8 ms·

> The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains

> The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions. Yes, but that horse has long ago left the barn. I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS. I do know how to write a web site. But if I cede that skill to an automated process, then that is the feather that will break the camel's back? The history of civilization is the history of specialization. No one can re-build all the tools they rely on from scratch. We either let other people specialize, or we let machines specialize. LLMs are one more step in the latter. The Luddites were right: the machinery in cotton mills was a direct threat to their livelihood, just as LLMs are now to us. But society marches on, textile work has been largely outsourced to machines, and the descendants of the Luddites are doctors and lawyers (and coders). 50 years from new the career of a "coder" will evoke the same historical quaintness as does "switchboard operator" or "wainwright."

ryandrake 1y ago
This reply brings to mind the well-known Heinlein quote: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- DrillShopper 1y ago
  This is a fantastic and underrated quote, despite all of the problems I have with Heinlein's fascism-glorifying work.
  - margalabargala 1y ago
    The quote is more reasonable in context.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  The sheer amount of activities that he left out because he couldn't even remember they existed would turn this paragraph into a book.
- crooked-v 1y ago
  That's a quote that sounds great until, say, that self-built building by somebody who's neither engineer nor architect at best turns out to have some intractible design flaw and at worst collapses and kills people. It's also a quote from a character who's literally immortal and so has all the time in the world to learn things, which really undermines the premise.
  - elcritch 1y ago
    I sort of view that list as table stakes for a well rounded capable person.. Well barring the invasion bit. Then again, being familiar with guns and or other forms of self defense is valuable. I think most farmers would be somewhat capable on most of that list. Equations for farm production. Programming tractor equipment. Setting bones. Giving and taking orders. Building houses and barns. Building a single story building isn’t that difficult, but time consuming. Especially nowadays with YouTube videos and pre-planned plans.
    - lisper 1y ago
      > pre-planned plans Isn't that cheating? Shouldn't a properly self-reliant human be able to come up with the plans too?
      - diroussel 1y ago
        Learning from others doesn’t mean you are not learning.
        salomonk_mur 1y ago
        Ask the LLM to create plans and step by step guides then!
      - sethammons 1y ago
        To bake a cake from scratch, first, you must create the universe
  - 1y ago
- Mawr 1y ago
  What an awful quote. Literally all progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization.
  - Jedd 1y ago
    That is literally not true.
    - flir 1y ago
      I'd be interested in counter-examples?
      - kazinator 1y ago
        Counter-examples are not really their area, evidently.
      - nicbou 1y ago
        A lot of discoveries come from someone applying their scientific knowledge to a curious thing happening in their hobby or private life. A lot of successful businesses apply software engineering to a specific business problem that is invisible to all other engineers.
      - Jedd 1y ago
        Given the original, ludicrous, claim was: > Literally all progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization. Then we don't really need plural examples, right? Anyway - language, wheel, fire, tool-making, social constructs like reciprocity principle - I think gave us some progress as a species and a society.
        akimbostrawman 1y ago
        All of these examples are done by specialist because I don't see many cars being build by dentists. Even in mankind's beginning specialization existed in the form of hunter and gatherer. This specialization in combination with team work brought us to the top of the food chain to a point where we can strive beyond basic survival. The people making space crafts (designing and building, another example of specialization) don't need to know how to repair or build a microwave to heat there for food. Of course everybody still needs to know basic knowledge (how to turn on microwave) to get by.
- djhn 1y ago
  It’s a quote from a character in Heinlein’s fiction. A human character with a lifespan of over a thousand years. I too liked that quote and found it inspiring. Until I read the book, that is.
