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cautiouscat 4 hours ago [-]
I admittedly flip-flop on this quite a bit. I use LLMs in my work and for a bunch of pet projects I don’t really care much about.
For the pet projects, it’s not really a big deal. I’m the only user, and I as the user don’t care how it works under the hood.
Work is a different story. I have never felt more disconnected from my work than in the last 6-8 months. It takes a huge mental toll to read into our code and figure stuff out, almost like I just got hired and I’m working on new code for the first time. I’m asked to read “specs” written by LLMs that are unintelligible and I find my brain disconnecting immediately. Tickets, also written by LLMs pose the same problem.
I’m asking teammates questions because I want their answer and I’m told to just ask Claude.
None of this feels good, it may be where the industry is heading but as a professional it feels wrong.
alansaber 2 hours ago [-]
A lot of the "none of this feels good" is that the models have been RL'd to produce longer and longer outputs. You don't start with a 1 paragraph explanation, being forced into a back-and-forth with the model so much anymore, unless you explicitly ask. Instead, it'll generate a 10 page report that you sorta-skim and the hooks of your attention skid off, and you prompt something vague like "make it shorter".
rDr4g0n 3 hours ago [-]
when llms write all the code, all we have left are the specs. ive found a lot of success applying software engineering discipline to spec writing and making it a human-only activity. from there hand the spec to LLM with a few guardrails around implemention and writing quality tests that prove the spec.
PRs review more quickly when you have human written spec diffs to orient you and guide (or skip) the code review.
a danger to avoid is writing specs which are basically just really bad code (prose is terrible code). you can work towards patterns to avoid this pitfall.
also, dont coflate spec with plan. spec is durable decisions. plan is execution to turn decisions into code. plan is disposable, dont check it in.
either way, find the human layer and dont use LLMs there. make all the important decisions in the spec, delegate the other decisions to the LLM.
i believe this is the new craft.
that said, i expect a small but significant exodus from software. a lotta folks came for the "programming" that is now being outsourced. were becoming so tired, just absolutely burning out.
i hope we will eventually realize its time to go, instead of giving up our souls for a fucking paycheck.
kazinator 17 minutes ago [-]
I'm absolutely not destroying my cherished "pet" projects with this shit.
orphea 3 hours ago [-]
What I hate the most is people vomiting AI slop communicating with others. I have teammates who decided that an agent producing a wall of text summarizing changes in a pull request instead of a simple "LGTM" is a good idea. I have teammates who talk using AI almost exclusively (you can see a small tag "Sent using Claude" or "Sent using Cursor" under their messages)
kg 3 hours ago [-]
Posing a well considered, concise and precise question only to get a wall of Claudeisms in response from a colleague is always demoralizing. Then you have to play the guessing game of 'is this detail in the response true, or did Claude make it up for them?'
bayindirh 3 hours ago [-]
> I have teammates who talk using Claude almost exclusively.
If somebody told that humans are a form of creature which can forego their most important and powerful capabilities just for convenience, I'd call the person saying that batshit insane, but here we are...
I have no more words for this.
rDr4g0n 3 hours ago [-]
a teammate who exclusively writes slop PRs and copy/paste LLM responses to slack has demonstrated they can be replaced by an LLM integration to slack and github.
also, take some fucking pride in your work.
xnorswap 3 hours ago [-]
I'm feeling the same, personal projects have never felt better, but work has slowly felt more miserable.
Code reviews come back with a ream of issues that I just want to scream "I don't give a fuck".
Pre-LLM no-one would have cared that if another class was configured differently ( it isn't ) and called the new class in a different way ( it doesn't ), that you'd in some race-condition occasionally leak a resource, but only on shutdown when the program is about to terminate anyway.
That's the kind of issue that claude loves to find and write up in a code review with the exact same verbiage and write up style as if it had just found a naive SQL injection from string concatenation.
Prior to LLMs I doubt anyone would even have spotted the first issue, let alone bothered to write it up.
But instead it's another round of review, another round of trying to decipher the LLM's comments to discover whether it's a meaningful problem or a nothingburger.
And it's all so tiring.
czpl 4 hours ago [-]
Why are we glossing over the fact that it's all trained on stolen code, stolen art, stolen books? It's unethical to use it, it's unethical to take money for it. It should be either free or killed. I really don't understand why we just collectively accepted that.
kazinator 15 minutes ago [-]
That's where the intelligence lies. It is not artificial intelligence; it's a hallucinative, interpolative search system through information produced by natural intelligence. The interpolation is all that is artificial.
mapontosevenths 4 hours ago [-]
I gloss over it because it's an argument that makes no sense to me.
Copyright exists to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Not to enrich artists or scientists.
Ai is progress. Further, the works it creates are fully transformative. It isn't just spitting out Harry Potter verbatim, it's making new things from it.
To me, this argument is like staying that if you read Winnie The Pooh as a child then Milne owns your artistic output for life, because one of your many influences might have been his work. It just seems obvious at face value.
kazinator 12 minutes ago [-]
You might be confusing patents and copyright.
Copyright squarely exists so that authors of can get paid.
Patents exist so that the secrets behind inventions are revealed in exchange for a limited time protection, promoting collaboration and progress.
czpl 3 hours ago [-]
How is it progress if it stops people from sharing. It just reduces everything to the lowest common denominator.
Or how is it progress if the data centers just eat up all the components skyrocketing the prices for regular people.
kg 3 hours ago [-]
The frequency with which AI boosters leap to "clearly once you've read a book the author owns everything that comes out of your brain" still shocks me a little bit. It's obviously not the same as somebody torrenting books2 or libgen or whatever and training on it for profit.
mapontosevenths 3 hours ago [-]
I see no argument here. Just a note that it seems to be obvious to you. It must not be as obvious to me, or millions of others or we wouldn't be on the opposite side of it.
pydry 3 hours ago [-]
>Copyright exists to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Not to enrich artists or scientists.
Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences?
Whatever it started out as (and I have my doubts it was ever a tool to help artists), it's now primarily a tool corporations use to milk creativity for profit and squash it where it might interfere with that profit.
mapontosevenths 3 hours ago [-]
> Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences?
No, but that needs new laws. Not an abuse of the old ones justified under the thinnest of pretenses.
I don't think that folks stop to consider what bending copyright law into these weird shapes to meet their ends will do to other aspects of copyright.
For example, sampling in music. How is that different from AI generated music? If anything AI uses LESS of any individual song. You can't just say "no derivative works." That would fully halt progress on many fronts.
3 hours ago [-]
czpl 3 hours ago [-]
If a song was made purely of samples with no original input I'd argue it's in the same category.
Maybe AI uses less of any individual song, but does AI make something actually original and transformative or is it just bits and pieces of all the things it learnt on (in simplified terms)? I think that's where the discussion lies.
mapontosevenths 3 hours ago [-]
Entirely new works are often created entirely from samples, and can be amazing. See "Frontier Psychiatrist" by The Avalanches for one example done entirely by humans. There are many others.
czpl 3 hours ago [-]
Amazing or not, that is not the discussion. LLM output can look amazing as well but that's not what I'm arguing about.
Also with LLM's we'll reach a point when everything is made out of samples (metaphorically speaking), where do we fit original content then, or who will make it if it means it's going to be consumed by data centers immediately.
mapontosevenths 1 hours ago [-]
> Also with LLM's we'll reach a point when everything is made out of samples
We reached that point with humans long ago. There's nothing new under the sun. Only remixes of dead peoples greatest hits. The pentatonic scale, for example, was not invented by the people who use it.
Science and art would have to start over from scratch if you expect things to all be genuinely new from first principles.
> who will make it if it means it's going to be consumed by data centers immediately
People who enjoy making it.
socketcluster 3 hours ago [-]
I'm an open source dev and I appreciate AI. I'm glad it exists and I have no problem with people being rewarded for their work on AI.
That said, I also think everyone who contributed content online deserves to be rewarded for their contribution, especially since OpenAI (which made the largest contribution) was a non-profit in the beginning. So there should be some kind of tax. Otherwise I agree, it's not ethical. It's not 'fair use' of copyrights.
survirtual 3 hours ago [-]
Your heart is in the right place but your conclusion is not.
Because it was trained unethically we have a few moral obligations:
1) USE IT. Do not let only unethical people use a force amplifier on our collective efforts.
2) STOP PUBLISHING HUMAN GENERATED CONTENT. The more original human thought = the more they harvest our thinking.
3) Generate only known things in novel combinations. Do not provide new insights.
I could go on but strategically thinking AI is not going to be stopped in the way you are thinking. So you need to think a bit deeper on methods of optimizing the situation.
cindyllm 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rezaprima 3 hours ago [-]
IMHO, if they purchased the books etc, it's fair because, for me, it's like a biological neural network (i.e human) reading and watching the contents and memorizing them.
CMIIW
LewisVerstappen 3 hours ago [-]
Because it’s not a “fact”, it’s an argument that you are making.
ChickeNES 1 hours ago [-]
> I really don't understand why we just collectively accepted that.
Because none of what you said is true.
flexagoon 3 hours ago [-]
> stolen code, stolen art, stolen books
Copyright violation is not theft
wartywhoa23 2 hours ago [-]
War is peace, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery!
alansaber 2 hours ago [-]
Realpolitik moment
Touche 3 hours ago [-]
Humans are trained by reading things. Why is it unethical for another form of intelligence to learn the same way.
rDr4g0n 3 hours ago [-]
AI is big data. AI companies generate the big data from obscene volumes of materials they did not produce. then they charge rent for access.
legally i have no fucking clue, but morally, this is stealing humanity to produce a profit.
realistically the toothpaste is outta the tube, so the second best option is accept LLMs, but do not enrich AI companies.
56 minutes ago [-]
czpl 3 hours ago [-]
there is nothing intelligent about an LLM
sdcfgy 4 hours ago [-]
Not all of us did.
unified101 4 hours ago [-]
The important question is: Will my work competitor also resist AI? We have no way to organize this, and hence, as they say, "resistance is futile".
lnkl 4 hours ago [-]
The point is, you will be better than your competitor if you resist it.
