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I shouldn't be surprised by the number of comments of people saying "I'm going to uninstall Duolingo immediately", but I am. AI is increasing our productivity

I shouldn't be surprised by the number of comments of people saying "I'm going to uninstall Duolingo immediately", but I am. AI is increasing our productivity just as the loom did back in the early 1800s. So are HN members now the luddites? We're both the developers and the destroyers? Why don't we all just go back to coding on punch cards if we're concerned improved productivity will take our jobs? We need to look at what we're doing, and what we will be doing in the next 10 or 20 years. Do we know what that will be? No. But should we get out the pitch forks when a company says "we're going to do more with less people because new technology allows us to do that"?

n_ary 1y ago
You are misreading. The declaration effectively does NOT quantify or prove any productivity gain. It simply alludes to a possibility by forcing to adapt a new tool which is frequently sold as productivity gain. There is no real consensus or mass scale data except businesses with executives heavily invested in the AI adjacent stocks or prefer to be called visionaries like how SAP or Adobe got lucky by moving into cloud and subscription model purely by accidentally following random hype. Also in most software dev task, writing code is rarely if ever the bottleneck, it is the thinking, endless scrum bullcrap, management alignment, architects being too obtuse to not sign off on simpler solutions to protect their prestige, not filling empty roles, pushing teams to extreme and then suddenly deciding to throw away and start something brand new while asking why can’t the thrown away solution be adapted for the new thing or simply consulting/contracting firms intentionally prolonging the project to milk maximum billable hours. I have actually read the entire screenshot in that tweet and to me it read 50% as non technical executive pitched by some AI vendor about how cool their tools are and 50% of clueless people finding non existent nails for their new hammer. AI has benefits, it may give productivity gains, specially if you are sweat shops churning out customization of same ERP or wordpress theme. Just repeating productivity gain, coding landscape will change, life will be different 500 times daily because the seller of LLM(calling them the AI wholesale is deceptive, they are subset) wants you to do that, does not magically make those true. The whole trend is sickening and it needs to die. Replacing SWE is fine, but if SWE can be replaced, the justification can be used to replace crucial things like doctors, lawyers, auditors and lots of other professionals which will kill us all.
sunshine-o 1y ago
This is probably the wrong way to look at this. A more interesting question is: why are we doing this? Why are people learning foreign languages? It can be: - To interact with other human being -> so just find a language exchange - Because we are bored -> just find another human being - To find a job / immigrate in an other country -> but it seems AI will replace this job you are after anyway It is a bit the same with cars. For a long time I wished we had self driving cars because I was commuting 4, 5, 6 hours a day to earn more. But what would I do when I will have all that money? Probably enjoy driving an old analog car or better ride my horse everyday. Also anybody here eating poison with the dream of growing your own food? So always look at the big picture and you will see DuoLingo is irrelevant anyway. It is another robotic hamster wheel like Instagram and TikTok.

n_ary 1y ago

You are misreading. The declaration effectively does NOT quantify or prove any productivity gain. It simply alludes to a possibility by forcing to adapt a new tool which is frequently sold as productivity gain. There is no real consensus or mass scale data except businesses with executives heavily invested in the AI adjacent stocks or prefer to be called visionaries like how SAP or Adobe got lucky by moving into cloud and subscription model purely by accidentally following random hype. Also in most software dev task, writing code is rarely if ever the bottleneck, it is the thinking, endless scrum bullcrap, management alignment, architects being too obtuse to not sign off on simpler solutions to protect their prestige, not filling empty roles, pushing teams to extreme and then suddenly deciding to throw away and start something brand new while asking why can’t the thrown away solution be adapted for the new thing or simply consulting/contracting firms intentionally prolonging the project to milk maximum billable hours. I have actually read the entire screenshot in that tweet and to me it read 50% as non technical executive pitched by some AI vendor about how cool their tools are and 50% of clueless people finding non existent nails for their new hammer. AI has benefits, it may give productivity gains, specially if you are sweat shops churning out customization of same ERP or wordpress theme. Just repeating productivity gain, coding landscape will change, life will be different 500 times daily because the seller of LLM(calling them the AI wholesale is deceptive, they are subset) wants you to do that, does not magically make those true. The whole trend is sickening and it needs to die. Replacing SWE is fine, but if SWE can be replaced, the justification can be used to replace crucial things like doctors, lawyers, auditors and lots of other professionals which will kill us all.

sunshine-o 1y ago

This is probably the wrong way to look at this. A more interesting question is: why are we doing this? Why are people learning foreign languages? It can be: - To interact with other human being -> so just find a language exchange - Because we are bored -> just find another human being - To find a job / immigrate in an other country -> but it seems AI will replace this job you are after anyway It is a bit the same with cars. For a long time I wished we had self driving cars because I was commuting 4, 5, 6 hours a day to earn more. But what would I do when I will have all that money? Probably enjoy driving an old analog car or better ride my horse everyday. Also anybody here eating poison with the dream of growing your own food? So always look at the big picture and you will see DuoLingo is irrelevant anyway. It is another robotic hamster wheel like Instagram and TikTok.