  - wombatpm 1y ago
    I know the character is Lazarus Long. Which book was this quote in?
    - vasco 1y ago
      This is one of the cases where you should indeed rely on Google.
      - charlieflowers 1y ago
        You just created a modern take on LMGTFY
        arduanika 1y ago
        It's now pronounced LMCGPTTFY
        nicbou 1y ago
        I've had people do this to me (albeit in an attempt to be helpful, not snarky) and it felt so weird. The answers are something a copywriter would have thrown together in an hour. Generic, unhelpful drivel.
    - gnarlynarwhal42 1y ago
      Seems to be from the book "Time Enough for Love"
- moron4hire 1y ago
  I haven't butchered a hog or died yet.
theLiminator 1y ago
I think removing pointless cognitive load makes sense, but the point of an education is to learn how to think/reason. Maybe if we get AGI there's no point learning that either, but it is definitely not great if we get a whole generation who skip learning how to problem solve/think due to using LLMs. IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in the loop, whereas with other tools they are generally just a step in the process.
- hackyhacky 1y ago
  > IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in the loop, whereas with other tools they are generally just a step in the process. The (as yet unproven) argument for the use of AIs is that using AI to solve simpler problems allows us humans to focus on the big picture, in the same way that letting a calculator solve arithmetic gives us flexibility to understand the math behind the arithmetic. No one knows if that's true. We're running a grand experiment: the next generation will either surpass us in grand fashion using tools that we couldn't imagine, or will collapse into a puddle of ignorant consumerism, a la Wall-E.
  - jplusequalt 1y ago
    >the next generation will either surpass us in grand fashion using tools that we couldn't imagine, or will collapse into a puddle of ignorant consumerism, a la Wall-E Seeing how the world is based around consumerism, this future seems more likely. HOWEVER, we can still course correct. We need to organize, and get the hell off social media and the internet.
    - hackyhacky 1y ago
      > HOWEVER, we can still course correct. We need to organize, and get the hell off social media and the internet. Given what I know of human nature, this seems improbable.
      - 1y ago
tristor 1y ago
> I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS. Why not? I mean that, quite literally. I don't know how to make an ASIC, and if I tried to write an OS I'd probably fail miserably many times along the way but might be able to muddle through to something very basic. The rest of that list is certainly within my wheelhouse even though I've never done any of those things professionally. The peer commenter shared the Heinlein quote, but there's really something to be said for /society/ of being peopled by well-rounded individuals that are able to competently turn themselves to many types of tasks. Specialization can also be valuable, but specialization in your career should not prevent you from gaining a breadth of skills outside of the workplace. I don't know how to do any of the things in your list (including building a web site) as an /expert/, but it should not be out of the realm of possibility or even expectation that people should learn these things at the level of a competent amateur. I have grown a garden, I have worked on a farm for a brief time, I've helped build houses (Habitat for Humanity), I've taken a hobbyist welding class and made some garish metal sculptures, I've built a race car and raced it, and I've never built a toaster but I have repaired one (they're actually very electrically and mechanically simple devices). Besides the disposable income to build a race car, nothing on that list stands out to me as unachievable by anyone who chooses to do so.
- hackyhacky 1y ago
  > The peer commenter shared the Heinlein quote, but there's really something to be said for /society/ of being peopled by well-rounded individuals that are able to competently turn themselves to many types of tasks Being a well-rounded individualist is a great, but that's an orthogonal issue to the question of outsourcing our skills to machinery. When you were growing crops, did you till the land by hand or did you use a tractor? When you were making clothes did you sew by hand or use a sewing machine? Who made your sewing needles? The (dubious) argument for AI is that using LLMs to write code is the same as using modern construction equipment to build a house: you get the same result for less effort.
