[munificent]

Every one of these articles fills me with a related kind of dread.

My whole life, my whole personality is architected around making things by hand for other people. My ideal world is a hipster stereotype where we all sit around using a small number of artisanal products to make other artisanal products for each other.

The arc of my programming career has gone lower and lower down the stack because when I create, I enjoy it most when it feels concrete, deliberate, and long-lasting. I get no joy out of duct taping a few libraries together (though I respect others who do).

While I spend a lot of my day doing code review and think it's a valuable, important part of the process, it's not my favorite task. I like making stuff, not just socially interacting with others to loosely guide them towards making stuff. The idea of AI-assisted software development to me just sounds like taking the one part of the job I like most—writing code—and turning it into even more code review, except now I'm reviewing code vomited out by a machine.

And I completely dread the long term societal implications of a world where most people spend most of their day consuming media auto-generated by a machine. Where lonely men and women hide from their social anxiety by cultivating simulated romantic relationships with chatbots. Where teens have their expectations of sex set by watching synthesized porn starring virtual actors doing things that are physically impossible. Where people watch auto-generated videos of impossibly idyllic vistas instead of actually leaving the house and going for a hike. Where our beliefs of the world are formed largely by synthesized news articles that may or may not accurately reflect it. Where children learn to speak, read, and write from AI tutors and pick up all the grammatical and stylistic quircks of the AI model such that they now because actual real parts of human language.

And, of course, where almost all of the massive profit generated by all of that flows to an increasingly small number of huge corporations.

None of that sounds like a world I want to live in.

I totally get the value of AI for things like classification and understanding. But generative AI feels like a pandora's box to me.

[turtleyacht]

Interested to know what your plans are. You've thought about this a lot, and for me your books sit next to all the others I have on C, assembly, math, etc--and, I am a bit embarrased to say, a large portion of which I still need to study.

I don't think I should despair too much, and simply grant triumph to a statistical steamroller.

The value is we'll still be making stuff, or yearning for it, and AI becomes a part of our toolkit (or never). Perhaps in your case, we will see Prompt Engineering Patterns someday.

I intend to plop down a tiny fortune enabling my children to have obscene hardware for wherever their personal projects take them, and server-grade CPUs, multiple GPUs, and fiber will be a given.

Just know you're standing at a height somewhere above, and as a giant to me I hope you can see farther ahead :)

Maybe we'll retreat more into our personally-named server, managing a handful of like-minded users, crafting rooms in a MUD no one will read. We'll publish stats for our packet filter, read stories typed by hand, and make little games.

There are still lots of problems we would be completely new to in many domains, people suffering injustice, and are those not things we might be interested in as well?

For sake of learning things, we are still satisfied. Even if AI were to generate it in an instant. For sake of satisficing our home labs and side projects, we find a tiny reprieve.

[munificent]

> Interested to know what your plans are.

I think I'll manage to eke out the rest of my career doing the kinds of programming I enjoy at least until I'm ready to retire. That's basically the extent of my plan.

> Just know you're standing at a height somewhere above, and as a giant to me I hope you can see farther ahead :)

I wish I could, but I'm as lost as the rest of us. I just happened to have written a couple of books.

> Maybe we'll retreat more into our personally-named server, managing a handful of like-minded users, crafting rooms in a MUD no one will read. We'll publish stats for our packet filter, read stories typed by hand, and make little games.

That hits perhaps just a little too close to home.

I think of the countless old folks in garages tinkering on old cars with manual transmissions and no engine computers, simple enough that they can still be tinkered, wishing they still made cars like that today. (I drive a twenty-year-old truck for similar reasons, though I'm not savvy enough to actually work on it.) Or other old folks hand-knitting sweaters and blankets for grandkids who appreciate the gesture but put it into storage because the latest mass produced fast fashion blanket they got off Amazon matches their room's decor better.

The whole thing just makes me feel old and out of touch.

[g9yuayon]

> My whole life, my whole personality is architected around making things by hand for other people.

Not sure if there's a conflict here. We still use compilers, right? Unless we write in machine instructions, there's always some kind of program generations somewhere.

> I get no joy out of duct taping a few libraries together (though I respect others who do).

You still can work on stuff that requires human ingenuity . If you look at the the credits section of the GPT-4 paper, you will see many people there because they are the master of "low-level" optimization. For instance, the author of Reformer is a lead in the Long Context section, because apparently he knows how to reduce the O(N^2) of self attention to O(Nlog(N)), to say the least.

[shaunxcode]

This is specifically what the situationists were trying to express with “the society of the spectacle”. It is very interesting to live though a time where broad swaths of humanity are awakening to such a critique.

[zachthewf]

I understand and share your fear. In a sense, I think we already live in this world: there are many people who are already slaves to YouTube, TikTok, strategically timed push notifications, etc.

We live in a world where digital tech is fantastic for people who have the skill and strategy to place healthy limits on their own use of it, and the worst possible world for those who cannot. And it's all about to get much more extreme.

All of your fears will likely come to pass, but I think there are also much more positive framings and there are fantastic opportunities to build solutions to some of these problems.

- Loneliness. Today, lonely men and women already suffer. A simulated relationship is a legitimate improvement over no human contact at all. Could a bot use the embeddings of your interactions to match you with a compatible partner, saving you the anxiety of having to navigate the dating market.

- Auto-generated videos. Frankly, most movies and TV shows suck today, probably because they come out of a broken Hollywood. I can't wait until the barrier is so low that a random genius college student can make a feature film with almost no resources. Maybe there will be more new movies that are actually good!

- AI tutors. Playing with GPT4 the past few days I've already experienced visceral joy from its use as a teaching tool. It is like having a pretty smart co-worker who knows something about literally everything. I'm honestly so excited about being able to learn new things without dealing with the fundamental barrier of finding good sources of knowledge.

[munificent]

> We live in a world where digital tech is fantastic for people who have the skill and strategy to place healthy limits on their own use of it, and the worst possible world for those who cannot.

I have several family members with ADHD and this is profoundly true. I don't know if they would even have a diagnosable condition if they didn't have the misfortune of living in a world that is actively preying on their attention every moment of their life.

> Today, lonely men and women already suffer. A simulated relationship is a legitimate improvement over no human contact at all.

I disagree. What I see over and over again in society today is that parasocial relationships (fandom, celebrity worship, life vlogging, etc.) enable and intensity loneliness. They provide just enough of an emulation of actual human contact with none of the effort or risk that many people (myself included, sometimes, honestly) do that instead of being forced out the door to get the real thing.

It's exactly like the thing we all do where you wander into the kitchen hungry. You're too lazy to prepare a real meal, so you have some chips or crackers or something and that gives you just enough satiety that you wander off again. But then ten minutes later you're back again, still hungry.

> Maybe there will be more new movies that are actually good!

I would so much rather watch a movie with flaws and that isn't entirely to my taste if it was made by a person who actually cared about what they were doing.