@lyse Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.
Your very first point is obviously crucial. “Writing code” is just the means to an end for many people and they don’t really care about it or like it, so they love AI. I had this in another draft (it refers to the other list I posted):
https://movq.de/v/614f14c3ef/ramble.txt
And this right here is so important:
simplicity is the real art and much harder to achieve.
Finding an elegant, simple solution is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay harder than anything else. And here’s the thing: I don’t get why nerds/techies don’t get “nerd-sniped” by this. A lot of people love building big stuff and then brag about being clever/competent because they were able to build that big thing – but once you realize that this approach is the lazy one, shouldn’t you make finding the elegant solution your goal? Doesn’t that give you more bragging rights?
(Am I being clear? Do you understand what I mean? 😅)
@movq Oh, I understand exactly what you mean. :-) I fully agree with you. And it also completely puzzles me why only so few people share our view.
@lyse maybe you both are the bots! :-D That aside—which may, or may not be true, LOL—I agree too.
@movq I’m very curious…
What I like about this whole computer stuff is that you can explore how
things work. You can dig through problems and solve them. Nothing is
more satisfying than finally understanding something after you scratched
your head for some hours.
Surely you could do the same with AI? Tinker with how it works, study it, understand it, build your own and realize what it really is (without all the big tech hype)?
Is it the fact that “big tech” companies have basically stolen all of human knowledge to their benefit to build these AI(s) that’s the problem? Or is it that these AI(s) can write code better than you can (some of the time)? Or is it that because of all of the above, there’s no joy left in writing code anymore? 🤔
@prologic let me ask you this. Would you want your children not to learn anything, because “they have AI”? Are you OK with your children using the AI for all of their homework? What sense will it make? What kind of future would that bring for them? We need to analyse the repercussions from all angles, even if AI were to provide absolutely flawless answers every single time. Even if AI were to become omniscient. What will it be of the human race then? What would we do? Serve the AI? Maintain the AI? Would we have found the true meaning of life then? To care for AI. Is that it?
@bender Now that’s an interesting philosophical viewpoint right there. But this assumes that the “AI” we seemingly have available to us today is actually telligent, understands and has cognitive reasoning. It does not. All of these LLM models from big-tech companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Alibaba are all just very powerful, very large multidimensional neural networks with attention that are very good at statistical probabilities of ‘what comes next”. I think we get really upset over the wrong things sometimes. We need to continue to be upset that these 🤬 companies have basically destroyed any meaningful value of the concept of Copyright and Intellectual Property and Works of art. The so-called “AI” we have today is just a tool. Can you say for certain that the typewriter and the computer ruined our ability to write? Perhaps yes, but we still learn how to do so, likewise, I still think that learning to write code, research, read and write are all valuable skills to learn. Later on once you have the basics, you can defer some of the “tedious” work to these models, because frankly, they’re far better at inferencing and pattern matching than you or i will ever be, not because they’re better at pattern-matching per se, but because they have been trained on a very large corpus and they are much much faster at doing the same basic things we are far superior at.
@prologic don’t get mad at me, but the long block of text didn’t address any of my questions. 😜😅