5 ms·

Why Even Try If You Have A.I.?

39 points by Kaibeezy 1y ago

Kaibeezy 1y ago
https://archive.ph/QJ8cu https://archive.ph/QJ8cu
cruzcampo 1y ago
AI does feel like it sucks the joy out of any human creative endavour by replacing it with effortless, good enough slop. Why try to engage in the arts when you won't be able to make a living as illustrator or musician because AI slop is good enough to feed the capital machine? Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it? Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia? All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do - sweatshops coming back to the US again soon thanks to the Trump tarrifs! All the intellectually or creatively stimulating work is going away, sacrificed to the machine at the altar of mammon.
- roenxi 1y ago
  If anyone has been going in to art for the commercial opportunities then someone needs to sit them down and explain how bad a strategy that is. Art is a recreational activity that happens to involve money sometimes. Besides, I don't care how good the AI is it can't make a $100 million equivalent to Blue Poles. People are clearly paying for the connection with the human artist rather than the quality of the art. > Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it? Why engage in engineering quality software? The reasons haven't changed because AI exists. AI just adds new ways of achieving high quality software outcomes. I don't mind admitting that I spent a lot of my childhood really annoyed at all the people who seemed to just be smarter than me and there was no clear way to catch up. It is a lot less fair than physical fitness where I could at least train more. Levelling that playing field somewhat is long overdue and - for most people - going to be quite a welcome change.
  - cruzcampo 1y ago
    The reasons have changed. https://x.com/eugeneyan/status/1917034784355979479/photo/1 https://x.com/eugeneyan/status/1917034784355979479/photo/1 Our capitalist overlords don't want us to write quality software anymore. They want cheap, disposable AI slop.
- lclc 1y ago
  The dream of many (if not most) people here on Hacker News has always seemed to eventually leave tech and work with their hands. AI will just get us there sooner for many professions.
  - hereonout2 1y ago
    True, it's a cliche but it's my dream also. Except the dream includes first using a tech salary to pay off a mortgage or at least most of it, and then being able to comfortably work with my hands in some romantic artisanal manner. AI probably gets me closer to spending 60 hours a week doing back breaking groundwork and struggling to pay the bills.
- nikanj 1y ago
  "Why try to engage in the arts if you won't make money" is perhaps the most capitalist dystopian statement I've read the whole year. I sing with my friends regularly. I'm not expecting to ever get paid a dime.
  - cruzcampo 1y ago
    That is the capitalist dystopia we live in. I don't like it either. If we lived in a post-capitalist society, AI wouldn't be the threat it is.
  - MrScruff 1y ago
    Precisely. The percentage of people making a living from their creative pursuit is vanishingly small.
    - cruzcampo 1y ago
      We should be looking to move that number up, not down.
  - teamonkey 1y ago
    I don’t think they mean “getting rich,” they mean “enough to get by”. Many art forms can and should require more time and investment than simply getting together with friends a couple of times a month. Even then, for some people getting enough free time to do that is a struggle. They need to monetise their spare time by working second jobs, and so on, instead of pursuing art.
    - nikanj 1y ago
      "Enough to get by" is still a variant of "make money" Have people forgotten how enjoyable dancing, painting, making music or any of the other arts are, even if you don't get paid a penny
      - cruzcampo 1y ago
        But if you don't get paid a penny, unless you're born into wealth, you will need to do some other endavour for most of your day if you don't want to starve. The point is that all that's going to be left to do to prevent starvation is the crappiest jobs - all the enjoyable ones are being automated away.
- Kaibeezy 1y ago
  https://smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-2 https://smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-2
- snakeboy 1y ago
  > Why try to engage in the arts when you won't be able to make a living as illustrator or musician because AI slop is good enough to feed the capital machine? Maybe this is an uncommon view on HN, but personally I engage in the arts to scratch that itch of creative expression and emotional release, not with the goal to eventually monetize it. Even without AI, my poetry would never realistically be "good enough" to make it into a career, but that doesn't make it any less fulfilling for me.
  - cruzcampo 1y ago
    In our capitalist system, we have to do something monetizable to be able to survive, unless we were lucky enough to be born into wealth. AI is taking away all enjoyable avenues to do so.
- azangru 1y ago
  > Why try to engage in the arts ... Why try to engage in engineering quality software Try applying your questions to other areas. Why engage in the study of philosophy, or history, or ancient languages, when barely anything of use ever comes out of it? For that matter, why engage in the study of the sciences, when you are statistically very unlikely to make a significant contribution. Why engage in the sports, if you almost certainly won't become an Olympic champion, and quite likely not even a professional sportsman? Why work in geriatrics or palliative care when your patients will keep dying?.. There are things that we do for fun, or for personal fulfilment, or just because... > Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia? ... All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do Well, there you go then. The reason for doing something that 'makes us think' etc. is because this is much more desirable for the doer than 'shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do'.
