Comment by reconnecting
20 hours ago
AI is only getting better at consuming energy and wasting people's time communicating with this T9. However, if talented engineers continue to use it, it might eventually provide more accurate replies as a result.
Answering your question, no matter how much I personally degrade or improve, I will not be able to produce anything even remotely comparable in terms of negative impact that AI brings to humanity these days.
I see this logical pairing a lot.
1) AI is basically useless, a mere semi-random word generator. 2) And it is so powerful that it is going to hurt (or even destroy) humanity.
This is this is called "having your cake, and letting it eat you too".
There’s nothing incongruent about that pairing (though I also think you’re not being entirely fair in describing what your parent comment said). Atom bombs also fit: They are basically useless and they are so powerful that they can destroy humanity.
With LLMs, the destruction is less immediate and overt, but chatbots do provable harm to people, and can be manipulated to warp our sense of reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis
People are having romantic relationships with their chatbots and committing suicide because of them. That is harm.
That's a dishonest framing of their argument. There's nothing logically inconsistent in believing wide adoption of AI tools causes developers' skills to atrophy and that the tools also fail to deliver on the hype/promises.
You're inserting "destroy humanity" when OP is suggesting the problem is offloading all thinking to an unreliable tool (I don't entirely agree with their position but it's defensible and not as you stated).
There's no point arguing with someone who's not only wrong, but who doesn't care if they're wrong. ("I will not be able to produce anything even remotely comparable in terms of negative impact that AI brings to humanity these days.")
There are basically no conditions under which one party can or will reach a legitimate common ground with the other. Sucks, but that's HN nowadays.
There is common ground, as per my initial message. Only one AI company spends billions of dollars yearly on marketing their software to make it work. I work on open-source software development on a bootstrapped basis.
My input is: water, nutrition, a bit of electricity, and beliefs and the output is a fairly complex logical system like software. AI's input is billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of people's lives spent in screen time daily, gigawatts of electricity, and still produces very questionable results.
To answer your question in other words: if you spent the same amount of resources on human intelligence, it might bring much more impressive results in one year. However, taking into account the resources already paid into these AI technologies, humanity is unlikely to have a chance to buy out of this new 'dependency'.
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