Comment by didibus
5 days ago
I agree with the potential of AI. I use it daily for coding and other tasks. However, there are two fundamental issues that make this different from the Photoshop comparison.
The models are trained primarily on copyrighted material and code written by the very professionals who now must "upskill" to remain relevant. This raises complex questions about compensation and ownership that didn't exist with traditional tools. Even if current laws permit it, the ethical implications are different from Photoshop-like tools.
Previous innovations created new mediums and opportunities. Photoshop didn't replace artists, because it enabled new art forms. Film reduced theater jobs but created an entirely new industry where skills could mostly transfer. Manufacturing automation made products like cars accessible to everyone.
AI is fundamentally different. It's designed to produce identical output to human workers, just more cheaply and/or faster. Instead of creating new possibilities, it's primarily focused on substitution. Say AI could eliminate 20% of coding jobs and reduce wages by 30%:
* Unlike previous innovations, this won't make software more accessible
* Software already scales essentially for free (build once, used by many)
* Most consumer software is already free (ad-supported)
The primary outcome appears to be increased profit margins rather than societal advancement. While previous technological revolutions created new industries and democratized access, AI seems focused on optimizing existing processes without providing comparable societal benefits.
This isn't an argument against progress, but we should be clear-eyed about how this transition differs from historical parallels, and why it might not repeat the same historical outcomes. I'm not claiming this will be the case, but that you can see some pretty significant differences for why you might be skeptical that the same creation of new jobs, or improvement to human lifestyle/capabilities will emerge as with say Film or Photoshop.
AI can also be used to achieve things we could not do without, that's the good use of AI, things like Cancer detection, self-driving cars, and so on. I'm speaking specifically of the use of AI to automate and reduce the cost/speed of white collar work like software development.
For me this is the "issue" I have with AI. Unlike say the internet, mobile and other tech revolutions where I could see new use cases or existing use case optimisation spring up all the time (new apps, new ways of interacting, more efficient than physical systems, etc) AI seems to be focused more on efficiency/substitution of labour than pushing the frontier on "quality of life". Maybe this will change but the buzz is around job replacement atm.
Its why it is impacting so many people, but also having very small changes to everyday "quality of life" kind of metrics (e.g. ability to eat, communicate, live somewhere, etc). It arguably is more about enabling greater inequality and gatekeeping of wealth to capital - where intelligence and merit matters less in the future world. For most people its hard to see where the positives are for them long term in this story; most everyday folks don't believe the utopia story is in anyway probable.
> The primary outcome appears to be increased profit margins rather than societal advancement. While previous technological revolutions created new industries and democratized access, AI seems focused on optimizing existing processes without providing comparable societal benefits.
This is the thing that worries me the most about AI.
The author's ramblings dovetails with this a bit in their "but the craft" section. They vaguely attack the idea of code-golfing and focusing on coding for the craft as essentially incompatible with the corporate model of programming work. And perhaps they're right. If they are, though, this AI wave/hype being mostly about process-streamlining and such seems to be a distillation of that fact.
Maybe it's like automation that makes webdev accessible to anyone. You take a week long AI coaching course and talk to an AI and let it throw together a website in an hour, then you self host it.