Foobar8568 4 hours ago [-]
How so?
discreteevent 3 hours ago [-]
Because you will have an understanding of the complete system. Your domain and the code. This means that you can be more creative with it and also get yourself out of a mess if it occurs (which it will).
From what I have seen AI doesn't understand the code. But even if you argue that it does understand the code it definitely doesn't understand the domain because it's only input channel is a stream of text and you didn't even type in a "full" text representation of the domain.
So you remain the only thing that can understand the whole system. If your competitor has no one (or no team) who can put together a full understanding of the system then you will have an advantage.
Foobar8568 40 minutes ago [-]
From my experience building different systems, there is no moat anymore ( beside your commercial connections for B2B). If one lack understanding of a domain, he will get it by testing the system.
So basically nothing has changed from before AI.
dist-epoch 2 hours ago [-]
You will have a good understanding of a system which is 20 times smaller in size/features.
For a todo app that is fine. But for most projects your competitor will leave you in the dust with the speed at which they add features.
Same story, 25 years ago:
> But with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling us, we would have the new feature too.
What I would love to see is a side by side comparison of two companies (one using AI, and one without) over an extended period of time.
Id wager that they would fare the same. The time saved on some tasks are outweighed by extra time spent on others. Everyone assumes that just because you can pump out more features, you're more successful.
unified101 3 hours ago [-]
Work competitor is also your colleague.
layer8 4 hours ago [-]
It probably depends on how you are positioned on the market, but my employer has yet to see competitive pressure from not using AI.
rDr4g0n 3 hours ago [-]
History has a lot to say about the ruling class benefitting from (and ensuring?) the working class cannot organize, because that is exactly when the workers have leverage.
workers that feel powerless and dont try to resist is great news for rulers who only serve to generate revenue.
unified101 2 hours ago [-]
I'm all ears for a solution. But all I hear is some workers want to bar other workers (H1B, seniority, etc) from working. I hear nothing about organizing.
Class warfare is nice to write about, but there's been 0 credible approaches in the last 2 years proposed. Do you think it will magically appear sometime? Are we generally prepared to stand with our less experienced colleagues? and immigrants?
voidUpdate 4 hours ago [-]
I've never understood the water argument... yes, it takes a lot of water in the initial setup to fill the water cooling loops, but isn't not constantly burning water, right? it gets cooled off again and goes around the loop
N_Lens 4 hours ago [-]
It’s not a good argument in my opinion, just something that’s spread because it’s easy to latch onto. The actual numbers on water usage aren’t a big deal.
That’s not to say that AI is all fine and dandy, I genuinely think frontier AI companies have deranged leadership.
alcomatt 4 hours ago [-]
In some cases it does. Most of the DCs use open evaporators still. Keeps the costs down.
samvher 4 hours ago [-]
Yes and many forms of electricity generation evaporate water as well
mapontosevenths 4 hours ago [-]
Yes. The part I don't get is why do we care about that?
Earth is two thirds water, and it rains. The water I drank this morning is million of years old. It will be around for millions more.
So, they pump some water out of the earth and it evaporates... It will come back down, and we aren't running out anytime soon.
Why do we care? Are they building these things in deserts? If so that's the problem. They should use closed loops if they want to build in the desert.
joenada 4 hours ago [-]
This is satirical, right? They use fresh water, which is a tiny, tiny % of all water on earth.
mindwok 3 hours ago [-]
Why does this matter? It remains fresh when its evaporated until it falls into the ocean, and then gets evaporated from there back into fresh.
alcomatt 2 hours ago [-]
Because it rarely goes back to the place it has been taken from.
joenada 2 hours ago [-]
It matters because there's almost none as it is, and you don't collect 100% of the water you use just because it rains. Water gets polluted, trapped underground, locked up in glaciers.
mapontosevenths 15 minutes ago [-]
> It matters because there's almost none as it is
That's ridiculous and untrue.
voidUpdate 3 hours ago [-]
2.5 to 3% according to google... Small but not tiny tiny
mapontosevenths 3 hours ago [-]
Three percent of two thirds of the entire planet is enormous. We aren't running out, and never will.
Some people just live in places that aren't suitable for human life and survive only through technology. Those places need to have different laws about water.
For example, I shouldn't be forced to use a low flow showerhead when I'm 100 miles from 1.3 quadrillion gallons of fresh water. If you aren't next door to lake Michigan then maybe you should be.
joenada 2 hours ago [-]
Because you're the only person on earth who matters, clearly.
Also, it's not 3% of 2/3. It's more like ~1% of 3% of 2/3. Most of the fresh water on earth is locked up in glaciers or trapped deep underground. You can absolutely lose surface water, too - when pipes leak, for instance. And that happens all the time because a lot of the water infrastructure is ancient. Where I live, there are still thousands of miles of Victorian-era pipes. These crack all the time. You don't just get that water back straight away when it next rains.
mapontosevenths 1 hours ago [-]
> You can absolutely lose surface water,
Where the heck does it go? Space? You're talking about the entire planet here. There's nowhere for it to be lost to, unless you're cracking it into hydrogen and oxygen or something.
> Because you're the only person on earth who matters, clearly.
As I said elsewhere in this third 2/3rds of humans live near large bodies of water.
joenada 1 hours ago [-]
Your question is already answered in the comment you're replying to.
joenada 3 hours ago [-]
That's fresh water in general. Most of it is frozen. The amount you can actually use is a sliver.
toasty228 3 hours ago [-]
Ah ok, then drought aren't a problem I guess? Guess what happens when you pump ground water faster than rain water replenishes it? Guess what climate change is disturbing?
This your your typical HN take, aka "I thought about a random problem I barely understand for 12 seconds and I think I figured it out better than domain experts"
mapontosevenths 3 hours ago [-]
Fully two thirds of earths inhabitants live near large bodies of water. It's not a problem for most of us.
The 1/3rd that choose to live in arid places where droughts are a concern should probably just pass laws that require closed loop cooling.
alansaber 2 hours ago [-]
I think it's just the most evocative of the plethora of environmental arguments
scotty79 4 hours ago [-]
It's about evaporative cooling. Read about how cooling towers work in nuclear and coal plants. The principle is the same for the data centers, but it the wasteheat to get rid of comes from computation.
They obviously shouldn't be doing it like that, but since clean water is cheap and business in absence of reason optimizes for lowest costs that's exactly what they did.
adamtaylor_13 3 hours ago [-]
I must again point out that we're not even certain yet that we're "losing" any programming capability, and we're not certain the tradeoff isn't worth it.
All of these arguments presuppose we're losing something that's not worth losing.
I want someone to start one square earlier and argue to me why that matters. I've read enough of these "your skills are atrophying!" arguments; I'm also making like 10x as much revenue as I did through a business that delights my clients. Why should I care about my "skills" if I'm still able to make money, pursue hobbies, and enjoy life?
I just don't think it's that serious.
mirror_neuron 2 hours ago [-]
I think there's a key difference of perspective hidden in your response. You're a business owner; you sell outcomes to your customers. Even if we suppose that skill atrophy is real, it's easy to see how that tradeoff would be worth it to you, and not to someone who is an individual contributor in a corporate environment. For an IC in a corporate environment, the accumulation of portable skills is an important part of what makes the job worthwhile.
For what it's worth: I went freelance right around the time that agents were starting to become extremely capable, and I've never enjoyed my work more. I'd believe the claim that my hands-on coding skills are atrophying to some degree, but I'm also developing other skills that have much higher leverage in my new setting.
glimshe 2 hours ago [-]
> "hands-on coding skills are atrophying to some degree"
It really depends on how you define "coding", right? Throughout my career coding meant many different things. In the beginning, coding was really Assembly. Then it became C. Then C++/OOP. Then Java/C# and managed memory languages. Then Python etc.
These languages aren't the same thing with different syntax. The details that matter in the act of "coding" changed dramatically. It really went from "bit thinking" in the assembly era to stitching open source libraries in the Python era. Many would excel in one paradigm but not the other.
Coding with AI requires a different set of skills. I see the proper command of AIs through prompts and human-made specs as hand coding as much as building line-by-line micro algorithms in Assembly.
I think the noise in this discussion comes from putting vibe coding and AI-assisted coding in the same bucket. I'd argue that pure vibe coding is perhaps the one thing that doesn't resemble traditional coding as much. But the AI coding approach where people gradually build applications through the accumulation of components and layers built with heavy AI assistance is hand coding.
I can see that relying on AI assistance for too long could atrophy the skill of manual line-by-line mental model transcription, but I never really cared too much for this skill. Once I have the right data structures and algorithms in my head, actually entering the if, else, class, struct, for, etc statements are a giant annoyance.
vouwfietsman 3 hours ago [-]
Bad blog.
> I do not come to you with clean hands.
> I am not here to dictate morality
These two things contradict eachother.
> My primary focus here will be software development
> Environmental Harm
> Stanley Tucci
These three things also contradict eachother.
> If we lived in a post-scarcity
Maybe this is your real problem, and you're just confusing cause and effect.
> We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die
Hyperbole.
> Look up the “Eliza effect”. Even the weakest conceivable program like this was seductive. These new ones are masters of seduction.
Sounds like software development alright.
This person has a familiar name, I'm sure he is amazing at something. This blog is not the peak of his work.
EDIT:
> I quote “AI” to emphasize that these things are not intelligent.
I don't think the take is bad, and what he says is right. Maybe we shall look at the substance rather than the artistic properties of their words?
I was recently discussing with someone who wanted to put all datacenters into AI datacenter basket, and inadvertently labeled all consolidated computing bad. That person, claiming otherwise was not knowing what they were talking about,
But while having nuances, AI datacenters and heavy AI usage is harmful to the world we live in, as a whole. We should come into terms with this and go from there.
vouwfietsman 3 hours ago [-]
No, what he says is not right. Parts of it are, but broadly (as I pointed out) he conflates a lot of things together that have no business being in the same sentence.