  - cruzcampo 1y ago
    That's all fine and dandy, but in our capitalist system, we have to do something monetizable to be able to survive, unless we were lucky enough to be born into wealth. AI is taking away all enjoyable avenues to do so.
    - azangru 1y ago
      So how do historians, or philosophers, or classical linguists currently survive in our capitalist system?
      - cruzcampo 1y ago
        Mostly through family wealth.
- b800h 1y ago
  Chess has been mastered by computers long ago, and yet people still play it.
  - nikurasu-tan 1y ago
    But a computer still can't predict all moves, because the number of possible moves exceeds the number of atoms in the visible universe. This fact still blows my mind.
  - intended 1y ago
    Work is not the same as leisure. horse riding has been obsolete as a primary mode of transportation, yet still people ride horses for fun.
- lwo32k 1y ago
  Well I can only speak for myself, but my interest in poetry (which was non-existent) has spiked thanks to AI responding to random questions on poetry. To the point now, I spend sometime everyday thinking about poems, writing little notes to people and experiencing some real connection over it.
- globnomulous 1y ago
  > good-enough slop It isn't nearly good enough, as far as I can tell. Systems that nobody understands because nobody wrote them are unsafe, unmaintainable, and brittle. Art generated by AI can't be copyrighted so its use can't be controlled. > Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia? If the most optimistic reasonable projections of the AI optimists are true, the decay of human capability by itself among people who rely on AI will be so damaging that those who don't rely on it will become more valuable on the labor market. If the most optimistic projections aren't correct, then in all likelihood these will continue to be simple tools that nobody should use for anything serious. And apart from market/labor dynamics, I have seen no evidence that those who shun the use of AI tools are worse off for it (quite the contrary), so the spread of these tools should, if the current tend continues, actually become a rallying cry for and proof of the value of human work and the intrinsicness and necessity of our participation in the worlds we make for ourselves. The longer the hype continues, the surer I am that it won't replace humans.
kubb 1y ago
I really wish that machines could just take over at some point and we could be free of the pointless jobs we have. There are two problems with this: machines can’t do that right now, despite everyone trying to make them, and somehow we humans are amazingly capable of inventing new and new jobs to do, because we somehow hate leisure. Already almost a century ago Bertrand Russel observed in the Praise of Idleness that we have the capacity to greatly relieve ourselves from the burden of jobs, if not fully then enough to create the space to do excellent, intrinsically motivated things. Alas, this never happens. We always have to invent some other job. And what’s the point of super AI (please forgive me for using this vague and misleading term, I’m doing so sarcastically) if it can’t even give us a minute more of time with our kids, or tinkering on our personal projects?
- iNic 1y ago
  It did happen and continues to happen!!! The average time worked per week has halved over th past 70 years (more so in Europe than the US, but that is also why the US is richer)
  - iNic 1y ago
    It's not just jobs but also chores used to take up significantly more time!
- chii 1y ago
  > Alas, this never happens. it never happens because the amount of energy we can collect and consume is still insufficient. We have not reached post-scarcity, not even close in fact. And i don't see a superior AI being capable of giving us post-scarcity, at least, not within this life time, nor the next. Perhaps in 100 years, that would be possible, if you'd want to be optimistic.
  - rini17 1y ago
    If AI can outrun hedonic treadmill that would be vast achievement. Even more so if nature isn't destroyed in the process.
  - 1y ago
oldge 1y ago
After twenty years building out products in Silicon Valley I have come to the point where I have lost the plot. None of the projects at my last company seemed interesting, none of the projects I see other companies seem interesting. All AI, no substance. So I’ll just sit at home and build robots till something interesting does pop up or my robots gain sentience and decide I’m the problem.
- mosdl 1y ago
  In my current job hunt, 80% of startups I talked to were AI for X and I fully agree - nalmost all of them were uninteresting or could even articulate why AI would make a difference.
maschine 1y ago
[flagged]
caseyy 1y ago
People ceasing to think because AI can "reason" sounds a lot like people ceasing to go outside and move because now jobs can be done from a computer screen, and so can tasks like grocery shopping, prescription filling, bill paying, services, clothing shopping, take-out food, and more. We lost something when we moved everything online - much of our physical health. I wonder if we won't lose much of our mental health if we outsource physical, on-the-spot thinking to the virtual world, too. Though of course, there is the argument that using calculators didn't make us more mentally inept, so why would AI? But I'm not sure, this seems different.