  - mistrial9 1y ago
kenjackson 1y ago
> I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS. I do know how to write a web site. But if I cede that skill to an automated process, then that is the feather that will break the camel's back? Reminds me of the Nate Bargatz set where he talks about how if he was a time traveler to the past that he wouldn't be able to prove it to anyone. The skills most of us have require this supply chain and then we apply it at the very end. I'm not sure anyone in 1920 cares about my binary analysis skills.
c22 1y ago
Specialization is over-rated. I've done everything in your list except make an ASIC because learning how to do those things was interesting and I prefer when things are done my way. I started way back in my 20s just figuring out how to write websites. I'm not sure where the camel's back would have broken. It has, of course, been convenient to be able to "bootstrap" my self-reliance in these and other fields by consuming goods produced by others, but there is no mechanical reason that said goods should be provided by specialists rather than advanced generalists beyond our irrational social need for maximum acceleration.
- danielbln 1y ago
  Jack of all trades, master of none. I also somehow doubt that you've built a car from scratch, including designing the engine, carving it out of a block of metal and so on. And if we're talking modern car, good luck fabbing the integrated circuits in your backyard or whatever. Even your particular generalist fantasy will (and most likely has) hit the hard constraints of specialization real quick. There is no single human alive that can understand or build a modern computer from top to bottom. And this is true for various bits of human technology, that's how specialized we are as a species.
  - c22 1y ago
    It was an electric car, but it's true that I bought the motor (and the esc, batteries, etc...) That said, I have wound several motors in my day. I'm not saying some degree of specialization isn't desirable in the world, just that it's overrated. Do we need a modern computer?
jplusequalt 1y ago
>50 years from new the career of a "coder" will evoke the same historical quaintness as does "switchboard operator" or "wainwright." And what happens to those coders? For that matter--what happens to all the other jobs at risk of being replaced by AI? Where are all the high paying jobs these disenfranchised laborers will flock to when their previous careers are made obsolete? We live in a highly specialized society that requires people take out large loans to learn the skills necessary for their careers. You take away their ability to provide their labor, and it now seriously threatens millions of workers from obtaining the same quality of life they once had. I seriously oppose such a future, and if that makes me a Luddite, so be it.
- hackyhacky 1y ago
  > And what happens to those coders? For that matter--what happens to all the other jobs at risk of being replaced by AI? Some will manage to remain in their field, most won't. > Where are all the high paying jobs these disenfranchised laborers will flock to when their previous careers are made obsolete? They don't exist. Instead they'll take low-paying jobs that can't (yet) be automated. Maybe they'll work in factories [1]. > I seriously oppose such a future, and if that makes me a Luddite, so be it. Like I said, the Luddites were right, in the short term. In the long term, we don't know. Maybe we'll live in a post-scarcity Star Trek world where human labor has been completely devalued, or maybe we'll revert to a feudal society of property owners and indentured servants. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/bessent-fired-federal-workers-manufacturing-jobs-tariffs-2056700 https://www.newsweek.com/bessent-fired-federal-workers-manuf...
  - jplusequalt 1y ago
    >They don't exist. Instead they'll take low-paying jobs that can't (yet) be automated. Maybe they'll work in factories >or maybe we'll revert to a feudal society of property owners and indentured servants. We as the workers in society have the power to see that this doesn't happen. We just need to organize. Unionize. Boycott. Organize with people in your community to spread worker solidarity.
    - 1y ago
dTal 1y ago
I dunno, the "tool" that LLMs "replace" is thinking itself. That seems qualitatively different than anything that has come before. It's the "tool" that underlies all the others.
whilenot-dev 1y ago
