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AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You

388 points · 554 comments · dimonomid

  1. NalNezumi · · focus · HN ↗
    The problem imo is the slow deterioration of institutional knowledge that offloading the mental task of wisdom gathering to AI is causing.

    One interesting comparison is to the history of manufacturing. West/America decided one day that manufacturing would be cheaper to outsource and better (short term) profit was to be made by outsourcing it all to China. The institutional expertise started to deteriorate, to the point that America simply didn't even have the capacity, or expertise anymore to produce stuff (such as grill brush [1])

    I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing.

    "I'm coding 10x faster" "look at the output velocity per employee"

    "we are producing much more (in China)" "look at profit / number of (manufacturing) employers"

    Seems ok if you're American / Chinese but I'm struggling to understand how the rest can be OK with allowing institutional knowledge to deteriorate while having an active dependency to the former two. We already see this with the tech dependency towards USA and manufacturing competition from China.

    [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;3ZTGwcHQfLY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;3ZTGwcHQfLY

    1. jordanb · · focus · HN ↗
      &gt; I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing.

      Absolutely people were extremely dismissive to anyone saying that we&#x27;re losing the ability to make things in this country!

      There were all these theories like Comparative Advantage that people would trot out to point out that, if you don&#x27;t like outsourcing, not only are you ignorant and backwards you&#x27;re also probably racist.

      1. FuckButtons · · focus · HN ↗
        If there are not history books out there that try to discern the etiology of those decisions, there really should be.
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