Most of these idealistic pieces about AI seem to come from senior, established or wealthy people who aren't very exposed to the labor market. In that view, the question of AI and its transformation is almost philosophical like this piece.
It's more a question of survival if you're labor though. It's very transformative tech but it's coming at a time when the scales are heavily tilted in favor of capital over labor, the government is the most corrupt its ever been and AI is going to make that much more extreme. It doesn't matter how amazing the technology is if all the benefits are going to accrue to the same few people who already have everything and destroy everyone else's bargaining power.
- AI make a number of programmers redundant and their work is replaced with code of dubious quality and uncertain ability to maintain. The same is true for QAs and designers.
- young and old replace human friendship, and fostering their social skills, for conversations with their AI bot
- people avoid using their brain or practicing their skills in favour of asking some LLM
- people's work stolen, with the possibility of an AI subscription in return
- the laws on hacking and thief ignored
- a school of dead girls blamed on AI
The main benefit I've seen so far is that, since Google turned the web into a SEO hellhole, using AI to search is much nicer than wading through javascript-heavy, heavily-tracked, websites for a morsel of information. And there's some nice free translation and OCR tools now.
It may work well for them, but is it replicable? Or is it a lottery winner trying to reverse explain the win?
For a tool to be deemed useful, the benefits needs to be generally applicable while the cons needs to be accidental or be reduced enough to not be immediately harmful.
It's just one person's story, though a dramatic one. But I think it puts us back at square one: "sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad."
There would need to be a lot of studies to show the overall impact. The people dwelling on the harms of AI aren't doing that.
zaptheimpaler · · focus · HN ↗
It's more a question of survival if you're labor though. It's very transformative tech but it's coming at a time when the scales are heavily tilted in favor of capital over labor, the government is the most corrupt its ever been and AI is going to make that much more extreme. It doesn't matter how amazing the technology is if all the benefits are going to accrue to the same few people who already have everything and destroy everyone else's bargaining power.
tarkin2 · · focus · HN ↗
- AI make a number of programmers redundant and their work is replaced with code of dubious quality and uncertain ability to maintain. The same is true for QAs and designers.
- young and old replace human friendship, and fostering their social skills, for conversations with their AI bot
- people avoid using their brain or practicing their skills in favour of asking some LLM
- people's work stolen, with the possibility of an AI subscription in return
- the laws on hacking and thief ignored
- a school of dead girls blamed on AI
The main benefit I've seen so far is that, since Google turned the web into a SEO hellhole, using AI to search is much nicer than wading through javascript-heavy, heavily-tracked, websites for a morsel of information. And there's some nice free translation and OCR tools now.
xorcist · · focus · HN ↗
skybrian · · focus · HN ↗
It’s just one person’s story, but I thought this was pretty good:
<a href="https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/our-ai-midwife" rel="nofollow">https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/our-ai-midwife
skydhash · · focus · HN ↗
For a tool to be deemed useful, the benefits needs to be generally applicable while the cons needs to be accidental or be reduced enough to not be immediately harmful.
skybrian · · focus · HN ↗
There would need to be a lot of studies to show the overall impact. The people dwelling on the harms of AI aren't doing that.