1. Reducing/replacing/automating highly complex work is fundamentally a good thing, it might be the case that society is not ready for the consequences of it, those are two separate things. Concluding that millions of people will die, is simply hyperbole.
2. Saying that AI is not intelligent is at best a non-sequitur but more likely intended misrepresentation and goalpost moving
3. The environmental harm of AI, however significant, is ultimately public knowledge and 100% clear in the public discourse around the current implementation of AI. This says nothing about AI in the general sense, only how we produce it today. This is like preventing cars from becoming a thing because they produce CO2. Do you think the world would be better off if cars were never invented?
None of this is about the 'artistic properties of their words', it is precisely about the core content being objectionable.
bayindirh 3 hours ago [-]
> Reducing/replacing/automating highly complex work is fundamentally a good thing, it might be the case that society is not ready for the consequences of it, those are two separate things. Concluding that millions of people will die, is simply hyperbole.
I don't think saying that millions will die is a hyperbole. It might be communicated poorly, but having no ability to work in a world with worsening quality of life (via climate crisis and economic changes) is being pinched between a rock and a hard place. What these people gonna do? Photosynthesis? One of countries which is among the leaders of this technology believes that social governmental systems is communism. So, yeah, perfect.
> The environmental harm of AI, however significant, is ultimately public knowledge and 100% clear in the public discourse around the current implementation of AI.
Yet the people who own and hype this technology is applying the Tobacco/Soda Industry Playbook: Deny and publish studies saying otherwise.
This is not fair, because who has the gold, makes the rules to increase their profit even more.
> This is like preventing cars from becoming a thing because they produce CO2. Do you think the world would be better off without combustion engines?
My current stance is not undoing things to zero, however forcing AI development to be more environmentally conscious and start regulating its power and water use. This is possible by prescribing energy source mix ratios, closed loop water cooling, etc. etc.
Of course this will slow some progress and make it a bit more expensive for a while, but in the end it'll be way more environmentally friendly.
All discourse doesn't have to be on a duotone plane. We can discuss in a 3D space with infinitely more shades.
vouwfietsman 3 hours ago [-]
> but having no ability to work in a world with worsening quality of life
If unemployment leads to death, there are many more things wrong than just AI. Why get mad at AI instead of at capitalism. This is nonsensical.
> Tobacco/Soda Industry Playbook
Except both of those succeeded in destroying health for decades, whereas AI had like a 2 year run before all the datacenter madness came to light.
> My current stance is not undoing things to zero,
This does not at all answer my question, my question is about the past not the present. The author is arguing to resist AI, what if resisting cars had worked? This is my question.
bayindirh 2 hours ago [-]
> there are many more things wrong than just AI.
Systems don't break instantly, but after many blows. There's already many more things are wrong. AI is a very potent accelerant in this case, not the sole problem.
> Why get mad at AI instead of at capitalism. This is nonsensical.
I'm not mad at AI, but how it's built, operated and for what end (i.e. capitalism). I believe I'm pretty consistent about this for quite some time (i.e. my comment history).
> whereas AI had like a 2 year run before all the datacenter madness came to light.
Being known is not a guaranteed precursor to change. It's one step closer to change, yes, but nothing is guaranteed because the supporting forces are too strong. We'll see how the discourse and reality will evolve. We're just starting.
> my question is about the past not the present. The author is arguing to resist AI, what if resisting cars had worked? This is my question.
My bad, misunderstood what you said. Maybe it didn't work in the distant past, but resisting cars in Paris worked, for example. Being adamant about Diesel cars' problems eradicated them from passenger sector and pushed them to the high-torque, special application, heavy haul niche.
Unfortunately, humans don't get motivated to make changes until they experience the proverbial near-death experience, and there's always suspicion about early alarmists, but at least maybe we can sow the seeds of awareness earlier this time and reduce the time to change, IDK.
But there's one thing I hate (and I don't use the word lightly): Being right early, being shot down by others with accusations of being stupid, and being right on the long run. This cycle is really wearing me down, and this is the third or fourth time I'm going through this about large world events.
vouwfietsman 29 minutes ago [-]
You are providing nuance to the authors stance, my reaction is to the authors stance. I don't disagree with you but this is no longer about the actual content of the blog post.
ChickeNES 1 hours ago [-]
> Bad blog.
The Anti's have been cranking up their submissions of this junk lately.
rsynnott 1 hours ago [-]
> I do not use any of the programming “AIs”, not even whatever is built into JetBrains IDEs
The JetBrains one is particularly bad, in that it seems very clearly worse than their (excellent, arguably best-in-class) deterministic autocomplete.
etrautmann 2 hours ago [-]
"A real experiment: “Devise an honest AI experiment in your department, measuring real costs and real benefits. Try, honestly, to find all the flaws with this AI stuff.”
This does not seem like a honest framing of an experiment... Wouldn't that be to create a true trial to assess strengths and weaknesses, or to figure out in what ways AI is effective for your team as a tool?
glimshe 4 hours ago [-]
Emotional rejection of AI will lead to the same outcome as emotional rejection of cars, the printing press and computers.
Additionally, when it comes to the software field, it will be a sure way of selecting yourself out of the work pool.
> it will be sure way of selecting yourself out of the work pool
If, as an engineer, you rely completely on AI then you will be selected out of the work pool. Some engineers will still be needed. If I was interviewing them (I used to do a lot of this) then I will want the ones who understand the code. If they only use AI then it will quickly become clear that they don't understand it. Why would I hire them when another person can understand it?
glimshe 44 minutes ago [-]
Yes, but let's not fall on the false dichotomy trap. The options aren't only "reject AI" and "completely rely on AI".
49 minutes ago [-]
lirolero 4 hours ago [-]
> it will be sure way of selecting yourself out of the work pool
i'm ok with that
ftomassetti 3 hours ago [-]
It must be nice have no economic needs and have no dependents
lirolero 3 hours ago [-]
It is
happytoexplain 2 hours ago [-]
The whole "it's like the printing press, cars, computers, etc etc" is a weak, blunt comparison. Not only are all those things, AI included, very different from each other, but even accepting the premise, critics of technology often had/have reasonable arguments.
It's a disappointingly un-thoughtful quip to see on HN so commonly. It's the kind of thing I would mostly expect to hear from non-technical people out in public spaces.
kg 3 hours ago [-]
Plenty of people live successfully without a car in 2026.
glimshe 3 hours ago [-]
In this context, a "car" is a vehicle with some sort of engine, as opposed to a horse, mule, carriage or other animal-powered vehicle. Those who rejected cars when they came out would also happily reject buses, cabs and even trains.
alansaber 2 hours ago [-]
A more up-to-date analogy would probably be the people who refuse to fly in commercial aviation.
renegat0x0 3 hours ago [-]
There are various approaches toward AI. Some are radical. I often found extremism to be wrong in most cases.
I have a suspicion that people who reject AI related stuff is just scared under the hood. They fight against AI because of the fear against loosing job, money, or control.
There were many manual jobs. Lets say carpenters. They had manually created things, often pieces of art. Now many things are soulless, created by factory output, and by robots. It is true that we lost some artistry. It is true that every line of code will not be a work of art. There is no going back though. Adapt.
wartywhoa23 3 hours ago [-]
> ... people who reject AI related stuff is just scared under the hood. They fight against AI because of the fear ...
Oh yes, buddy, those stupid people should better act out of love, not fear, right?
> There is no going back though. Adapt.
“He who would live must fight, and he who does not want to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has no right to exist.”
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925.
adamtaylor_13 3 hours ago [-]
Dude said "Adapt" and you really pulled out Hitler.
Oi. Discussion on this site gets more difficult each day. Instead of pointing out where you disagreed you just pulled out the most egregious appeal to authority and said, "oH yEaH?"
wartywhoa23 2 hours ago [-]
Should I have read this another comment of yours first,
> I'm also making like 10x as much revenue as I did
I'd not even bother to reply to someone who has all the skin in the AI game to perceive every criticism of it as a personal attack on one's wealth.
Don't forget to turn all your revenues into real estate before the bubble explodes.
adamtaylor_13 18 minutes ago [-]
> I'd not even bother to reply
Yes, you've shown yourself quite ambivalent to any notion of truth. You'd just as soon call someone Hitler and be on with it rather than try to understand another human's perspective. Pat yourself on the back, friend.
wartywhoa23 3 hours ago [-]
Pointing it out for you: the inescapable "X is here, adapt" is absolutely fascist in its nature.
It's as if all man-made change was placed in the same ballpark as tectonic movements and extinction events - as a blind force of nature.
Humans are given intelligence not only to construct things, but also not to construct things that better be not, FFS.
adamtaylor_13 3 hours ago [-]
I can't help but notice that for certain people with a particular anger against society, everything they disagree with is fascist in nature.
If Mao had said it, it would've been "absolutely communist", if Washington had said it, it would've been "absolutely Patriotic".
Planktonne 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think that's a reasonable read; you can't dismiss a specific criticism on the (unsupported) ground that the person making it would totally have dismissed anything at all.
adamtaylor_13 19 minutes ago [-]
wartywhoa expresses an opinion that I find intellectually lazy and spiritually prideful. Refusing to engage with an idea because it was dimly echoed in a statement made by an evil man is just intellectually lazy.
It's a spectacular bit of pride in oneself to try to silence someone's opinion because you found an abstractly-similar statement made by an evil man. Why probe the idea when you could just assign Hitler's evil intentions directly to them?
It's gross. It's tired. I wish people cared more to engage in good faith.
keiferski 3 hours ago [-]
I can buy the idea that AIs are making people a lot lazier intellectually, on average.
