I largely agree with this perspective, but my main niggle is:
> There is a middle ground of people, such as myself and Freddie deBoer, who believe AI will lead to improvements in some respects of life, but will not liberate people from work or anything grandiose like that. Nor will AI bring about the end of humanity either.
This summary includes "will lead to improvements in some respects of life", which I suspect will be true, but omits "will lead to degradations in some respects of life", which I think is equally true and equally important.
I suspect that, on the whole, it will lead to reduction in the quality of life for most people, much like so many other tech developments over the last 2 or 3 decades have done.
smackeyacky•6h ago
It already lead to a reduction in quality of life.
AI has already poisoned the internet with slop, making successfully searching for information much harder.
More personally for hacker news folks, the early promise of AI making programming easier is an illusion. The combination of pressure from management to make AI hype work, vs the actual performance degradation most programmers working on legacy apps experience makes the job harder, not easier.
I've seen this adage floating around for a while now: if it's not worth writing then it's not worth reading. It sums up the current state of AI pretty succinctly for me.
JohnFen•6h ago
> There is a middle ground of people, such as myself and Freddie deBoer, who believe AI will lead to improvements in some respects of life, but will not liberate people from work or anything grandiose like that. Nor will AI bring about the end of humanity either.
This summary includes "will lead to improvements in some respects of life", which I suspect will be true, but omits "will lead to degradations in some respects of life", which I think is equally true and equally important.
I suspect that, on the whole, it will lead to reduction in the quality of life for most people, much like so many other tech developments over the last 2 or 3 decades have done.
smackeyacky•6h ago
AI has already poisoned the internet with slop, making successfully searching for information much harder.
More personally for hacker news folks, the early promise of AI making programming easier is an illusion. The combination of pressure from management to make AI hype work, vs the actual performance degradation most programmers working on legacy apps experience makes the job harder, not easier.
I've seen this adage floating around for a while now: if it's not worth writing then it's not worth reading. It sums up the current state of AI pretty succinctly for me.