> I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS. I do know how to write a web site. But if I cede that skill to an automated process, then that is the feather that will break the camel's back? All the things you mention have a certain objective quality that can be reduced to an approachable minimum. A house could be a simple cabin, a tent, a cave; a piece of cloth could just be a cape; metal can be screwed, glued or cast; a transistor could be a relay or a wooden mechanism etc. ...history tells us all that. I think when there's a Homo ludens that wants to play, or when there's a Homo economicus that wants us to optimize, there might be one that separates the process of learning from adaptation (Homo investigans?)[0]. The process of learning something new could be such a subjective property that keeps a yet unknown natural threshold which can't be lowered (or "reduced") any further. If I were to be overly pessimistic, a hardcore luddite, I'd say that this species is under attack, and there will be a generation that lacks this aspect, but also won't miss it, because this character could have never been experienced in the first place. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_human_species#List_of_binomial_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_human_species#Li...
harrall 1y ago
I don’t think specialization is a bad thing but the friends I know that only know their subject seem to… how do I put this… struggle at life and everything a lot more. And even at work, the coworkers that don’t have a lot of general knowledge seem to work a lot harder and get less done because it takes them so much longer to figure things out. So I don’t know… is avoiding the work of learning worth it to struggle at life more?
dkersten 1y ago
”I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS. I do know how to write a web site.” Sure. But somebody has to know these things. For many jobs, knowing these things isn’t beneficial, but for others it is. Sure, you might be able to get a job slinging AI code to produce CRUD apps or whatever. But since that’s the easy thing, you’re going to have a hard time standing out from the pack. Yet we will still need people who understand the concepts at a deeper level, to fix the AI messes or to build the complex systems AI can’t, or the systems that are too critical to rely on AI, or the ones that are too regulated. Being able to do those thing, or to just better understand what the AI is doing to get better more effective results, that will be more valuable than just blindly leaning on AI, and it will remain valuable for a while yet. Maybe some day the AI can do everything, including ASICs and growing crops, but it’s got a long way to go still.
- hackyhacky 1y ago
  > Sure. But somebody has to know these things. For many jobs, knowing these things isn’t beneficial, but for others it is. I think you're missing the point of my comment. I'm not saying that human knowledge is useless. I'm specifically arguing against the case that: > The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions. My logic being that we are already irreversibly dependent on supply chains.
  - dkersten 1y ago
    You’re absolutely right. But my point still stands, too, which is that despite being irreversibly dependent on supply chains, doesn’t mean we are redundant. We still need people at all levels of the supply chain. Maybe it’s fewer people, yes, but it’ll take quite a leap forward in AI ability to replace all the specialists we will continue to require, especially as the less-able AI makes messes that need to be cleaned up.
CyLith 1y ago
Speak for yourself. Some of us see the difficulty in sustaining and maintaining this fragile technology stack and have decided to do something about it. I may not be able to do all those things but it is worth learning, since there really is no downside for someone who enjoys learning. I am tackling farming and cpu design at the moment and it is tremendously fun.
- hackyhacky 1y ago
  Good for you, I guess, but your hobbyist interest in farming is not an argument against using AI. The point of my comment is that the our technology stack is already large enough that adding one more layer is not going to make a difference.
ifyoubuildit 1y ago
Things like this give us enshitification. When the consumer has no understanding of what they're buying, they have to take corporations at their word that new "features" are actually beneficial, when they're mostly beneficial to the seller. Kind of like how an ignorant electorate makes for a poor democracy, an ignorant consumer base makes for a poor free market.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