But I do think that for the atypical user that is "information-hungry," AIs are a massive productivity booster. I've probably asked ChatGPT 1,000 questions over the last 2 years that I otherwise would have needed to spend 15+ minutes researching. Prior to AI, I would have just... not spent the time looking them up.
The danger is just when you start using AI but otherwise continue doing exactly what you were doing before.
Planktonne 2 hours ago [-]
> I do think that for the atypical user that is "information-hungry,"
> Prior to AI, I would have just... not spent the time looking them up.
You're putting yourself in the group of people who are 'information-hungry', but your own evidence suggests that's not the case.
keiferski 2 hours ago [-]
I know you’re trying to be clever and critical (boy am I tired of this trope on HN) but no, I don’t agree.
Being curious about a lot of things doesn’t mean you’re willing to invest 15 minutes every time you have a question.
AI makes the cost of asking these questions functionally zero. Previously I’d ask maybe 1/10 of them on Reddit, get a smartass negative answer, if I get an answer at all. Now I have an assistant that answers an infinite number of questions on demand.
I suspect that a lot of AI-hostility from tech/nerdy people is because they don't have the ability to display their expertise as easily as they did on Stack Overflow/Reddit/etc. A huge percentage of comments on HN are still just people trying to display their knowledge. (And I'm very guilty of that as well.)
Planktonne 2 hours ago [-]
That's a lot of leaping to conclusions based on a small criticism.
I'm rather tired, personally, of the HN trope of people saying that AI is bad for/mis-used by everyone except a carefully-defined group that consists of exactly them.
If you're curious now only with AI, I'd say that makes you less curious--"intellectually hungry"--than the people who were curious before, without AI. It's great that you feel you can be more curious now, but I wouldn't be so quick to declare yourself superior to others with no more evidence than that you use AI the same amount.
lukan 3 hours ago [-]
"The danger is just when you start using AI but otherwise continue doing exactly what you were doing before."
You mean letting AI write the code, but still trying to write the same code by hand?
Joke aside, this is still what I am struggling with. I don't really code anymore - not worth it, when I want something done, but I miss it.
keiferski 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not a programmer so I can't really relate directly, I was replying more to the idea of using AI as an information-gathering tool.
I guess the analogy could be: with AI you should be doing more complex and more (quantity) programming than you did before. But don't quote me.
lukan 3 hours ago [-]
" the idea of using AI as an information-gathering tool."
Programming is mostly exactly that. You gather want information you need to get the job done. What are the names of the API you call, what are good patterns for this kind of situation etc.
But your point still stands as in use of AI can make those skills detoriate. And regarding to coding, that you don't know anymore what is in your codebase, how it actually works. Can happen fast if you let AI run in auto mode.
wartywhoa23 3 hours ago [-]
Count me in. I rejected my promotion (losing 2x gain in salary) from sysadmin to developer at my work exactly because of AI that ate it alive during the last year.
Our devs have been outright complaining about getting dumb, losing touch with the codebase and getting lost in weekly switching between models/agents that have been gushing as if from a firehose, but the management (read investors) knows better and there's a culture of self-censoring the opposition to AI among employees.
vertnerd 4 hours ago [-]
"After trying Kagi/Duck Duck Go, I have gone back to Google for search and I freely grant that I find the “AI Overview” to be useful."
I feel compelled to point out that Kagi does offer AI-backed answers if you want it to. Just pose your query with a question mark to trigger the AI response in addition to the usual search results. It is not ever the default or only answer, and I pray Kagi keeps it that way!
I use the AI option more often than I thought I would, usually for things that I don't consider controversial or complicated.
mancerayder 1 hours ago [-]
Reposting something I wrote on the topic of AI reducing not increasing domain knowledge in companies:
I'm seeing it at small scale around me. I view it as a Dunning Kruger enablement - AI gives confident answers and long-winded explanations on domains distinct from the person asking, making it hard to verify. The user of AI now feel they have replaced someone's advice. I see it in Technology at work (particularly in architecture) but also in non work things like plumbing, law, medicine. We're all doctors and physical therapists now, for example. Also we don't need psychologists, either.
Everyone is obsolete. Just upload the MRI report to Claude and let it tell you what you should do.
When people talked about AI being a catastrophe to befall us, I thought people were picturing killer robots. What's happening instead is something else - the enablement of stupidity.
borzi 4 hours ago [-]
Why? AI is enriching my life and letting me focus on solving hard problems. I don't believe in the sentience crap and am just using it at face value for what it is, a useful productivity tool. Every software developer's main purpose is to automate and reduce the amount of boring manual labour required. By this logic, should people in the past have "resisted the software development department"?
alansaber 2 hours ago [-]
Pragmatist meets moralist
ChickeNES 1 hours ago [-]
Luckily the former get things done while the latter whine.
williebeek 1 hours ago [-]
"I do not use any of the programming “AIs”"
There is your problem. You're making a case against technology that you don't understand. You haven't fixed esoteric bugs using AI or created whole new applications with AI. You haven't seen AI building new functionality in minutes instead of days of manual labor, at even better code quality.
Replace the word "AI" with Television/radio/internet/railways and you see how ridiculous this blog is.
bitbasher 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's so crazy to resist television, radio or the internet. Our literacy rates would likely be a lot higher!
cfiggers 3 hours ago [-]
I'm sympathetic to the author's core position. I think LLMs as they're currently deployed are doing net societal harm so far. For example, for every React app whistled up in five hours, there's a high schooler or college student out there sleepwalking through their foundational courses and being set up to catastrophically fail upon trying to enter the job market.
But I think it's important for the quality of public discourse that we forward only the best, strongest arguments for any given position (whether I personally agree with that position or not). A weak argument gives unnecessary purchase to unscrupulous haters who might use that weaker argument as a low-grade "straw man" to dismiss the whole position.
So with that preamble, some constructive criticism (very well-intentioned):
> I am not exaggerating: We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die.
On this one you are, in fact, exaggerating (certainly with "millions," likely with "thousands" as well).
The overwhelming majority of people who lose their job for whatever reason (and there are many reasons, not just this one issue) fall back on a support network of their family and friends while they "get back on their feet" by pivoting to another job or form of employment (sometimes branching into entrepreneurship, for example).
The alternative to employment at whatever FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company someone was laid off from is not "death." It is typically "some, sometimes quite significant, discomfort." Granted "AI Layoffs" are starting to ripple out beyond FAANG, but the story is similar in other industries.
If "layoffs kill people" is the moral hill we choose to plant our flag on, then mustn't we also campaign with equal vociferousness against all the other causes of layoffs in general? Since to do otherwise is to sit by while those laid off allegedly die in droves of thousands or perhaps millions?
It also occurs to me that this framing ("AI causes layoffs") also gives incompetent and unaccountable executives a pass by pinning the actual harm done by irresponsible layoffs (which to be clear, is not none!) on "the AI" rather than on the leaders who are in the positions to actually decide what happens in their organizations.
I think the argument is much stronger if we talk about the aggregate cost to humanity being paid in terms of displacement, life disruption, and curtailed opportunity (especially for juniors). We should not make the "toxic escalationism" move of equivocating things we don't like with negligent homicide, even if it makes for a punchy one-liner.
vouwfietsman 3 hours ago [-]
> For example, for every React app whistled up in five hours, there's a high schooler or college student out there sleepwalking through their foundational courses and being set up to catastrophically fail upon trying to enter the job market.
Oh man how did we ever survive calculators.
cfiggers 3 hours ago [-]
Are you arguing that a TI-84 has materially similar effects on development of critical thinking, writing, and reasoning skills as ChatGPT?
vouwfietsman 27 minutes ago [-]
No I'm arguing that many developments that simplify work while not undermining understanding exist, and we have dealt with them. In the narrow scope of understanding engineering, the fact that AI can also engineer does not prevent us from proper education or gaining understanding.
ripe 2 hours ago [-]
> forward only the best, strongest arguments for any given position... A weak argument gives unnecessary purchase to unscrupulous haters who might use that weaker argument as a low-grade "straw man" to dismiss the whole position.
Excellent point. Thank you for writing such a cogent argument.
It is clear that the rich and powerful are making short-term decisions that are causing widespread and long-term harm. Decisions such as, AI-pilled investors demanding unsustainable productivity from companies, and CEOs in turn forcing employees to use agentic coding and laying the rest off.
Such decision-making is not new, of course, but LLM technology is helping grifters and con artists to turbo-charge it. Founders can raise money using cool demos that achieve the impossible. Investment analysts can back up their AI story with huge paper profits.
The result, as you summarized, is life and career displacement and missed opportunities for young people. It's just too abstract and diffuse of an impact to influence people with, and it also seems to be railing against the holy cow of Capitalism.
"Data centers bad!", or "AI is disrupting humanity and the end is nigh!" are much more punchy slogans.
DannyBee 4 hours ago [-]
I guess i'll give a super-unpopular take.
Listening to developers complain about AI doing things to their life and the world at large when they have spent the past 30 years automating just about everyone else they could out of a job (Since this has been one of the primary uses of software) is ... something else. It sounds like a a a mix of hubris, arrogance, cognitive dissonance, ignorance, etc.
Only when it started to affect their world did any developers start to care, and even then nobody seems to ever stop and say "hey what were we doing the past 30 years, maybe we should think about this", it's instead "hey look at what these other people are doing with AI, someone should think about this".
It feels like, to paraphrase a movie quote - "Nobody gets to destroy jobs and the the world but us"
keiferski 3 hours ago [-]
Yup. If current-gen AIs were capable of writing articles, but not code, then devs wouldn't care at all. None of these articles would exist, and some new variation of "learn to code" would be the snarky reply to nay-sayers.
In fact, we already pretty much have proof of this: devs didn't care when software destroyed the journalism industry twenty years ago. Turns out that people ultimately only care when their only jobs are on the line.
