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I'm fine with people deciding that AI programming isn't for them, especially if they've given it a fair shake first and didn't drop it the second it made an obv

by simonw 1y ago

I'm fine with people deciding that AI programming isn't for them, especially if they've given it a fair shake first and didn't drop it the second it made an obvious mistake. What frustrates me is when people 1. claim it's entirely useless and that anyone who thinks it's useful is deceiving themselves (still very common, albeit maybe less so now than it was six months ago) or 2. claim that spending time writing about and understanding it "has turned a lot of them into drooling fanboys." Hence my snappy response to the above comment. I took it a bit personally.

saulpw 1y ago
That's fair. I also made a snappy response because I get frustrated on the other side, when proponents say 1) "you're using it wrong" or 2) "it'll get better" or 3) "I don't understand why people are resistant". In that last case, there's two interpretations of resistance, the one in which someone doesn't overcome their initial knee-jerk response, and another one when someone develops a more warranted resistance after exploring it. The first kind is potentially conservative, or ideological, or fearful, or lazy, which I think is what you take issue with. The second kind is more balanced and reasonable. Do we need a better descriptor to differentiate the two?
- simonw 1y ago
  Yeah, that makes sense. Honestly at this point you could build a full periodic table of AI hesitancy/resistance/criticism and have it be a useful document! I'm staunchly opposed to the whole "model welfare" thing, deeply skeptical of most of the AGI conversation and continue to think that outsourcing any critical decisions to an AI system is a catastrophically bad idea in a world where we haven't solved prompt injection (or indeed made much progress towards solving it) - so carve me out a bunch of squares for those. Maybe there's room here for one of those political compass style quizzes.

by simonw 1y ago

saulpw 1y ago

That's fair. I also made a snappy response because I get frustrated on the other side, when proponents say 1) "you're using it wrong" or 2) "it'll get better" or 3) "I don't understand why people are resistant". In that last case, there's two interpretations of resistance, the one in which someone doesn't overcome their initial knee-jerk response, and another one when someone develops a more warranted resistance after exploring it. The first kind is potentially conservative, or ideological, or fearful, or lazy, which I think is what you take issue with. The second kind is more balanced and reasonable. Do we need a better descriptor to differentiate the two?

simonw 1y ago
Yeah, that makes sense. Honestly at this point you could build a full periodic table of AI hesitancy/resistance/criticism and have it be a useful document! I'm staunchly opposed to the whole "model welfare" thing, deeply skeptical of most of the AGI conversation and continue to think that outsourcing any critical decisions to an AI system is a catastrophically bad idea in a world where we haven't solved prompt injection (or indeed made much progress towards solving it) - so carve me out a bunch of squares for those. Maybe there's room here for one of those political compass style quizzes.