- cik 1y ago
  That's a pretty narrow view, I think it depends more on culture. I live somewhere where (not in North America) where grocery delivery is the norm, food delivery is the norm... online shopping is easy. This all frees up time that we spend outside, in parks, in lessons and study... because these are communal values. We don't spend our free time in front of screens (though nothing wrong with that if you want it), again, because of culture.
  - caseyy 1y ago
    Unfortunately, physical health is not beholden to culture. The sedentary lifestyle in the US and other countries has significantly impacted health outcomes for the population. There is much research on it, enough to not discuss it over and over.
- sebastiennight 1y ago
  > using calculators didn't make us more mentally inept We (collectively) did lose some skills, that we no longer value as much because we (individually) grew up after the loss happened. Just like losing a large part of our orientation skills in the GPS era. Or how happily-single urban people in their 40s don't feel like they've lost anything compared to eg. their grandparents living a married life with three generations living under the same roof, but if you'd taken that person from the past and showed them the option to switch, they would feel the loss. It is totally possible that the average "2045 human" could be significantly mentally/emotionally atrophied in several ways, while not feeling like anything is missing.
lifestyleguru 1y ago
Call me when AI will be able to shortlist 2 job offers ready to be accepted by me and then 2 affordable real estates nearby every job location. Until then don't bother me with it.
thefz 1y ago
> Now that machines can think for us They don't
- vsl 1y ago
  But people treat them as if they could. You can already see them using LLM output as "proof" in discussions...
  - voidspark 1y ago
    They can simulate thinking or reasoning well enough, better than some humans.
spiderfarmer 1y ago
This might be an unpopular opinion, but generative AI truly is the miracle solution to a lot of my problems. As a solo entrepreneur with a huge, multi-year project that was bordering on impossible to achieve alone, it has done wonders for my ability to follow through on my opportunities and ambitions.
intended 1y ago
For the inevitable comparison to the advent of the automobile. You still have to think about how that introduction changed how humans lived. What are the changes that will happen here? PS: I must add - we talk about LLMs as reasoning machines, but they are narrative machines. They do not reason because they do not have a model making mind. If the content generated is similar enough to expert output, it doesnt matter if it came from a parrot or from a person. Its "good enough" provided it passes inspection. Any prognotication on our future work habits and mental resilience will have to recognize how verification is the crux of our physical and information economies.
BrandoElFollito 1y ago
I find that the concept of shifted "worth" was nicely done in the series The Orville[1]. This is a surprisingly deep series under a layer of comedy. The idea is that a device that gives you whatever you want was discovered, and this completely changed the priorities for people. The one that became the most important was "trust". You earn it, you lose it, you are defined by it. I like the concept. I would be happy to not do a lot of things that are "socially accepted" - job, clean environment etc. and more focus on people relationships as a determinant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orville
createaccount99 1y ago
What an overly verbose article.
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
The author opens with a story of building ramps and repeating endless combinations until they excel at ramp-building, expanding their possibilities through experimentation until they can say they’ve acquired quite some skill at ramp building. Consider though, how many ramps would be built if each time they had to first design and injection-mould the ramps? This would slow iteration. Fortunately there are already ramps to play with. The ramps are a tool used to build ramp courses. AI is also a tool, but it’s a tool for thinking at a certain level of abstraction. The author misses that infinite levels of abstraction exist in thought; in this way having tools of thought to lift you to higher levels lets you play in even more abstract thought-space. Having AI for the basic bits of thought is like already having ramps ready to go.
TYPE_FASTER 1y ago
The fear of AI reminds me of the fear of automation, that it will replace us. Part of me understands, part of me doesn't understand. Humanity has been dreaming of the future and writing about it for hundreds of years. It's closer than ever, and a lot of people are terrified that we're not going to have anything left to do. That's why I think it's a matter of mindset. This is going to sound dumb, but I keep thinking about the interactions between Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark and Jarvis in Iron Man. That's the AI I always wanted: something that could do deterministic (here's the weather, here's your schedule) and non-deterministic (research) things. Jarvis wasn't the inventor. Jarvis was a tool Tony used to invent things.