ChickeNES 1 hours ago [-]
I want to see the end of human labor entirely, so I say: "BRING IT ON!"
joenada 3 hours ago [-]
The difference is that automated tasks are (or should be) deterministic and reproducible, and taking up time devs could be using to do their actual job (writing code, solving technical problems, etc).
fpauser 3 hours ago [-]
Good argument. In the end we are all ignorant opportunists.
alansaber 2 hours ago [-]
And how could we not be? The world is unfathomably big and complex, and each of us wants their own narrative (well that, and to economically support loved ones, etc...)
draw_down 3 hours ago [-]
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serbuvlad 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not saying this situation is different from all of the other technological paradigm shifts in history.
But what concerns me is that authors of articles such as this feel no need to differentiate themselves from other anti-technology arguments in history.
alcomatt 4 hours ago [-]
I think it is very much different. Previous revolutions allowed us to fall back from manual labour to more mental driven work. Now even this is not going to be an option. Soon we're going to be reduced to be useful for spare parts only.
serbuvlad 3 hours ago [-]
This is only the case for the Industrial Revolution.
There have been many other thinking technologies and they ALL have been attacked in exactly the same way.
* Socrates attacked the invention of writing, arguing it would make people intellectually lazy.
* Abbot Johannes Trithemius argues in "In Praise of Scribes" in the 15th century that the Gutenberg machine would make people intellectually lazy.
* Lots of people in the 1960s attacked punch card computers, and automation in general (!), on the basis that it would make people intellectually lazy.
* Nicholas Carr attacks Google in a famous article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", on the basis that it would make people intellectually lazy.
And so on and so on and so on.
"That which has been is what will be, And there is nothing new under the sun."
It is because of this history that any argument such as the author makes, arguing that AI would make people intellectually lazy, must start already from the lamentation of the downfall of human intelligence from the days of Socrates, or must explain why this is different.
It is obviously not different.
There are three mental skills being offloaded onto AI:
1. Domain-specific skills
2. General intelligence (g)
3. Recall
Of these three, the danger with 1 is offloading them too early, before the AI is "good enough" to be better than human experts. This is a genuine concern and we should do things carefully. However, if the AI is good enough, there is no danger here.
Recall is the mental skill that all of these innovations have "hurt", but it can simply be trained explicitly and synthetically. We will certainly have to structure our societies more and more in the future to synthetically exercising recall (like we're now synthetically exercising our muscles), but if we do this, offloading recall at work is not a big issue.
As for general intelligence, this is the most harmless to offload, because, as far as I know from the literature, it cannot really be trained, and it does not really degrade either.
alcomatt 2 hours ago [-]
"If AI is good enough there is no danger" ?? Who's going to be validating the AI expertise after the experts are gone? Another AI? This is a downward spiral into oblivion and worst case, obsolescence.
The way the transformers work, getting to the point 1 will probably never be possible - more likely that the capital will just say it is good-enough "in the name of profits" and legislate to protect AI companies against any litigation from AI made mistakes. To a certain extent it is happening already - and all the IP and Copyright theft for model training has been brushed aside already. Yes there are few odd lawsuits here and there but they will be inconsequential and soon forgotten.
Recall is already being massively affected. I see it in our teams at work and I am also affected myself to a point. I very much doubt there will be a massive restructure of societies to allow us to work our brains out - mental gyms. They do exist now, in various chess clubs and are not that popular - that this will become a norm is a wishful thinking, and anyway, we will be too busy fighting one another for the last few remaining jobs.
General Intelligence without Recall and those hard acquired Domain-specific skills means nothing really - just our bioware defaults.
serbuvlad 1 hours ago [-]
1. I don't know, Transformers seem to be pretty good at those Domain specific skills.
2. I'm sure mental gyms will become common, although I'm not sure if chess is a very good mental gym. It may take a hundred years or so, though.
hackeridiot12 2 hours ago [-]
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moolcool 4 hours ago [-]
To be fair, many of the old anti-technology arguments were correct. We lived with the consequences, but life also went on.
vouwfietsman 3 hours ago [-]
Depends on what you mean by correct. Do you think the world would be better if those anti-technology people succeeded and the technologies did not come to be?
A world without steam engines, cars, computers, printing presses.
happytoexplain 2 hours ago [-]
Possibly for some things and possibly not for others. It's hard to say. The upsides and downsides are very apples-and-oranges.
The point isn't that the world would be objectively better in every case, but rather that the arguments of "anti-technology people" are frequently rational (and often don't even necessitate an elimination of the technology in question), and using their name as a cudgel as if they were cavemen is a low-quality rhetorical trope haunting all conversation about writing that is critical of AI.
It's also a distraction. If the topic is AI, then it's better to simply talk about the ups and downs of AI than the ups and downs of e.g. cars.
vouwfietsman 28 minutes ago [-]
Indeed it is, so it would be bad to just "resist ai"
moolcool 2 hours ago [-]
Predictions and prescriptions are different things. E.g. they said that recorded music would cause fewer people to sing and perform in their own homes. This happened, but we're all largely just fine with it.
happytoexplain 4 hours ago [-]
Why would they need to differentiate? You're implying those arguments were wrong?
The argument usually isn't "I believe X will not happen," it's usually either "I believe X should not happen" or "I believe we should manage how X happens".
Planktonne 3 hours ago [-]
> feel no need to differentiate themselves from other anti-technology arguments
Why should they? Other "anti-tech" arguments include
- Concern about global warming/pollution
- Resistance to nuclear/chemical warfare
It's not just, or even primarily, that anti-tech arguments are the equivalent of 'cameras will steal souls'.
llm_nerd 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure how valuable this advice is. From what I can see, Jeffries hasn't been involved in actual software development for decades (he is ~87 and has a lot of great accomplishments under his belt, but in the year 2026, 0% of his income relies upon him generating solutions for paying clients in a competitive space, and probably hasn't for a long, long time).
For some reason HN readers love this sort of content, largely by periphery players who mostly think it gives them an angle for clicks. And, I mean, as someone who uses lots of AI to delight clients and stay competitive, you be you. It leaves more for me.
ChickeNES 1 hours ago [-]
> From what I can see, Jeffries hasn't been involved in actual software development for decades (he is ~87 and has a lot of great accomplishments under his belt, but in the year 2026, 0% of his income relies upon him generating solutions for paying clients in a competitive space, and probably hasn't for a long, long time).
I had to google him to even figure out why he's relevant (his About Me on the linked site is literally "I’m Ron Jeffries, the same old one. This is my new site. It’s where all my new articles will go" very helpful smh.) Xtreme Programming? When was that last relevant, 20 years ago?
Vaslo 2 hours ago [-]
All I’m seeing is mediocre or inexperienced coders executing at a similar level to traditional coders, with traditional coders not liking it. Im guessing this is similar to any situation where new tech replacing old tech, and old tech potentially empire building to protect themselves with articles like “resist the helpful new technology!”
ftomassetti 4 hours ago [-]
I see good ethical reasons to be against AI, but I see no reasons why “resisting” would lead to anything but irrelevance. So I think this is terrible advice
meander_water 4 hours ago [-]
I see a lot of people throw their hands up in the air and say "I have no control over this, might as well go all in on AI".
But we as individual consumers have more power than we think. We don't need to use these AI features and products. We've survived perfectly fine without AI. Made plenty of scientific discoveries and lead enriched lives without it.
The biggest "fuck you" to the pricks who pushed this on us would be if we collectively went "meh".
_davide_ 4 hours ago [-]
I understand the appeal of saying fuck you to billionaires and pathological liars CEOs and the annoying usages of AI, but i don't understand the wider "fuck you AI".
AI are here, is it going to demolish and (maybe) reconstruct the world as we know it, trying to avoid it it's just silly. There is no sane world where we can "stop AI", even if every single researcher were to do vanish tomorrow and the hardware and schematics magically gone, it would still only be a stopgap.
So...What are you trying to achieve?
meander_water 3 hours ago [-]
A humanist revolution.
Sure we can't stop the technology, but we _can_ stop the importance and money heaped into it.
ChickeNES 1 hours ago [-]
Being against technology is anti-human
card_zero 56 minutes ago [-]
This is being against interest in a specific technology. For example I could say "I think yo-yos are stupid". But the yo-yo is here to stay! The world must adapt to the yo-yo or be left behind, because we all think that yo-yos are very important and we use them constantly to do everything instead of using our hands! Or we could not be interested in that, because it's stupid.
ChickeNES 11 minutes ago [-]
I didn't say disliking a particular technology is anti-human. I said being against technology is.
rDr4g0n 3 hours ago [-]
we can all debate the finer points but in any case "resist" is exactly the right message.
AI companies are racing to build empires on products built on the whole of human writing, charging rent to access it, then leveraging their scale to improve the model.
the big data era was a gold rush for greed. the AI era is has upgraded to a warp engine for greed.
the harms and manipulation of social media took ages to enter the social discourse, and are just now turning into legal action.
AIs warp-engine speed guarantees greed will fuel warp-engine scale harm before society catches up, and before America's greedy ass politicians are cornered into trying to do something.
resist fucking greed. if you gotta use LLMs, at least don't pay an AI company.
ChickeNES 1 hours ago [-]
Greed is good. You're on a website run by a VC firm lmao
api 3 hours ago [-]
I criticize stuff like this a lot. I criticize the doomer “bomb data centers” rationalist cult even more.
At the same time, maybe I shouldn’t, and I sometimes find all the AI skeptic and even doomer discourse heartening.
We really messed up with the Internet. I’m an Xennial and I had a minor role in it but I was there and it feels like the Internet was “our project.” I was literally born with the PC, discovered BBSes as a tween and the pre web Internet as a teen.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the net is bad. I think it’s more positive than not (still). But my god the addiction and disinformation and brain rot and propaganda and child predators and you get the idea.
The addiction is the big one, the root of all evil. “Maximizing engagement” is destroying civilization. But I digress.
Back in the 90s, nobody talked about this. Well not nobody but maybe this one person pissing into the hurricane. Discourse on the net and computing in general was 99.99% breathlessly positive bordering on delusional utopian.