ryandrake 1y ago

This reply brings to mind the well-known Heinlein quote: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
DrillShopper 1y ago
This is a fantastic and underrated quote, despite all of the problems I have with Heinlein's fascism-glorifying work.
- margalabargala 1y ago
  The quote is more reasonable in context.
marcosdumay 1y ago
The sheer amount of activities that he left out because he couldn't even remember they existed would turn this paragraph into a book.
crooked-v 1y ago
That's a quote that sounds great until, say, that self-built building by somebody who's neither engineer nor architect at best turns out to have some intractible design flaw and at worst collapses and kills people. It's also a quote from a character who's literally immortal and so has all the time in the world to learn things, which really undermines the premise.
- elcritch 1y ago
  I sort of view that list as table stakes for a well rounded capable person.. Well barring the invasion bit. Then again, being familiar with guns and or other forms of self defense is valuable. I think most farmers would be somewhat capable on most of that list. Equations for farm production. Programming tractor equipment. Setting bones. Giving and taking orders. Building houses and barns. Building a single story building isn’t that difficult, but time consuming. Especially nowadays with YouTube videos and pre-planned plans.
  - lisper 1y ago
    > pre-planned plans Isn't that cheating? Shouldn't a properly self-reliant human be able to come up with the plans too?
    - diroussel 1y ago
      Learning from others doesn’t mean you are not learning.
      - salomonk_mur 1y ago
        Ask the LLM to create plans and step by step guides then!
    - sethammons 1y ago
      To bake a cake from scratch, first, you must create the universe
- 1y ago
Mawr 1y ago
What an awful quote. Literally all progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization.
- Jedd 1y ago
  That is literally not true.
  - flir 1y ago
    I'd be interested in counter-examples?
    - kazinator 1y ago
      Counter-examples are not really their area, evidently.
    - nicbou 1y ago
      A lot of discoveries come from someone applying their scientific knowledge to a curious thing happening in their hobby or private life. A lot of successful businesses apply software engineering to a specific business problem that is invisible to all other engineers.
    - Jedd 1y ago
      Given the original, ludicrous, claim was: > Literally all progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization. Then we don't really need plural examples, right? Anyway - language, wheel, fire, tool-making, social constructs like reciprocity principle - I think gave us some progress as a species and a society.
      - akimbostrawman 1y ago
        All of these examples are done by specialist because I don't see many cars being build by dentists. Even in mankind's beginning specialization existed in the form of hunter and gatherer. This specialization in combination with team work brought us to the top of the food chain to a point where we can strive beyond basic survival. The people making space crafts (designing and building, another example of specialization) don't need to know how to repair or build a microwave to heat there for food. Of course everybody still needs to know basic knowledge (how to turn on microwave) to get by.
djhn 1y ago
It’s a quote from a character in Heinlein’s fiction. A human character with a lifespan of over a thousand years. I too liked that quote and found it inspiring. Until I read the book, that is.
- wombatpm 1y ago
  I know the character is Lazarus Long. Which book was this quote in?
  - vasco 1y ago
    This is one of the cases where you should indeed rely on Google.
    - charlieflowers 1y ago
      You just created a modern take on LMGTFY
      - arduanika 1y ago
        It's now pronounced LMCGPTTFY
        nicbou 1y ago
        I've had people do this to me (albeit in an attempt to be helpful, not snarky) and it felt so weird. The answers are something a copywriter would have thrown together in an hour. Generic, unhelpful drivel.
  - gnarlynarwhal42 1y ago
    Seems to be from the book "Time Enough for Love"
moron4hire 1y ago
I haven't butchered a hog or died yet.

theLiminator 1y ago

I think removing pointless cognitive load makes sense, but the point of an education is to learn how to think/reason. Maybe if we get AGI there's no point learning that either, but it is definitely not great if we get a whole generation who skip learning how to problem solve/think due to using LLMs. IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in the loop, whereas with other tools they are generally just a step in the process.

hackyhacky 1y ago
> IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in the loop, whereas with other tools they are generally just a step in the process. The (as yet unproven) argument for the use of AIs is that using AI to solve simpler problems allows us humans to focus on the big picture, in the same way that letting a calculator solve arithmetic gives us flexibility to understand the math behind the arithmetic. No one knows if that's true. We're running a grand experiment: the next generation will either surpass us in grand fashion using tools that we couldn't imagine, or will collapse into a puddle of ignorant consumerism, a la Wall-E.
- jplusequalt 1y ago
  >the next generation will either surpass us in grand fashion using tools that we couldn't imagine, or will collapse into a puddle of ignorant consumerism, a la Wall-E Seeing how the world is based around consumerism, this future seems more likely. HOWEVER, we can still course correct. We need to organize, and get the hell off social media and the internet.
  - hackyhacky 1y ago
    > HOWEVER, we can still course correct. We need to organize, and get the hell off social media and the internet. Given what I know of human nature, this seems improbable.
    - 1y ago

