Comment by teekert
4 hours ago
Do you seriously think everybody is a programmer now that we have AI? Or that we don't need programmers anymore?
The tools are just changing. But everything is always changing.
Again: Sure they have much to boo about, but AI? Gen AI can run on your own machine even, you can fully own the means to your production. How is this wasting the time they spent studying? You still need knowledge and understanding of a field to be active in it. When the tools change your internal "world model" is not suddenly corrupt. I hope these kids were taught how to think, not what to think.
Kids fresh out of college with crippling student debt and no jobs should just buy increasingly expensive GPUs capable of running the best local models. Well done, problem solved.
Because the manager/owner/techbro class has decided we don't need employees for anything anymore, AI can do it all. This is phenomenally untrue, but that doesn't help you pay off your $400K of student loans or buy a house.
If I hear that "AI is just a tool" nonsense one more time...
Ok, so what is it then?
To me it's a tool. It helps me accomplish my goals with less effort. That's the definition of a tool right? What is AI to you then? Perhaps I'm being dumb, but not sarcastic.
A large crop harvester is a tool, but if you used to work on a farm by hand it's not a tool you're going to get to use. It's a replacement for your labour and value, right? someone else will get to use the tool and earn money.
So the question is in what way ai is a tool to these kids.
2 replies →
So, the people who are saying "it's just a tool" are trying to imply that it's just like an electric drill vs a hand drill, and all that will happen is that people will switch to the better tool and get much more productive and that's it!
Any maybe that's where we are today, but AI is rapidly improving and while we don't know what's going to happen there's very clearly a real possibility that instead of just people doing the same jobs but with a better tool, that tool will actually completely replace their jobs. Maybe a significant fraction of the jobs in society. That's no mere tool.
The direct and unambiguous purpose of AI as a tool has been to replace labor and treat workers badly. This is not some doomsaying thing. This is literally what CEOs and billionares creating and pushing this shit have openly discussed and shared with reporters (who proceed to publish the quotes 100% uncritically and with no investigative sense of curiosity to ask further questions about it). They are excited at the idea that AI means they can cull millions and millions of jobs.
If I use AI to automate swathes of your field out of a job AI isn't the only tool.