39 points by Kaibeezy 1y ago

https://archive.ph/QJ8cu https://archive.ph/QJ8cu

AI does feel like it sucks the joy out of any human creative endavour by replacing it with effortless, good enough slop. Why try to engage in the arts when you won't be able to make a living as illustrator or musician because AI slop is good enough to feed the capital machine? Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it? Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia? All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do - sweatshops coming back to the US again soon thanks to the Trump tarrifs! All the intellectually or creatively stimulating work is going away, sacrificed to the machine at the altar of mammon.

roenxi 1y ago
If anyone has been going in to art for the commercial opportunities then someone needs to sit them down and explain how bad a strategy that is. Art is a recreational activity that happens to involve money sometimes. Besides, I don't care how good the AI is it can't make a $100 million equivalent to Blue Poles. People are clearly paying for the connection with the human artist rather than the quality of the art. > Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it? Why engage in engineering quality software? The reasons haven't changed because AI exists. AI just adds new ways of achieving high quality software outcomes. I don't mind admitting that I spent a lot of my childhood really annoyed at all the people who seemed to just be smarter than me and there was no clear way to catch up. It is a lot less fair than physical fitness where I could at least train more. Levelling that playing field somewhat is long overdue and - for most people - going to be quite a welcome change.
- cruzcampo 1y ago
  The reasons have changed. https://x.com/eugeneyan/status/1917034784355979479/photo/1 https://x.com/eugeneyan/status/1917034784355979479/photo/1 Our capitalist overlords don't want us to write quality software anymore. They want cheap, disposable AI slop.
lclc 1y ago
The dream of many (if not most) people here on Hacker News has always seemed to eventually leave tech and work with their hands. AI will just get us there sooner for many professions.
- hereonout2 1y ago
  True, it's a cliche but it's my dream also. Except the dream includes first using a tech salary to pay off a mortgage or at least most of it, and then being able to comfortably work with my hands in some romantic artisanal manner. AI probably gets me closer to spending 60 hours a week doing back breaking groundwork and struggling to pay the bills.
nikanj 1y ago
"Why try to engage in the arts if you won't make money" is perhaps the most capitalist dystopian statement I've read the whole year. I sing with my friends regularly. I'm not expecting to ever get paid a dime.
- cruzcampo 1y ago
  That is the capitalist dystopia we live in. I don't like it either. If we lived in a post-capitalist society, AI wouldn't be the threat it is.
- MrScruff 1y ago
  Precisely. The percentage of people making a living from their creative pursuit is vanishingly small.
  - cruzcampo 1y ago
    We should be looking to move that number up, not down.
- teamonkey 1y ago
  I don’t think they mean “getting rich,” they mean “enough to get by”. Many art forms can and should require more time and investment than simply getting together with friends a couple of times a month. Even then, for some people getting enough free time to do that is a struggle. They need to monetise their spare time by working second jobs, and so on, instead of pursuing art.
  - nikanj 1y ago
    "Enough to get by" is still a variant of "make money" Have people forgotten how enjoyable dancing, painting, making music or any of the other arts are, even if you don't get paid a penny
    - cruzcampo 1y ago
      But if you don't get paid a penny, unless you're born into wealth, you will need to do some other endavour for most of your day if you don't want to starve. The point is that all that's going to be left to do to prevent starvation is the crappiest jobs - all the enjoyable ones are being automated away.
Kaibeezy 1y ago
https://smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-2 https://smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-2
snakeboy 1y ago
> Why try to engage in the arts when you won't be able to make a living as illustrator or musician because AI slop is good enough to feed the capital machine? Maybe this is an uncommon view on HN, but personally I engage in the arts to scratch that itch of creative expression and emotional release, not with the goal to eventually monetize it. Even without AI, my poetry would never realistically be "good enough" to make it into a career, but that doesn't make it any less fulfilling for me.
- cruzcampo 1y ago
  In our capitalist system, we have to do something monetizable to be able to survive, unless we were lucky enough to be born into wealth. AI is taking away all enjoyable avenues to do so.
azangru 1y ago
> Why try to engage in the arts ... Why try to engage in engineering quality software Try applying your questions to other areas. Why engage in the study of philosophy, or history, or ancient languages, when barely anything of use ever comes out of it? For that matter, why engage in the study of the sciences, when you are statistically very unlikely to make a significant contribution. Why engage in the sports, if you almost certainly won't become an Olympic champion, and quite likely not even a professional sportsman? Why work in geriatrics or palliative care when your patients will keep dying?.. There are things that we do for fun, or for personal fulfilment, or just because... > Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia? ... All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do Well, there you go then. The reason for doing something that 'makes us think' etc. is because this is much more desirable for the doer than 'shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do'.
- cruzcampo 1y ago
  That's all fine and dandy, but in our capitalist system, we have to do something monetizable to be able to survive, unless we were lucky enough to be born into wealth. AI is taking away all enjoyable avenues to do so.
  - azangru 1y ago
    So how do historians, or philosophers, or classical linguists currently survive in our capitalist system?
    - cruzcampo 1y ago
      Mostly through family wealth.
b800h 1y ago
Chess has been mastered by computers long ago, and yet people still play it.
- nikurasu-tan 1y ago
  But a computer still can't predict all moves, because the number of possible moves exceeds the number of atoms in the visible universe. This fact still blows my mind.
- intended 1y ago
  Work is not the same as leisure. horse riding has been obsolete as a primary mode of transportation, yet still people ride horses for fun.
lwo32k 1y ago
Well I can only speak for myself, but my interest in poetry (which was non-existent) has spiked thanks to AI responding to random questions on poetry. To the point now, I spend sometime everyday thinking about poems, writing little notes to people and experiencing some real connection over it.
globnomulous 1y ago
> good-enough slop It isn't nearly good enough, as far as I can tell. Systems that nobody understands because nobody wrote them are unsafe, unmaintainable, and brittle. Art generated by AI can't be copyrighted so its use can't be controlled. > Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia? If the most optimistic reasonable projections of the AI optimists are true, the decay of human capability by itself among people who rely on AI will be so damaging that those who don't rely on it will become more valuable on the labor market. If the most optimistic projections aren't correct, then in all likelihood these will continue to be simple tools that nobody should use for anything serious. And apart from market/labor dynamics, I have seen no evidence that those who shun the use of AI tools are worse off for it (quite the contrary), so the spread of these tools should, if the current tend continues, actually become a rallying cry for and proof of the value of human work and the intrinsicness and necessity of our participation in the worlds we make for ourselves. The longer the hype continues, the surer I am that it won't replace humans.