tristor 1y ago

> I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS. Why not? I mean that, quite literally. I don't know how to make an ASIC, and if I tried to write an OS I'd probably fail miserably many times along the way but might be able to muddle through to something very basic. The rest of that list is certainly within my wheelhouse even though I've never done any of those things professionally. The peer commenter shared the Heinlein quote, but there's really something to be said for /society/ of being peopled by well-rounded individuals that are able to competently turn themselves to many types of tasks. Specialization can also be valuable, but specialization in your career should not prevent you from gaining a breadth of skills outside of the workplace. I don't know how to do any of the things in your list (including building a web site) as an /expert/, but it should not be out of the realm of possibility or even expectation that people should learn these things at the level of a competent amateur. I have grown a garden, I have worked on a farm for a brief time, I've helped build houses (Habitat for Humanity), I've taken a hobbyist welding class and made some garish metal sculptures, I've built a race car and raced it, and I've never built a toaster but I have repaired one (they're actually very electrically and mechanically simple devices). Besides the disposable income to build a race car, nothing on that list stands out to me as unachievable by anyone who chooses to do so.

hackyhacky 1y ago
> The peer commenter shared the Heinlein quote, but there's really something to be said for /society/ of being peopled by well-rounded individuals that are able to competently turn themselves to many types of tasks Being a well-rounded individualist is a great, but that's an orthogonal issue to the question of outsourcing our skills to machinery. When you were growing crops, did you till the land by hand or did you use a tractor? When you were making clothes did you sew by hand or use a sewing machine? Who made your sewing needles? The (dubious) argument for AI is that using LLMs to write code is the same as using modern construction equipment to build a house: you get the same result for less effort.
- mistrial9 1y ago

kenjackson 1y ago

c22 1y ago

Specialization is over-rated. I've done everything in your list except make an ASIC because learning how to do those things was interesting and I prefer when things are done my way. I started way back in my 20s just figuring out how to write websites. I'm not sure where the camel's back would have broken. It has, of course, been convenient to be able to "bootstrap" my self-reliance in these and other fields by consuming goods produced by others, but there is no mechanical reason that said goods should be provided by specialists rather than advanced generalists beyond our irrational social need for maximum acceleration.

danielbln 1y ago
Jack of all trades, master of none. I also somehow doubt that you've built a car from scratch, including designing the engine, carving it out of a block of metal and so on. And if we're talking modern car, good luck fabbing the integrated circuits in your backyard or whatever. Even your particular generalist fantasy will (and most likely has) hit the hard constraints of specialization real quick. There is no single human alive that can understand or build a modern computer from top to bottom. And this is true for various bits of human technology, that's how specialized we are as a species.
- c22 1y ago
  It was an electric car, but it's true that I bought the motor (and the esc, batteries, etc...) That said, I have wound several motors in my day. I'm not saying some degree of specialization isn't desirable in the world, just that it's overrated. Do we need a modern computer?

jplusequalt 1y ago

>50 years from new the career of a "coder" will evoke the same historical quaintness as does "switchboard operator" or "wainwright." And what happens to those coders? For that matter--what happens to all the other jobs at risk of being replaced by AI? Where are all the high paying jobs these disenfranchised laborers will flock to when their previous careers are made obsolete? We live in a highly specialized society that requires people take out large loans to learn the skills necessary for their careers. You take away their ability to provide their labor, and it now seriously threatens millions of workers from obtaining the same quality of life they once had. I seriously oppose such a future, and if that makes me a Luddite, so be it.

hackyhacky 1y ago
> And what happens to those coders? For that matter--what happens to all the other jobs at risk of being replaced by AI? Some will manage to remain in their field, most won't. > Where are all the high paying jobs these disenfranchised laborers will flock to when their previous careers are made obsolete? They don't exist. Instead they'll take low-paying jobs that can't (yet) be automated. Maybe they'll work in factories [1]. > I seriously oppose such a future, and if that makes me a Luddite, so be it. Like I said, the Luddites were right, in the short term. In the long term, we don't know. Maybe we'll live in a post-scarcity Star Trek world where human labor has been completely devalued, or maybe we'll revert to a feudal society of property owners and indentured servants. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/bessent-fired-federal-workers-manufacturing-jobs-tariffs-2056700 https://www.newsweek.com/bessent-fired-federal-workers-manuf...
- jplusequalt 1y ago
  >They don't exist. Instead they'll take low-paying jobs that can't (yet) be automated. Maybe they'll work in factories >or maybe we'll revert to a feudal society of property owners and indentured servants. We as the workers in society have the power to see that this doesn't happen. We just need to organize. Unionize. Boycott. Organize with people in your community to spread worker solidarity.
  - 1y ago

dTal 1y ago

I dunno, the "tool" that LLMs "replace" is thinking itself. That seems qualitatively different than anything that has come before. It's the "tool" that underlies all the others.

