Comment by sph
6 hours ago
> I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the truth in front of their eyes, and it breaks my heart because a lot of us are scared, confused, or uncertain, and not enough of us are talking honestly about it.
Imagine if we had to suffer these posts, day in and day out, when React or Kubernetes or any other piece of technology got released. This kind of proselyting that is the very reason there is tribalism with AI.
I don't want to use it, just like I don't want to use many technologies that got released, while I have adopted others. Can we please move on, or do we have to suffer this kind of moaning until everybody has converted to the new religion?
Never in my 20 years in this career have I seen such maniacal obsession as it has been over the past few years, the never-ending hype that have transformed this forum into a place I do not recognise, into a career I don't recognise, where people you used to respect [1] have gone into a psychosis and dream of ferrets, and if you dare being skeptical about any of it, you are bombarded with "I used to dislike AI, now I have seen the light and if you haven't I'm sorry for you. Please reconsider." stories like this one.
Jesus, live and let live. Stop trying to make AI a religion. It's posts like this one that create the sort of tribalism they rail against, into a battle between the "enlightened few" versus the silly Luddites.
You of course don't have to use AI. Your core point is correct: the world around you is changing quickly, and in unpredictable ways. And that's why it's dangerous to ignore: if you've developed a way that worked in the world 10 years ago, there's a risk it won't play the same way in the world of 2030. So this is time-frame to prepare for whatever that change will be.
For some people, that's picking up the tool and trying to figure out what its good for (if anything) and how it works.
The author of that post Nolan is a pretty interesting guy and deep in the web tech stack. He’s really one of the last people I’d call "tribal", especially since you mention React. This guy hand-writes his web components and files bug reports to browsers and writes his own memory leak detection lib and so on.
If such a guy is slowly dipping his toes into AI and comes to the conclusion he just posted, you should take a step back and consider your position.
I really don't care what authority he's arguing from. The "just try it" pitch here is fundamentally a tribalist argument: tribes don't want another tribe to exist that's viewed as threatening to them.
Trying a new technology seems like what engineers do (since they have to leverage technology to solve real problems, having more tools to choose from can be good). I'm surprised it rings as tribalist.
Honestly that's what makes this all the more dangerous. He's trying to have his cake and eat it too: accept all of the hype and all of the propaganda, but then couch it in the rhetoric of "oh I'm so concerned I can remain in a sort of moderate & empathetic position and not fall prey to tribalism and flame wars."
There's no both-sides-ing of genAI. This is an issue akin to street narcotics, mass weapons of war, or forever chemicals. You're either on the side of heavy regulation or outright bans, or you're on the side of tech politics which are directly harmful to humanity. The OP is not a thoughtful moderate because that's not how any of this works.
I don't think you understand how much things are about to change in a relatively short time. A lot of people are rightfully confused and concerned.
Many people are seeing this as an existential moment requiring careful navigation and planning, not just another language or browser or text editor war.
This is exactly my position. Landscape-changing technology is impossible to get away from, because it follows you. It's like a local business owner in 1998 telling me they didn't care about the stupid "internet" thing, and then the internet blew away their business within 10 years. Similar story with the PC: folks didn't get the option to just "opt out" of a digital office because they liked typewriters and paper. Cell phones were this way also, and while many people post about how they hate their phones and needs to quit using it so much, pretty much everyone admits you can't live in society without one because they have pervaded so many interactions.
So that's how I think AI will be seen in 20 years: like the PC, the internet, and mobile phones. Tech that shapes society, for better or worse.