kubb 1y ago

I really wish that machines could just take over at some point and we could be free of the pointless jobs we have. There are two problems with this: machines can’t do that right now, despite everyone trying to make them, and somehow we humans are amazingly capable of inventing new and new jobs to do, because we somehow hate leisure. Already almost a century ago Bertrand Russel observed in the Praise of Idleness that we have the capacity to greatly relieve ourselves from the burden of jobs, if not fully then enough to create the space to do excellent, intrinsically motivated things. Alas, this never happens. We always have to invent some other job. And what’s the point of super AI (please forgive me for using this vague and misleading term, I’m doing so sarcastically) if it can’t even give us a minute more of time with our kids, or tinkering on our personal projects?

iNic 1y ago
It did happen and continues to happen!!! The average time worked per week has halved over th past 70 years (more so in Europe than the US, but that is also why the US is richer)
- iNic 1y ago
  It's not just jobs but also chores used to take up significantly more time!
chii 1y ago
> Alas, this never happens. it never happens because the amount of energy we can collect and consume is still insufficient. We have not reached post-scarcity, not even close in fact. And i don't see a superior AI being capable of giving us post-scarcity, at least, not within this life time, nor the next. Perhaps in 100 years, that would be possible, if you'd want to be optimistic.
- rini17 1y ago
  If AI can outrun hedonic treadmill that would be vast achievement. Even more so if nature isn't destroyed in the process.
- 1y ago

oldge 1y ago

After twenty years building out products in Silicon Valley I have come to the point where I have lost the plot. None of the projects at my last company seemed interesting, none of the projects I see other companies seem interesting. All AI, no substance. So I’ll just sit at home and build robots till something interesting does pop up or my robots gain sentience and decide I’m the problem.

mosdl 1y ago
In my current job hunt, 80% of startups I talked to were AI for X and I fully agree - nalmost all of them were uninteresting or could even articulate why AI would make a difference.