whilenot-dev 1y ago

> I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS. I do know how to write a web site. But if I cede that skill to an automated process, then that is the feather that will break the camel's back? All the things you mention have a certain objective quality that can be reduced to an approachable minimum. A house could be a simple cabin, a tent, a cave; a piece of cloth could just be a cape; metal can be screwed, glued or cast; a transistor could be a relay or a wooden mechanism etc. ...history tells us all that. I think when there's a Homo ludens that wants to play, or when there's a Homo economicus that wants us to optimize, there might be one that separates the process of learning from adaptation (Homo investigans?)[0]. The process of learning something new could be such a subjective property that keeps a yet unknown natural threshold which can't be lowered (or "reduced") any further. If I were to be overly pessimistic, a hardcore luddite, I'd say that this species is under attack, and there will be a generation that lacks this aspect, but also won't miss it, because this character could have never been experienced in the first place. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_human_species#List_of_binomial_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_human_species#Li...

harrall 1y ago

I don’t think specialization is a bad thing but the friends I know that only know their subject seem to… how do I put this… struggle at life and everything a lot more. And even at work, the coworkers that don’t have a lot of general knowledge seem to work a lot harder and get less done because it takes them so much longer to figure things out. So I don’t know… is avoiding the work of learning worth it to struggle at life more?

dkersten 1y ago

”I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS. I do know how to write a web site.” Sure. But somebody has to know these things. For many jobs, knowing these things isn’t beneficial, but for others it is. Sure, you might be able to get a job slinging AI code to produce CRUD apps or whatever. But since that’s the easy thing, you’re going to have a hard time standing out from the pack. Yet we will still need people who understand the concepts at a deeper level, to fix the AI messes or to build the complex systems AI can’t, or the systems that are too critical to rely on AI, or the ones that are too regulated. Being able to do those thing, or to just better understand what the AI is doing to get better more effective results, that will be more valuable than just blindly leaning on AI, and it will remain valuable for a while yet. Maybe some day the AI can do everything, including ASICs and growing crops, but it’s got a long way to go still.

hackyhacky 1y ago
> Sure. But somebody has to know these things. For many jobs, knowing these things isn’t beneficial, but for others it is. I think you're missing the point of my comment. I'm not saying that human knowledge is useless. I'm specifically arguing against the case that: > The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions. My logic being that we are already irreversibly dependent on supply chains.
- dkersten 1y ago
  You’re absolutely right. But my point still stands, too, which is that despite being irreversibly dependent on supply chains, doesn’t mean we are redundant. We still need people at all levels of the supply chain. Maybe it’s fewer people, yes, but it’ll take quite a leap forward in AI ability to replace all the specialists we will continue to require, especially as the less-able AI makes messes that need to be cleaned up.

CyLith 1y ago

Speak for yourself. Some of us see the difficulty in sustaining and maintaining this fragile technology stack and have decided to do something about it. I may not be able to do all those things but it is worth learning, since there really is no downside for someone who enjoys learning. I am tackling farming and cpu design at the moment and it is tremendously fun.

hackyhacky 1y ago
Good for you, I guess, but your hobbyist interest in farming is not an argument against using AI. The point of my comment is that the our technology stack is already large enough that adding one more layer is not going to make a difference.

ifyoubuildit 1y ago

Things like this give us enshitification. When the consumer has no understanding of what they're buying, they have to take corporations at their word that new "features" are actually beneficial, when they're mostly beneficial to the seller. Kind of like how an ignorant electorate makes for a poor democracy, an ignorant consumer base makes for a poor free market.

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