We didn’t see it coming.
Nobody was talking about how this could go off the rails and do horrible things. Well almost nobody. I guess dystopian cyberpunk nailed some of it but it was too much in the realm of fiction. It wasn’t part of the real world discourse which was all Mondo 2000 and early Wired and open source movement and PC industry optimism.
So ironically all the anti AI discourse makes me cautiously more optimistic about AI. We are talking about the risks, the downsides, the ways it could go majorly bad. Maybe we will notice if it does and correct. If we’d done that with the net, noticed that maybe addictionmaxxing apps and sites was going to work “too well” or that flattening the discourse to 140 characters would harm the collective mind, things might be a little better today.
Even if we go in with one eye a little open and correct a little bit, that could make a big difference. Could have with the net too.
For the pet projects, it’s not really a big deal. I’m the only user, and I as the user don’t care how it works under the hood.
Work is a different story. I have never felt more disconnected from my work than in the last 6-8 months. It takes a huge mental toll to read into our code and figure stuff out, almost like I just got hired and I’m working on new code for the first time. I’m asked to read “specs” written by LLMs that are unintelligible and I find my brain disconnecting immediately. Tickets, also written by LLMs pose the same problem.
I’m asking teammates questions because I want their answer and I’m told to just ask Claude.
None of this feels good, it may be where the industry is heading but as a professional it feels wrong.
PRs review more quickly when you have human written spec diffs to orient you and guide (or skip) the code review.
a danger to avoid is writing specs which are basically just really bad code (prose is terrible code). you can work towards patterns to avoid this pitfall.
also, dont coflate spec with plan. spec is durable decisions. plan is execution to turn decisions into code. plan is disposable, dont check it in.
either way, find the human layer and dont use LLMs there. make all the important decisions in the spec, delegate the other decisions to the LLM.
i believe this is the new craft.
that said, i expect a small but significant exodus from software. a lotta folks came for the "programming" that is now being outsourced. were becoming so tired, just absolutely burning out.
i hope we will eventually realize its time to go, instead of giving up our souls for a fucking paycheck.
If somebody told that humans are a form of creature which can forego their most important and powerful capabilities just for convenience, I'd call the person saying that batshit insane, but here we are...
I have no more words for this.
also, take some fucking pride in your work.
Code reviews come back with a ream of issues that I just want to scream "I don't give a fuck".
Pre-LLM no-one would have cared that if another class was configured differently ( it isn't ) and called the new class in a different way ( it doesn't ), that you'd in some race-condition occasionally leak a resource, but only on shutdown when the program is about to terminate anyway.
That's the kind of issue that claude loves to find and write up in a code review with the exact same verbiage and write up style as if it had just found a naive SQL injection from string concatenation.
Prior to LLMs I doubt anyone would even have spotted the first issue, let alone bothered to write it up.
But instead it's another round of review, another round of trying to decipher the LLM's comments to discover whether it's a meaningful problem or a nothingburger.
And it's all so tiring.
Copyright exists to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Not to enrich artists or scientists.
Ai is progress. Further, the works it creates are fully transformative. It isn't just spitting out Harry Potter verbatim, it's making new things from it.
To me, this argument is like staying that if you read Winnie The Pooh as a child then Milne owns your artistic output for life, because one of your many influences might have been his work. It just seems obvious at face value.
Copyright squarely exists so that authors of can get paid.
Patents exist so that the secrets behind inventions are revealed in exchange for a limited time protection, promoting collaboration and progress.
Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences?
Whatever it started out as (and I have my doubts it was ever a tool to help artists), it's now primarily a tool corporations use to milk creativity for profit and squash it where it might interfere with that profit.
No, but that needs new laws. Not an abuse of the old ones justified under the thinnest of pretenses.
I don't think that folks stop to consider what bending copyright law into these weird shapes to meet their ends will do to other aspects of copyright.
For example, sampling in music. How is that different from AI generated music? If anything AI uses LESS of any individual song. You can't just say "no derivative works." That would fully halt progress on many fronts.
We reached that point with humans long ago. There's nothing new under the sun. Only remixes of dead peoples greatest hits. The pentatonic scale, for example, was not invented by the people who use it.
Science and art would have to start over from scratch if you expect things to all be genuinely new from first principles.
> who will make it if it means it's going to be consumed by data centers immediately
People who enjoy making it.
That said, I also think everyone who contributed content online deserves to be rewarded for their contribution, especially since OpenAI (which made the largest contribution) was a non-profit in the beginning. So there should be some kind of tax. Otherwise I agree, it's not ethical. It's not 'fair use' of copyrights.
Because it was trained unethically we have a few moral obligations:
1) USE IT. Do not let only unethical people use a force amplifier on our collective efforts.
2) STOP PUBLISHING HUMAN GENERATED CONTENT. The more original human thought = the more they harvest our thinking.
3) Generate only known things in novel combinations. Do not provide new insights.
I could go on but strategically thinking AI is not going to be stopped in the way you are thinking. So you need to think a bit deeper on methods of optimizing the situation.
CMIIW
Because none of what you said is true.
Copyright violation is not theft
legally i have no fucking clue, but morally, this is stealing humanity to produce a profit.
realistically the toothpaste is outta the tube, so the second best option is accept LLMs, but do not enrich AI companies.
From what I have seen AI doesn't understand the code. But even if you argue that it does understand the code it definitely doesn't understand the domain because it's only input channel is a stream of text and you didn't even type in a "full" text representation of the domain.
So you remain the only thing that can understand the whole system. If your competitor has no one (or no team) who can put together a full understanding of the system then you will have an advantage.
For a todo app that is fine. But for most projects your competitor will leave you in the dust with the speed at which they add features.
Same story, 25 years ago:
> But with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling us, we would have the new feature too.
https://paulgraham.com/avg.html
Id wager that they would fare the same. The time saved on some tasks are outweighed by extra time spent on others. Everyone assumes that just because you can pump out more features, you're more successful.
workers that feel powerless and dont try to resist is great news for rulers who only serve to generate revenue.
Class warfare is nice to write about, but there's been 0 credible approaches in the last 2 years proposed. Do you think it will magically appear sometime? Are we generally prepared to stand with our less experienced colleagues? and immigrants?
That’s not to say that AI is all fine and dandy, I genuinely think frontier AI companies have deranged leadership.
Earth is two thirds water, and it rains. The water I drank this morning is million of years old. It will be around for millions more.
So, they pump some water out of the earth and it evaporates... It will come back down, and we aren't running out anytime soon.
Why do we care? Are they building these things in deserts? If so that's the problem. They should use closed loops if they want to build in the desert.
That's ridiculous and untrue.
Some people just live in places that aren't suitable for human life and survive only through technology. Those places need to have different laws about water.
For example, I shouldn't be forced to use a low flow showerhead when I'm 100 miles from 1.3 quadrillion gallons of fresh water. If you aren't next door to lake Michigan then maybe you should be.
Also, it's not 3% of 2/3. It's more like ~1% of 3% of 2/3. Most of the fresh water on earth is locked up in glaciers or trapped deep underground. You can absolutely lose surface water, too - when pipes leak, for instance. And that happens all the time because a lot of the water infrastructure is ancient. Where I live, there are still thousands of miles of Victorian-era pipes. These crack all the time. You don't just get that water back straight away when it next rains.
Where the heck does it go? Space? You're talking about the entire planet here. There's nowhere for it to be lost to, unless you're cracking it into hydrogen and oxygen or something.
> Because you're the only person on earth who matters, clearly.
As I said elsewhere in this third 2/3rds of humans live near large bodies of water.
This your your typical HN take, aka "I thought about a random problem I barely understand for 12 seconds and I think I figured it out better than domain experts"
The 1/3rd that choose to live in arid places where droughts are a concern should probably just pass laws that require closed loop cooling.
They obviously shouldn't be doing it like that, but since clean water is cheap and business in absence of reason optimizes for lowest costs that's exactly what they did.
All of these arguments presuppose we're losing something that's not worth losing.
I want someone to start one square earlier and argue to me why that matters. I've read enough of these "your skills are atrophying!" arguments; I'm also making like 10x as much revenue as I did through a business that delights my clients. Why should I care about my "skills" if I'm still able to make money, pursue hobbies, and enjoy life?
I just don't think it's that serious.
For what it's worth: I went freelance right around the time that agents were starting to become extremely capable, and I've never enjoyed my work more. I'd believe the claim that my hands-on coding skills are atrophying to some degree, but I'm also developing other skills that have much higher leverage in my new setting.
It really depends on how you define "coding", right? Throughout my career coding meant many different things. In the beginning, coding was really Assembly. Then it became C. Then C++/OOP. Then Java/C# and managed memory languages. Then Python etc.
These languages aren't the same thing with different syntax. The details that matter in the act of "coding" changed dramatically. It really went from "bit thinking" in the assembly era to stitching open source libraries in the Python era. Many would excel in one paradigm but not the other.
Coding with AI requires a different set of skills. I see the proper command of AIs through prompts and human-made specs as hand coding as much as building line-by-line micro algorithms in Assembly.
I think the noise in this discussion comes from putting vibe coding and AI-assisted coding in the same bucket. I'd argue that pure vibe coding is perhaps the one thing that doesn't resemble traditional coding as much. But the AI coding approach where people gradually build applications through the accumulation of components and layers built with heavy AI assistance is hand coding.
I can see that relying on AI assistance for too long could atrophy the skill of manual line-by-line mental model transcription, but I never really cared too much for this skill. Once I have the right data structures and algorithms in my head, actually entering the if, else, class, struct, for, etc statements are a giant annoyance.
> I do not come to you with clean hands. > I am not here to dictate morality
These two things contradict eachother.
> My primary focus here will be software development > Environmental Harm > Stanley Tucci
These three things also contradict eachother.
> If we lived in a post-scarcity
Maybe this is your real problem, and you're just confusing cause and effect.
