This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example.
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
I am sure many smokers in the 1950s also saw the health benefits of tobacco, that they were very happy to experience the increased energy after a smoke and could get more done as a result. I‘m pretty sure none of them felt their lungs and throats deteriorating either.
Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is. We don‘t have the research (yet) that AI is addictive and causes brain atrophy, but all the evidence is certainly pointing that way, the same way the evidence were pointing that way about tobacco in the 1950s. My only hope is that it doesn’t take us another 2 decades to prove the obvious.
>Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is.
It is, but why is that a problem? Moving from physical labor on the farm, factory or construction site to sedentary work and lifestyles would also atrophy our muscles so now we pursue physical activities we actually enjoy like gym and sports instead of hanging on to those dangerous and strenuous physical labor jobs just to stay in shape.
Similarly, you will use the AI to churn through the repetitive mundane tasks the AI can do, and then work your brain on the activities you actually enjoy.
Now if you choose to not exercise your brain and dumb yourself down the same way sedentary people don't exercise their bodies and get obese, then I guess that's on you, but we can't force the world to technologically regress just because some people are lazy and don't exercise, the same way we haven't forced construction workers to use pickaxes instead of machinery to tear up a road just to make sure they stay in shape and don't get too fat from sitting in their air conditioned excavators.
>then work your brain on the activities you actually enjoy.
1. As seen in this coountry, most people did not in fact "pursue physical activities they enjoyed". They got much less healthy and then the white collar machines started to churn their brains too. I do not see this ending any differently.
2. As many have noted (and has been known for decades pre-AI), getting more work done in a modern workplace does not reward you with more of your time back. It gives you more work and higher velocity plans. It may even end up compensating you less. There's only more benefit to this if you are your own boss, and so far a lot of those kinds of people are simply selling grifts, not truly disrupting the industry with newfound efficiencies.
>but we can't force the world to technologically regress just because some people are lazy and don't exercise
I didn't want to go too off topic, but since this is such a sticking point I need to make a big note about the US: most of the world is more sedentary than 100 years ago. But the obesity epidemic is mostly US-cerntric.
Which shows that, while we can't force a diet, we can definitely regulate incentives. But the US chose not to. We had all kinds of initatives to try and regulate what we put in our food and what to subsidize. We instead said corporations can do whatever we want and subsidized chemicals that are heavily taxes or banned in many other western countries.
I know that's a scary word for this community, but this analog of regulations can work here in AI as well. We don't need to ban AI (but I'm not opposed to it in primary schools), but we can shape policy to prevent "corporations can do whatever they want" yet again.
We can't regulate incentives. Unless we can somehow go back to how the world was in the 1960s, the incentive today in a global competitive world economy, is to make more money than your economic rivals, otherwise if you only regulate yourself but if they don't, then they will economically dominate you in the long run and turn your government into their puppet, your country into their playground and your people in their sweatshop workers. It's economic neo-colonilism 2.0 electric boogaloo.
Regulations only work if all players in the world adhere to them, but history has proven they don't. They expect everyone else to adhere to the rules and slow down so that they can get ahead of you.
> But the US chose not to
Smart. Then US can be the survivor in this global race. As someone in the EU I am aware of more top EU-born tech companies relocating their offices/R&D to the US than vice versa.
> but we can shape policy to prevent "corporations can do whatever they want" yet again.
I fully agree. But again, this will work if all major nations regulate AI equally, otherwise, AI corporations will move where they have more freedom.
We call tax subsidies "tax incentives" for a reason. You subsidize high-fructose corn syrup, you incentivize society to include cheap oils in their food.
>the incentive today in a global competitive world economy, is to make more money than your economic rivals
On a domestic level this is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how cheaply China makes corn syrup if there's still a cost of importing it into your country. And if it's still a problem, you add tariffs for more (dis)incentive. That was the original way they were supposed to be implemented, not as this massive general tax on doing any business with a country.
And if it's still a problem despite that, direct regulations and bans from usage in market consumption products is a last option. We can , do, and have done all of these for hundreds of ingredients.
>Then US can be the survivor in this global race
I'm talking specifically about food here, you know? You were so focused on the obesity epidemic that I wanted to highlight the actual underpinnings of it instead of leave it at "the world got lazier and fatter, that's progress".
Clearly tariffs don't so much to software. AI needs different solutions.
>AI corporations will move where they have more freedom.
If AI is a societally damaging tool, then I see this as a win. Let them move, let the US economy correct back to rationalism again, and let's improve society instead of CEO's bottom lines.
I also do believe in the invisible hand. If big tech doesn't like potential US regulations, smaller startups will happily compete for that role in the country.
> I didn't want to go too off topic, but since this is such a sticking point I need to make a big note about the US: most of the world is more sedentary than 100 years ago. But the obesity epidemic is mostly US-cerntric.
Note: nearly all of the western hemisphere has obesity rates of >25%. Obesity is also high in the Middle East and Australia/NZ.