maschine 1y ago

[flagged]

caseyy 1y ago

People ceasing to think because AI can "reason" sounds a lot like people ceasing to go outside and move because now jobs can be done from a computer screen, and so can tasks like grocery shopping, prescription filling, bill paying, services, clothing shopping, take-out food, and more. We lost something when we moved everything online - much of our physical health. I wonder if we won't lose much of our mental health if we outsource physical, on-the-spot thinking to the virtual world, too. Though of course, there is the argument that using calculators didn't make us more mentally inept, so why would AI? But I'm not sure, this seems different.

cik 1y ago
That's a pretty narrow view, I think it depends more on culture. I live somewhere where (not in North America) where grocery delivery is the norm, food delivery is the norm... online shopping is easy. This all frees up time that we spend outside, in parks, in lessons and study... because these are communal values. We don't spend our free time in front of screens (though nothing wrong with that if you want it), again, because of culture.
- caseyy 1y ago
  Unfortunately, physical health is not beholden to culture. The sedentary lifestyle in the US and other countries has significantly impacted health outcomes for the population. There is much research on it, enough to not discuss it over and over.
sebastiennight 1y ago
> using calculators didn't make us more mentally inept We (collectively) did lose some skills, that we no longer value as much because we (individually) grew up after the loss happened. Just like losing a large part of our orientation skills in the GPS era. Or how happily-single urban people in their 40s don't feel like they've lost anything compared to eg. their grandparents living a married life with three generations living under the same roof, but if you'd taken that person from the past and showed them the option to switch, they would feel the loss. It is totally possible that the average "2045 human" could be significantly mentally/emotionally atrophied in several ways, while not feeling like anything is missing.

lifestyleguru 1y ago

Call me when AI will be able to shortlist 2 job offers ready to be accepted by me and then 2 affordable real estates nearby every job location. Until then don't bother me with it.

thefz 1y ago

> Now that machines can think for us They don't

vsl 1y ago
But people treat them as if they could. You can already see them using LLM output as "proof" in discussions...
- voidspark 1y ago
  They can simulate thinking or reasoning well enough, better than some humans.

spiderfarmer 1y ago

This might be an unpopular opinion, but generative AI truly is the miracle solution to a lot of my problems. As a solo entrepreneur with a huge, multi-year project that was bordering on impossible to achieve alone, it has done wonders for my ability to follow through on my opportunities and ambitions.

intended 1y ago

For the inevitable comparison to the advent of the automobile. You still have to think about how that introduction changed how humans lived. What are the changes that will happen here? PS: I must add - we talk about LLMs as reasoning machines, but they are narrative machines. They do not reason because they do not have a model making mind. If the content generated is similar enough to expert output, it doesnt matter if it came from a parrot or from a person. Its "good enough" provided it passes inspection. Any prognotication on our future work habits and mental resilience will have to recognize how verification is the crux of our physical and information economies.

BrandoElFollito 1y ago

I find that the concept of shifted "worth" was nicely done in the series The Orville[1]. This is a surprisingly deep series under a layer of comedy. The idea is that a device that gives you whatever you want was discovered, and this completely changed the priorities for people. The one that became the most important was "trust". You earn it, you lose it, you are defined by it. I like the concept. I would be happy to not do a lot of things that are "socially accepted" - job, clean environment etc. and more focus on people relationships as a determinant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orville

createaccount99 1y ago

What an overly verbose article.

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

The author opens with a story of building ramps and repeating endless combinations until they excel at ramp-building, expanding their possibilities through experimentation until they can say they’ve acquired quite some skill at ramp building. Consider though, how many ramps would be built if each time they had to first design and injection-mould the ramps? This would slow iteration. Fortunately there are already ramps to play with. The ramps are a tool used to build ramp courses. AI is also a tool, but it’s a tool for thinking at a certain level of abstraction. The author misses that infinite levels of abstraction exist in thought; in this way having tools of thought to lift you to higher levels lets you play in even more abstract thought-space. Having AI for the basic bits of thought is like already having ramps ready to go.

TYPE_FASTER 1y ago

The fear of AI reminds me of the fear of automation, that it will replace us. Part of me understands, part of me doesn't understand. Humanity has been dreaming of the future and writing about it for hundreds of years. It's closer than ever, and a lot of people are terrified that we're not going to have anything left to do. That's why I think it's a matter of mindset. This is going to sound dumb, but I keep thinking about the interactions between Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark and Jarvis in Iron Man. That's the AI I always wanted: something that could do deterministic (here's the weather, here's your schedule) and non-deterministic (research) things. Jarvis wasn't the inventor. Jarvis was a tool Tony used to invent things.