> We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die
Hyperbole.
> Look up the “Eliza effect”. Even the weakest conceivable program like this was seductive. These new ones are masters of seduction.
Sounds like software development alright.
This person has a familiar name, I'm sure he is amazing at something. This blog is not the peak of his work.
EDIT:
> I quote “AI” to emphasize that these things are not intelligent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
I was recently discussing with someone who wanted to put all datacenters into AI datacenter basket, and inadvertently labeled all consolidated computing bad. That person, claiming otherwise was not knowing what they were talking about,
But while having nuances, AI datacenters and heavy AI usage is harmful to the world we live in, as a whole. We should come into terms with this and go from there.
1. Reducing/replacing/automating highly complex work is fundamentally a good thing, it might be the case that society is not ready for the consequences of it, those are two separate things. Concluding that millions of people will die, is simply hyperbole.
2. Saying that AI is not intelligent is at best a non-sequitur but more likely intended misrepresentation and goalpost moving
3. The environmental harm of AI, however significant, is ultimately public knowledge and 100% clear in the public discourse around the current implementation of AI. This says nothing about AI in the general sense, only how we produce it today. This is like preventing cars from becoming a thing because they produce CO2. Do you think the world would be better off if cars were never invented?
None of this is about the 'artistic properties of their words', it is precisely about the core content being objectionable.
I don't think saying that millions will die is a hyperbole. It might be communicated poorly, but having no ability to work in a world with worsening quality of life (via climate crisis and economic changes) is being pinched between a rock and a hard place. What these people gonna do? Photosynthesis? One of countries which is among the leaders of this technology believes that social governmental systems is communism. So, yeah, perfect.
> The environmental harm of AI, however significant, is ultimately public knowledge and 100% clear in the public discourse around the current implementation of AI.
Yet the people who own and hype this technology is applying the Tobacco/Soda Industry Playbook: Deny and publish studies saying otherwise.
This is not fair, because who has the gold, makes the rules to increase their profit even more.
> This is like preventing cars from becoming a thing because they produce CO2. Do you think the world would be better off without combustion engines?
My current stance is not undoing things to zero, however forcing AI development to be more environmentally conscious and start regulating its power and water use. This is possible by prescribing energy source mix ratios, closed loop water cooling, etc. etc.
Of course this will slow some progress and make it a bit more expensive for a while, but in the end it'll be way more environmentally friendly.
All discourse doesn't have to be on a duotone plane. We can discuss in a 3D space with infinitely more shades.
If unemployment leads to death, there are many more things wrong than just AI. Why get mad at AI instead of at capitalism. This is nonsensical.
> Tobacco/Soda Industry Playbook
Except both of those succeeded in destroying health for decades, whereas AI had like a 2 year run before all the datacenter madness came to light.
> My current stance is not undoing things to zero,
This does not at all answer my question, my question is about the past not the present. The author is arguing to resist AI, what if resisting cars had worked? This is my question.
Systems don't break instantly, but after many blows. There's already many more things are wrong. AI is a very potent accelerant in this case, not the sole problem.
> Why get mad at AI instead of at capitalism. This is nonsensical.
I'm not mad at AI, but how it's built, operated and for what end (i.e. capitalism). I believe I'm pretty consistent about this for quite some time (i.e. my comment history).
> whereas AI had like a 2 year run before all the datacenter madness came to light.
Being known is not a guaranteed precursor to change. It's one step closer to change, yes, but nothing is guaranteed because the supporting forces are too strong. We'll see how the discourse and reality will evolve. We're just starting.
> my question is about the past not the present. The author is arguing to resist AI, what if resisting cars had worked? This is my question.
My bad, misunderstood what you said. Maybe it didn't work in the distant past, but resisting cars in Paris worked, for example. Being adamant about Diesel cars' problems eradicated them from passenger sector and pushed them to the high-torque, special application, heavy haul niche.
Unfortunately, humans don't get motivated to make changes until they experience the proverbial near-death experience, and there's always suspicion about early alarmists, but at least maybe we can sow the seeds of awareness earlier this time and reduce the time to change, IDK.
But there's one thing I hate (and I don't use the word lightly): Being right early, being shot down by others with accusations of being stupid, and being right on the long run. This cycle is really wearing me down, and this is the third or fourth time I'm going through this about large world events.
The Anti's have been cranking up their submissions of this junk lately.
The JetBrains one is particularly bad, in that it seems very clearly worse than their (excellent, arguably best-in-class) deterministic autocomplete.
This does not seem like a honest framing of an experiment... Wouldn't that be to create a true trial to assess strengths and weaknesses, or to figure out in what ways AI is effective for your team as a tool?
Additionally, when it comes to the software field, it will be a sure way of selecting yourself out of the work pool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--bH6O2_Vvk
If, as an engineer, you rely completely on AI then you will be selected out of the work pool. Some engineers will still be needed. If I was interviewing them (I used to do a lot of this) then I will want the ones who understand the code. If they only use AI then it will quickly become clear that they don't understand it. Why would I hire them when another person can understand it?
i'm ok with that
It's a disappointingly un-thoughtful quip to see on HN so commonly. It's the kind of thing I would mostly expect to hear from non-technical people out in public spaces.
I have a suspicion that people who reject AI related stuff is just scared under the hood. They fight against AI because of the fear against loosing job, money, or control.
There were many manual jobs. Lets say carpenters. They had manually created things, often pieces of art. Now many things are soulless, created by factory output, and by robots. It is true that we lost some artistry. It is true that every line of code will not be a work of art. There is no going back though. Adapt.
Oh yes, buddy, those stupid people should better act out of love, not fear, right?
> There is no going back though. Adapt.
“He who would live must fight, and he who does not want to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has no right to exist.”
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925.
Oi. Discussion on this site gets more difficult each day. Instead of pointing out where you disagreed you just pulled out the most egregious appeal to authority and said, "oH yEaH?"
> I'm also making like 10x as much revenue as I did
I'd not even bother to reply to someone who has all the skin in the AI game to perceive every criticism of it as a personal attack on one's wealth.
Don't forget to turn all your revenues into real estate before the bubble explodes.
Yes, you've shown yourself quite ambivalent to any notion of truth. You'd just as soon call someone Hitler and be on with it rather than try to understand another human's perspective. Pat yourself on the back, friend.
It's as if all man-made change was placed in the same ballpark as tectonic movements and extinction events - as a blind force of nature.
Humans are given intelligence not only to construct things, but also not to construct things that better be not, FFS.
If Mao had said it, it would've been "absolutely communist", if Washington had said it, it would've been "absolutely Patriotic".
It's a spectacular bit of pride in oneself to try to silence someone's opinion because you found an abstractly-similar statement made by an evil man. Why probe the idea when you could just assign Hitler's evil intentions directly to them?
It's gross. It's tired. I wish people cared more to engage in good faith.
But I do think that for the atypical user that is "information-hungry," AIs are a massive productivity booster. I've probably asked ChatGPT 1,000 questions over the last 2 years that I otherwise would have needed to spend 15+ minutes researching. Prior to AI, I would have just... not spent the time looking them up.
The danger is just when you start using AI but otherwise continue doing exactly what you were doing before.
> Prior to AI, I would have just... not spent the time looking them up.
You're putting yourself in the group of people who are 'information-hungry', but your own evidence suggests that's not the case.
Being curious about a lot of things doesn’t mean you’re willing to invest 15 minutes every time you have a question.
AI makes the cost of asking these questions functionally zero. Previously I’d ask maybe 1/10 of them on Reddit, get a smartass negative answer, if I get an answer at all. Now I have an assistant that answers an infinite number of questions on demand.
I suspect that a lot of AI-hostility from tech/nerdy people is because they don't have the ability to display their expertise as easily as they did on Stack Overflow/Reddit/etc. A huge percentage of comments on HN are still just people trying to display their knowledge. (And I'm very guilty of that as well.)
I'm rather tired, personally, of the HN trope of people saying that AI is bad for/mis-used by everyone except a carefully-defined group that consists of exactly them.
If you're curious now only with AI, I'd say that makes you less curious--"intellectually hungry"--than the people who were curious before, without AI. It's great that you feel you can be more curious now, but I wouldn't be so quick to declare yourself superior to others with no more evidence than that you use AI the same amount.
You mean letting AI write the code, but still trying to write the same code by hand?
Joke aside, this is still what I am struggling with. I don't really code anymore - not worth it, when I want something done, but I miss it.
I guess the analogy could be: with AI you should be doing more complex and more (quantity) programming than you did before. But don't quote me.
Programming is mostly exactly that. You gather want information you need to get the job done. What are the names of the API you call, what are good patterns for this kind of situation etc.
But your point still stands as in use of AI can make those skills detoriate. And regarding to coding, that you don't know anymore what is in your codebase, how it actually works. Can happen fast if you let AI run in auto mode.
Our devs have been outright complaining about getting dumb, losing touch with the codebase and getting lost in weekly switching between models/agents that have been gushing as if from a firehose, but the management (read investors) knows better and there's a culture of self-censoring the opposition to AI among employees.
I feel compelled to point out that Kagi does offer AI-backed answers if you want it to. Just pose your query with a question mark to trigger the AI response in addition to the usual search results. It is not ever the default or only answer, and I pray Kagi keeps it that way!
I use the AI option more often than I thought I would, usually for things that I don't consider controversial or complicated.
I'm seeing it at small scale around me. I view it as a Dunning Kruger enablement - AI gives confident answers and long-winded explanations on domains distinct from the person asking, making it hard to verify. The user of AI now feel they have replaced someone's advice. I see it in Technology at work (particularly in architecture) but also in non work things like plumbing, law, medicine. We're all doctors and physical therapists now, for example. Also we don't need psychologists, either. Everyone is obsolete. Just upload the MRI report to Claude and let it tell you what you should do.