The US, with an obesity rate of >40%, is exceptionally obese, but it's not correct to say that obesity is mainly a US problem. It's quickly becoming a worldwide problem.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
runarberg · · focus · HN ↗
Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is. We don‘t have the research (yet) that AI is addictive and causes brain atrophy, but all the evidence is certainly pointing that way, the same way the evidence were pointing that way about tobacco in the 1950s. My only hope is that it doesn’t take us another 2 decades to prove the obvious.
PorciiVorbesc · · focus · HN ↗
It is, but why is that a problem? Moving from physical labor on the farm, factory or construction site to sedentary work and lifestyles would also atrophy our muscles so now we pursue physical activities we actually enjoy like gym and sports instead of hanging on to those dangerous and strenuous physical labor jobs just to stay in shape.
Similarly, you will use the AI to churn through the repetitive mundane tasks the AI can do, and then work your brain on the activities you actually enjoy.
Now if you choose to not exercise your brain and dumb yourself down the same way sedentary people don't exercise their bodies and get obese, then I guess that's on you, but we can't force the world to technologically regress just because some people are lazy and don't exercise, the same way we haven't forced construction workers to use pickaxes instead of machinery to tear up a road just to make sure they stay in shape and don't get too fat from sitting in their air conditioned excavators.
johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
1. As seen in this coountry, most people did not in fact "pursue physical activities they enjoyed". They got much less healthy and then the white collar machines started to churn their brains too. I do not see this ending any differently.
2. As many have noted (and has been known for decades pre-AI), getting more work done in a modern workplace does not reward you with more of your time back. It gives you more work and higher velocity plans. It may even end up compensating you less. There's only more benefit to this if you are your own boss, and so far a lot of those kinds of people are simply selling grifts, not truly disrupting the industry with newfound efficiencies.
>but we can't force the world to technologically regress just because some people are lazy and don't exercise
I didn't want to go too off topic, but since this is such a sticking point I need to make a big note about the US: most of the world is more sedentary than 100 years ago. But the obesity epidemic is mostly US-cerntric.
Which shows that, while we can't force a diet, we can definitely regulate incentives. But the US chose not to. We had all kinds of initatives to try and regulate what we put in our food and what to subsidize. We instead said corporations can do whatever we want and subsidized chemicals that are heavily taxes or banned in many other western countries.
I know that's a scary word for this community, but this analog of regulations can work here in AI as well. We don't need to ban AI (but I'm not opposed to it in primary schools), but we can shape policy to prevent "corporations can do whatever they want" yet again.
PorciiVorbesc · · focus · HN ↗
We can't regulate incentives. Unless we can somehow go back to how the world was in the 1960s, the incentive today in a global competitive world economy, is to make more money than your economic rivals, otherwise if you only regulate yourself but if they don't, then they will economically dominate you in the long run and turn your government into their puppet, your country into their playground and your people in their sweatshop workers. It's economic neo-colonilism 2.0 electric boogaloo.
Regulations only work if all players in the world adhere to them, but history has proven they don't. They expect everyone else to adhere to the rules and slow down so that they can get ahead of you.
> But the US chose not to
Smart. Then US can be the survivor in this global race. As someone in the EU I am aware of more top EU-born tech companies relocating their offices/R&D to the US than vice versa.
> but we can shape policy to prevent "corporations can do whatever they want" yet again.
I fully agree. But again, this will work if all major nations regulate AI equally, otherwise, AI corporations will move where they have more freedom.
johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
We call tax subsidies "tax incentives" for a reason. You subsidize high-fructose corn syrup, you incentivize society to include cheap oils in their food.
>the incentive today in a global competitive world economy, is to make more money than your economic rivals
On a domestic level this is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how cheaply China makes corn syrup if there's still a cost of importing it into your country. And if it's still a problem, you add tariffs for more (dis)incentive. That was the original way they were supposed to be implemented, not as this massive general tax on doing any business with a country.
And if it's still a problem despite that, direct regulations and bans from usage in market consumption products is a last option. We can , do, and have done all of these for hundreds of ingredients.
>Then US can be the survivor in this global race
I'm talking specifically about food here, you know? You were so focused on the obesity epidemic that I wanted to highlight the actual underpinnings of it instead of leave it at "the world got lazier and fatter, that's progress".
Clearly tariffs don't so much to software. AI needs different solutions.
>AI corporations will move where they have more freedom.
If AI is a societally damaging tool, then I see this as a win. Let them move, let the US economy correct back to rationalism again, and let's improve society instead of CEO's bottom lines.
I also do believe in the invisible hand. If big tech doesn't like potential US regulations, smaller startups will happily compete for that role in the country.
Windchaser · · focus · HN ↗
Note: nearly all of the western hemisphere has obesity rates of >25%. Obesity is also high in the Middle East and Australia/NZ.
The US, with an obesity rate of >40%, is exceptionally obese, but it's not correct to say that obesity is mainly a US problem. It's quickly becoming a worldwide problem.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_obesity#/media/File:Obesity_rate_(WHO,_2022).png" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_obesity#/media...