[matheusmoreira]

Pretty wild to see this in a technology forum. The whole idea of technology is to do more with less. It inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable. Have you ever wondered how many livelihoods computer programmers have destroyed? Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?

[Barrin92]

>The whole idea of technology is to do more with less

No, that's not the whole idea of technology. Technology exists to, and this is a non-exhaustive list: fostering creativity, play, enabling autonomy and self sufficiency, connecting people to each other, collaboration, building skills and enhancing people's natural capacities. That's a smalls et of examples of what one could imagine technology to do.

Are these AI tools connecting people, genuinely enhancing their capacity to think, increasing or diminishing their creativity and self-sufficiency? The answer looks pretty obvious to me.

People who think technology is something to be used to "do more" and then discarded have no actual interest in technology as an object of study, or as a set of pro-social tools. That's not the mentality of a hacker. Why would it surprise you that people on a website called hackernews don't have the same attitude as a guy in an MBA class?

[matheusmoreira]

It absolutely is. Technology is what lets you farm more with less resources. Manufacture more with less materials. Get more things done in less time. Fostering creativity and play? Yeah, by getting more things done in less time, so as to free up that time for all the fun stuff you actually want to do. Of course, to others this "fun stuff" is just yet another inefficiency to be eliminated.

We might love technology and think it has intrinsic value, but the rest of the world could not care less. It's about maximizing profits and minimizing costs. That includes the costs of human labor. No hacker here thinks of the amazon mechanical turk employees that AI will certainly get rid of, for example. I bet the hackers here will be at their most self-satisfied when they finally manage to replace doctors.

So it is indeed pretty rich to read complaints on so called Hacker News about hacking itself being automated away by AI models. It's a very arrogant perspective. Did hackers think they were above this? Did they think they were irreplaceable? Hilarious.

[miyoji]

> The whole idea of technology is to do more with less. It inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable

I don't think either of these sentences is true.

> Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?

I didn't say anything about a moral line, I just said that there are a lot of programmers who are very excited to remove themselves from being employable. I didn't even say whether I thought that was good or bad!