Comment by oxag3n
5 hours ago
Interesting times we observe. I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology. Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.
Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers.
Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.
> I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology.
When I was young I ran into a number of adults who refused to use e-mail. They thought it was a disgrace, a fad, or useless. They hated being forced to write emails and tried to force everything into being a phone call or a meeting.
Back then changes happened more gradually.
It took a long time for technologies like cell phones and email to permeate. AI went from a novelty to being the only topic in tech overnight by comparison.
> Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.
Blockchain and NFTs were a useless sideshow. Their investors and hodlers were trying to force them into places they weren’t useful, but you could ignore them and your life wouldn’t be any different.
AI is infiltrating tech jobs whether you like it or not.
Outside of tech and email jobs AI isn’t as big of a talking point. I talk to construction contractors and some people in other physical jobs who are positive about it. They don’t see any threat to their job but they’ve found a lot of ways to use it for things like helping with translations and quickly searching for advice.
> Blockchain and NFTs were a useless sideshow. Their investors and hodlers were trying to force them into places they weren’t useful
Not unlike trying to cajole a probabilistic text generator into writing code that isn't atrocious. And failing.
If you actually try and use frontier models with basic harnessing and skills setup, you can’t seriously make this claim. Agentic coding is getting extremely good when you take time to properly setup an environment for an agent to work in.
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It's not just AI. It's AI on top of society discontent that existed for a long time, but accelerated recently. The big underlying problem is, since at least 1970s every subsequent generation had to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as their parents. For a few decades it was balanced by the increasing women's participation in the workforce. But then, since 2008, we got banking crisis, both political parties focusing on outrage, pandemic, great resignation, generation of workers lost due to the lack of in-person contact, and now AI.
There hasn't been a tech nearly as disruptive in recent times and possibly in all human history. Agriculture and industry both had obvious benefits serving humanity whereas AI can be a bit more of a competitor to it.