When people talked about AI being a catastrophe to befall us, I thought people were picturing killer robots. What's happening instead is something else - the enablement of stupidity.
There is your problem. You're making a case against technology that you don't understand. You haven't fixed esoteric bugs using AI or created whole new applications with AI. You haven't seen AI building new functionality in minutes instead of days of manual labor, at even better code quality.
Replace the word "AI" with Television/radio/internet/railways and you see how ridiculous this blog is.
But I think it's important for the quality of public discourse that we forward only the best, strongest arguments for any given position (whether I personally agree with that position or not). A weak argument gives unnecessary purchase to unscrupulous haters who might use that weaker argument as a low-grade "straw man" to dismiss the whole position.
So with that preamble, some constructive criticism (very well-intentioned):
> I am not exaggerating: We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die.
On this one you are, in fact, exaggerating (certainly with "millions," likely with "thousands" as well).
The overwhelming majority of people who lose their job for whatever reason (and there are many reasons, not just this one issue) fall back on a support network of their family and friends while they "get back on their feet" by pivoting to another job or form of employment (sometimes branching into entrepreneurship, for example).
The alternative to employment at whatever FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company someone was laid off from is not "death." It is typically "some, sometimes quite significant, discomfort." Granted "AI Layoffs" are starting to ripple out beyond FAANG, but the story is similar in other industries.
If "layoffs kill people" is the moral hill we choose to plant our flag on, then mustn't we also campaign with equal vociferousness against all the other causes of layoffs in general? Since to do otherwise is to sit by while those laid off allegedly die in droves of thousands or perhaps millions?
It also occurs to me that this framing ("AI causes layoffs") also gives incompetent and unaccountable executives a pass by pinning the actual harm done by irresponsible layoffs (which to be clear, is not none!) on "the AI" rather than on the leaders who are in the positions to actually decide what happens in their organizations.
I think the argument is much stronger if we talk about the aggregate cost to humanity being paid in terms of displacement, life disruption, and curtailed opportunity (especially for juniors). We should not make the "toxic escalationism" move of equivocating things we don't like with negligent homicide, even if it makes for a punchy one-liner.
Oh man how did we ever survive calculators.
Excellent point. Thank you for writing such a cogent argument.
It is clear that the rich and powerful are making short-term decisions that are causing widespread and long-term harm. Decisions such as, AI-pilled investors demanding unsustainable productivity from companies, and CEOs in turn forcing employees to use agentic coding and laying the rest off.
Such decision-making is not new, of course, but LLM technology is helping grifters and con artists to turbo-charge it. Founders can raise money using cool demos that achieve the impossible. Investment analysts can back up their AI story with huge paper profits.
The result, as you summarized, is life and career displacement and missed opportunities for young people. It's just too abstract and diffuse of an impact to influence people with, and it also seems to be railing against the holy cow of Capitalism.
"Data centers bad!", or "AI is disrupting humanity and the end is nigh!" are much more punchy slogans.
Listening to developers complain about AI doing things to their life and the world at large when they have spent the past 30 years automating just about everyone else they could out of a job (Since this has been one of the primary uses of software) is ... something else. It sounds like a a a mix of hubris, arrogance, cognitive dissonance, ignorance, etc.
Only when it started to affect their world did any developers start to care, and even then nobody seems to ever stop and say "hey what were we doing the past 30 years, maybe we should think about this", it's instead "hey look at what these other people are doing with AI, someone should think about this".
It feels like, to paraphrase a movie quote - "Nobody gets to destroy jobs and the the world but us"
In fact, we already pretty much have proof of this: devs didn't care when software destroyed the journalism industry twenty years ago. Turns out that people ultimately only care when their only jobs are on the line.
But what concerns me is that authors of articles such as this feel no need to differentiate themselves from other anti-technology arguments in history.
There have been many other thinking technologies and they ALL have been attacked in exactly the same way.
* Socrates attacked the invention of writing, arguing it would make people intellectually lazy.
* Abbot Johannes Trithemius argues in "In Praise of Scribes" in the 15th century that the Gutenberg machine would make people intellectually lazy.
* Lots of people in the 1960s attacked punch card computers, and automation in general (!), on the basis that it would make people intellectually lazy.
* Nicholas Carr attacks Google in a famous article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", on the basis that it would make people intellectually lazy.
And so on and so on and so on.
"That which has been is what will be, And there is nothing new under the sun."
It is because of this history that any argument such as the author makes, arguing that AI would make people intellectually lazy, must start already from the lamentation of the downfall of human intelligence from the days of Socrates, or must explain why this is different.
It is obviously not different.
There are three mental skills being offloaded onto AI:
1. Domain-specific skills
2. General intelligence (g)
3. Recall
Of these three, the danger with 1 is offloading them too early, before the AI is "good enough" to be better than human experts. This is a genuine concern and we should do things carefully. However, if the AI is good enough, there is no danger here.
Recall is the mental skill that all of these innovations have "hurt", but it can simply be trained explicitly and synthetically. We will certainly have to structure our societies more and more in the future to synthetically exercising recall (like we're now synthetically exercising our muscles), but if we do this, offloading recall at work is not a big issue.
As for general intelligence, this is the most harmless to offload, because, as far as I know from the literature, it cannot really be trained, and it does not really degrade either.
The way the transformers work, getting to the point 1 will probably never be possible - more likely that the capital will just say it is good-enough "in the name of profits" and legislate to protect AI companies against any litigation from AI made mistakes. To a certain extent it is happening already - and all the IP and Copyright theft for model training has been brushed aside already. Yes there are few odd lawsuits here and there but they will be inconsequential and soon forgotten.
Recall is already being massively affected. I see it in our teams at work and I am also affected myself to a point. I very much doubt there will be a massive restructure of societies to allow us to work our brains out - mental gyms. They do exist now, in various chess clubs and are not that popular - that this will become a norm is a wishful thinking, and anyway, we will be too busy fighting one another for the last few remaining jobs.
General Intelligence without Recall and those hard acquired Domain-specific skills means nothing really - just our bioware defaults.
2. I'm sure mental gyms will become common, although I'm not sure if chess is a very good mental gym. It may take a hundred years or so, though.
A world without steam engines, cars, computers, printing presses.
The point isn't that the world would be objectively better in every case, but rather that the arguments of "anti-technology people" are frequently rational (and often don't even necessitate an elimination of the technology in question), and using their name as a cudgel as if they were cavemen is a low-quality rhetorical trope haunting all conversation about writing that is critical of AI.
It's also a distraction. If the topic is AI, then it's better to simply talk about the ups and downs of AI than the ups and downs of e.g. cars.
The argument usually isn't "I believe X will not happen," it's usually either "I believe X should not happen" or "I believe we should manage how X happens".
Why should they? Other "anti-tech" arguments include
- Concern about global warming/pollution
- Resistance to nuclear/chemical warfare
It's not just, or even primarily, that anti-tech arguments are the equivalent of 'cameras will steal souls'.
For some reason HN readers love this sort of content, largely by periphery players who mostly think it gives them an angle for clicks. And, I mean, as someone who uses lots of AI to delight clients and stay competitive, you be you. It leaves more for me.
I had to google him to even figure out why he's relevant (his About Me on the linked site is literally "I’m Ron Jeffries, the same old one. This is my new site. It’s where all my new articles will go" very helpful smh.) Xtreme Programming? When was that last relevant, 20 years ago?
But we as individual consumers have more power than we think. We don't need to use these AI features and products. We've survived perfectly fine without AI. Made plenty of scientific discoveries and lead enriched lives without it.
The biggest "fuck you" to the pricks who pushed this on us would be if we collectively went "meh".
AI are here, is it going to demolish and (maybe) reconstruct the world as we know it, trying to avoid it it's just silly. There is no sane world where we can "stop AI", even if every single researcher were to do vanish tomorrow and the hardware and schematics magically gone, it would still only be a stopgap.
So...What are you trying to achieve?
Sure we can't stop the technology, but we _can_ stop the importance and money heaped into it.
AI companies are racing to build empires on products built on the whole of human writing, charging rent to access it, then leveraging their scale to improve the model.
the big data era was a gold rush for greed. the AI era is has upgraded to a warp engine for greed.
the harms and manipulation of social media took ages to enter the social discourse, and are just now turning into legal action.
AIs warp-engine speed guarantees greed will fuel warp-engine scale harm before society catches up, and before America's greedy ass politicians are cornered into trying to do something.
resist fucking greed. if you gotta use LLMs, at least don't pay an AI company.
At the same time, maybe I shouldn’t, and I sometimes find all the AI skeptic and even doomer discourse heartening.
We really messed up with the Internet. I’m an Xennial and I had a minor role in it but I was there and it feels like the Internet was “our project.” I was literally born with the PC, discovered BBSes as a tween and the pre web Internet as a teen.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the net is bad. I think it’s more positive than not (still). But my god the addiction and disinformation and brain rot and propaganda and child predators and you get the idea.
The addiction is the big one, the root of all evil. “Maximizing engagement” is destroying civilization. But I digress.
Back in the 90s, nobody talked about this. Well not nobody but maybe this one person pissing into the hurricane. Discourse on the net and computing in general was 99.99% breathlessly positive bordering on delusional utopian.
We didn’t see it coming.
Nobody was talking about how this could go off the rails and do horrible things. Well almost nobody. I guess dystopian cyberpunk nailed some of it but it was too much in the realm of fiction. It wasn’t part of the real world discourse which was all Mondo 2000 and early Wired and open source movement and PC industry optimism.
So ironically all the anti AI discourse makes me cautiously more optimistic about AI. We are talking about the risks, the downsides, the ways it could go majorly bad. Maybe we will notice if it does and correct. If we’d done that with the net, noticed that maybe addictionmaxxing apps and sites was going to work “too well” or that flattening the discourse to 140 characters would harm the collective mind, things might be a little better today.
Even if we go in with one eye a little open and correct a little bit, that could make a big difference. Could have with the net too.