[geophile]

> "They are forbidden from creating original works to express themselves. However, they are still permitted to comment on writing, interpret it, share their taste. They are still valued for their appraisal, presentation, understanding and appreciation of creative writing. They just can’t write creatively anymore. They can go on as an enthusiastic spectator.

> ... It revealed that the process of prompting novel proofs will be as auraless as ordering doordash. Watch as magic and mystery evaporate. Watch as the sun sets on our heroic age. Is there not something evil in the act of blocking all future generations of mathematicians from the experience of discovery? Forget about accuracy or even attribution. Something fundamental to the experience of mathematics is being taken."

These passages resonated with me, as someone who has been enchanted by writing software for almost 60 years. It crystalizes something that has been nagging at me for many years: I like writing software. Reviewing, testing, spec-ing, designing, etc. are all important, but they are all incidental to the actual creation of software. They are all necessary for me to do if I'm going to write software, but they are peripheral. I didn't latch on to computer programming because I got into flow state reviewing code, or spec-ing it.

And this is happening in one profession after another. For example, fighter pilots. I suspect that a fighter pilot feels about flying jet fighters the same way that I feel about programming. And he or she will soon be exactly as useless: Doing things related to flying, from the sidelines, but not doing the thing him or herself.

AI is stealing all the fun parts.

[xg15]

My suspicion is still that this has to do with losing insight in the little specific details of the matter and general understanding.

An area where I realized that was feature engineering: Early ML systems had handcrafted features that were fed into the model. There were relatively arbitrary and the number of features you could reasonably generate that way was tiny, compared to modern systems - but it gave you some understanding what input the model got exactly and you could use it to clear up some failure modes, or be certain that the model learned something that could not possibly make sense.

Then the idea was to automate feature generation. What's not to like? Except that in practice, the automated features simply seem to become part of the blackbox and are not available anymore for understanding.

[psunavy03]

As someone who has been both a software professional and a jet aviator, the same process is going to occur in both. Humans will still be in the loop, but the span of control and effectiveness of each individual human will explode. There's a reason the current plan is to augment manned aircraft with "loyal wingman" drones and smaller ones. Even in the Russo-Ukrainian War, manned aircraft are still A Thing. They've even hauled old prop trainers out of storage to put a guy in the back with an assault rifle to shoot down Shahed drones, because they're too slow for fighters.

Software is going to go through the same adaptation and exaptation process as military aviation.

[nutjob2]

> AI is stealing all the fun parts.

No one is stopping you from doing what you enjoy.

But lets get real here: no one asked for programming to be the way it is. It just too hard, too menial, too esoteric, too particular and too anal for 99% of the population. That's great if you're one of the 'wizards' and can charge huge amounts of money to make software that isn't exactly wizardry and more like just regular stuff people need for their lives and businesses. The quality and nature of software mostly reflects the mentality of those who wrote it, instead of those who use it. Multi-million dollar software projects continue to fail decades after the Mythical Man Month was written.

If programming as we know it disappears, few will mourn its loss, having suffered its consequences. Most people, including most programmers will just move onto the next great thing, whatever that is, and be empowered by it.

Meanwhile, welcome to what technology has been doing to everyone else for the last 100+ years.

[skeledrew]

> AI is stealing all the fun parts.

Disagree. AI has is taking all the parts that remove the fun. Now people can truly have fun with that which they find interest in, because there's a way to avoid the parts they're not interested in engaging with, with little to no consequence.

[MinimalAction]

Disagree. In many professions, people were paid to endure the boring parts to be able to finally do fun parts. See academia; a professor writes grants, attends committee meetings, teaches (sometimes undesirably) and such, to finally go do research which is fun. If the fun parts are predominantly done by AI, and are removing people from getting paid, what fills one's stomach?

[skeledrew]

Stomach-filling ability is actually tangential to whether one has to engage with the bits they don't want to engage with, since it isn't precluded by the fun parts (there are people out there who are able to fill their stomachs from only doing what they find fun). But also it turns out to be a good example of that which forces one into doing that which they don't find fun. And IMO this - pretty typical - conflation really emphasizes how much we're stuck in and need to change this system that forces so many people to do things they don't want to do so they can fill their stomachs.

[haickernews]

This. Cannot emphasize this enough. I used to be bogged down with all sorts of decisions. What framework should I use? How can I make this code cleaner? What should this project be about? Is this decision going to bite me in the ass later?

Now I can safely hand this all off to Claude while leisurely browsing e621. The unlock is incredible, and I wouldn't trade this velocity for anything.

[spiresofagartha]

This is a slippery slope. Having only fun things to do make them obviously boring. The human being craves contrast.

That assuming what you've said is true, which is not. In a work environment, you're forced to optimize whatever that there is, regardless if it's fun or not.

Moreover, there is always fun to be had even in tasks you've found boring beforehand.

[skeledrew]

> Having only fun things to do make them obviously boring.

This doesn't really pan out the way you think it does as people can always choose to do boring things if they want (if there's even any truth to your assertion). Unless your argument is something along the lines of humans need to be forced to do things they don't want so they're able to find fun in anything, which I think is pretty... wild.

[spiresofagartha]

I do think humans need to be forced to do things they don't want. You don't need to believe my words. Just watch how many people get bored in their long vacations.

If all you do is having fun, it's obvious you'll need a new bar over and over (which is literally happening nowadays).

[skeledrew]

That sounds like systematic conditioning. Before there was actually a system, say back in cave people days, how did they operate without the system? During medieval days when monarchies were the rage, how did the royalty - and nobles to an extent - operate when they had serfs doing everything for them? Coming to more modern history, what about slave masters/mistresses?

Throughout history there has always been at least one group in societies (if not the whole) who didn't have to do anything they didn't want, and said groups have survived through the centuries. Now we're just at the point where it's very feasible for all in any given society to once again not have to be forced into anything and still thrive. What's needed is for that incompatible system that conditions forced labour to be thrown out.