[christiangenco]

> I would argue that there are very few benefits of AI, if any at all. What it actually does is create a prisoner's dilemma situation where some use it to become more efficient only because it makes them faster and then others do the same to keep up. But I think everyone would be FAR better off without AI.

Personally, my life has significantly improved in meaningful ways with AI. Apart from the obvious work benefits (I'm shipping code ~10x faster than pre-AI), LLMs act as my personal nutritionist, trainer, therapist, research assistant, executive assistant (triaging email, doing SEO-related work, researching purchases, etc.), and a much better/faster way to search for and synthesize information than my old method of using Google.

The benefits I've gotten are much more than conveniences and the only argument I can find that anyone else is worse off because of these benefits is that I don't hire junior developers anymore (at max I was working with 3 for a contracting job). At the same time, though, all of them are also using LLMs in similar ways for similar benefits (and working on their own projects) so I'd argue they're net much better off.

[vouaobrasil]

A few programmers being better off does not make an entire society better off. In fact, I'd argue that you shipping code 10x faster just means in the long run that consumerism is being accelerated at a similar rate because that is what most code is used for, eventually.

[simonw]

I spent much of my career working on open source software that helped other engineers ship code 10x faster. Should I feel bad about the impact my work there had on accelerating consumerism?

[vouaobrasil]

I don't know if you should feel bad or not, but even I know that I have a role to play in consumerism that I wish I didn't.

That doesn't necessitate feeling bad because the reaction to feel good or bad about something is a side effect of the sort of religious "good and evil" mentality that probably came about due to Christianity or something. But *regardless*, one should at least understand that because our world has reached a sufficient critical mass of complexity, even the things we do that we think are benign or helpful can have negative side effects.

I never claim that we should feel bad about that, but we should understand it and attempt to mitigate it nonetheless. And, where no mitigation is possible, we should also advocate for a better societal structure that will eventually, in years or decades, result in fewer deleterious side effects.

[simonw]

The TV show The Good Place actually dug into this quite a bit. One of the key themes explored in the show was the idea that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, because eventually the things you consume can be tied back to some grossly unethical situation somewhere in the world.

[jfyi]

That theme was primarily explored through the idea it's impossible to live a truly ethical life in the modern world due to unknowable externalities.

I don't think the takeaway was meant to really be about capitalism but more generally the complexity of the system. That's just me though.