Key point. The top use case for "Artificial Intelligence" is lack of natural intelligence.
PS Cute choice of sample size.
Maybe both are correct because most people are not using AI to generate their next SAAS passive income whatever.
So all we need is a ban on every other programmer's employment of it.
I'll wait :)
>top use case for "Artificial Intelligence" is lack of natural intelligence.
Also true if you think about a situation where there is just not enough natural intelligence to accomplish something within its scope.
Maybe there never was enough natural intelligence for something or other, or maybe not enough any more.
It could be a lot more acceptable to settle for artificial in those cases more so than average, especially if there is a dire need,
But first you have to admit the dire lack of natural intelligence :\
...from the lacking intelligence, sure.
But from anyone else?
I'm left wondering whether I should have just hand-coded what I was doing a bit slower, but kept my attention focused on the task
That’ll likely degenerate into “I want my AI to do dishes and laundry so I can code, not code so I can do my dishes and laundry”
It's less cool than having a future robot do it for you while you relax, but if you enjoy programming it brings some of the joy back.
"What was I doing again!?" is a big problem
The earlier days of programming had more "blocking" since compilation was quite slow. So the issue is obviously that "blocking", but social media.
Worst offenders like Rust are "today", not "earlier".
Still, you seem to be arguing that the choice should be Pascal instead of Rust. There is a reason why we choose these new languages: language features. Compile time is a lesser consideration.
Do I mean that one should choose Pascal today? No, compiling C code today is really fast and has practically no "blocking" time. But you can still inflict yourself "blocking" time if you want, with languages like Rust.
Are things clearer now?
C++ was/is even worse what with generation of all the templated code and then through the roof link times for linker to sort out all the duplicate template implementations (ok, Solaris had a different approach but I guess that's a nitpick).
I have not worked on any large project in Pascal, but friends worked with Delphi and I remember them complaining how slow it was.
So, in my experience, it really was slow.
Nearly every time, your problems were detected _early_ in the process. Because build systems exist, they don't take 30 minutes on average. They focus on what's changed and you'll see problems instantly.
It's _WAY_ more efficient for human attentional flow than waiting for AI to reason about some change while I tap my fingers.
I like to fire the model off to do exploratory implementations as I refine the existing work.
I'm using Aider though, which makes this easy: it's just another tab in the terminal.
While it's not presenting anything new, the article does cover a number of important talking points in an accessible way.
The title itself. Without reading the article, I can sense the "we are living in a stupid age" arrogant trope characteristic of the "winning" social classes.
Things like electricity, computers, internet, smartphones and AI are those earthquakes caused by the tectonic movement towards dominance of the machine.
The goal of human progress was to make everything easier. Tools came up to augment human abilities, both physical and mental, so that humans can free themselves from all hard work of physical labor and thinking.
We do gym and sports as the body needs some fake activity to fool it into believing that we still need all that muscle strength. We might get some gym and sports for the mind too to give it some fake activity.
Remember, the goal is to preserve ourselves as physical beings while not really doing any hard work.
The Factorio devs are ahead of the curve on that front I guess.
Think about it: do we rather to live in a world where heavy labor is a necessity to make a living, or a world where we go to gym to maintain our physique?
If mental labor isn't (as) necessary and people just play Scrabble or build weird Rude Goldberg machines in Minecraft to keep their minds somewhat fit, is this future really that bleak?
Even if a world where people don’t use their brains were desirable (that’s a humungous if), the present is definitely not the time to start. If anything, we’re in dire need of the exact opposite: people using their brains to not be conned by all the bullshit being constantly streamed into our eyes and ears.
And in your world, what happens when an natural disaster which wasn’t predicted takes out the AI and no one knows how to fix it?
You were clearly advocating for a particular future (“honestly believe (…) it’s a great thing”), so hiding behind it being a hypothetical feels disingenuous. Of course it’s an hypothetical, because it obviously does not describe the current state of the world. That doesn’t mean the idea is beyond criticism or commentary. On the contrary, that’s exactly what hypotheticals are for.
In the past, the majority of people who could be heard by the "masses" tended to be educated and wealthy. Now, everyone gets a voice.
But seems the article is more about AI and how it may make us stupider. Which I have no opinion on.
chrisjj•1h ago
A printed sign can do the same.
Try harder, A"I".
loloquwowndueo•1h ago
Not that I’d trust an AI to get it right - but people already don’t.
chrisjj•1h ago
In UK, works as designed... to maximise penalty earnings.
JKCalhoun•1h ago
Yeah, but otherwise, the whole MIT Media Lab thing is increasingly tasting a little bitter, not the glamorous, enviable place it seemed like in decades past.
Rather than looking for the next internet-connected wearable, for some reason, increasingly, I keep thinking about Bruce Dern's character in the film Silent Running.
doix•1h ago
I eventually gave up and only ate to avoid having to deal with it.
CaptainOfCoit•1h ago
chrisjj•1h ago
CaptainOfCoit•1h ago
chrisjj•27m ago
raincole•1h ago