timo.mihaljov.com
0.1x programmer
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Absolutely incredible how the knowledge-sharing people-connecting device has been carefully rendered into a blight on our lives, well done everyone.
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Haha, thanks! Do check out the talk, I actually do a deep dive into the tech behind ai, and why it is the dumbest technology known to mankind. www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPMq...
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I think we agree about the immediate effects, and it's the second-order effects where our views diverge and I veer into skepticism. I suspect that much of what we call low-value work isn't really wasted effort but actually builds the mental muscle we need to do the high-value work effectively.
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(I don't expect you to read these articles, but I included the links just in case you or someone else reading this wants to dive deeper into the arguments or simply to understand what the hell I am on about 😄)
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Although the above essay is about the use of generative AI in academia, if one subscribes to Naur's view of programming as theory building (as I do), its key points remain very relevant. In both cases the textual artifact is not as important as the experience and understanding behind it.
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I don't think they are very analogous technologies. A calculator automates a completely mechanical process that always produces the only correct answer, whereas generative AI replaces a fuzzy process during which we constantly recalibrate our conception of what correct even looks like.
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This would not a bad thing in the abstract. After all, cloud computing essentially did the same for infrastructure costs. But crucially the jury's still out for the long-term trade-offs. It's a bit early to praise sprinters' superior performance during the first 100 meters of a marathon.
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So far there's no evidence that these short-term gains have not come at the expense of long-term productivity. Perhaps AI tools will turn out not to be a fixed productivity multiplier but a way to optimize for a much shorter term than we ever could before.
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By accepting that you'll never be capital-g Good at more than a small handful of things, you accept that you have always been and always will be dependent on the countless people with different handfuls. Whereas faux-independence is defined by fear, interdependence gives rise to gratitude.
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Mundane things start to look like miracles when you learn how much effort has gone into them. Learning a bit of typography can transform a book from a container of words into a thing of beauty in itself. Learning to play an instrument can take a song from "I like it" to "how is this possible?!"
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The world becomes a different place once life finally manages to beat the "I bet I could do that" out of you. The more acutely you feel that "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne", the more awe you feel when you see other people do things that are out of your reach.
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This thread is getting much longer than I intended so I'll try to wrap it up with something positive.
That bitter pill? It's not just bitter -- it's bittersweet.
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From this cynical point of view the AI bubble makes complete sense. Anyone who has spent decades learning to write/paint/compose/code just to perform the role of an expert looks like a complete fool to someone who thinks they can just press a button and automate the performance with AI.
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In practice this manifests as a categorical dismissal of expertise. It's even worse than simply not valuing the skills that experts have. It's believing that they don't have any skills beyond knowing how to look and sound to play the part.
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Impostor syndrome -- the name for the fact that even objectively accomplished people may subjectively feel like impostors -- has been twisted into a hall-of-mirrors version of itself, a belief that even accomplished people really *are* just impostors, not skilled in their craft but at faking it.
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"Fake it till you make it" can be good advice for the right person at the right time, but with everyone scrambling to make it, the message seems to have gotten distorted into a folk wisdom of "faking it *is* making it."
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There are many ways in which we try to resolve the unbearable tension between the belief that we can (or should) be extraordinary and the fact that we are completely ordinary and can't be otherwise. They are all harmful in different ways, but here I want to focus on one of them.
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It's a very bitter pill to swallow for people raised with the well-meaning but ultimately harmful belief that we all have the potential to become whoever we want and do whatever we want. It becomes more bitter still if that belief turns into a sense of entitlement or even duty.
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The vast majority of us can (at best!) become experts in one or two fields during our lifetime and pretty good at a handful more, and even that takes a tremendous amount of effort, dedication, and the good fortune of ending up in circumstances favorable to our pursuits.
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Maybe I'm wrong and it turns out we can handwave all this complexity away and never have to actually understand anything again. I remain sceptical and will continue typing out my code the old-fashioned way, knowing what each character means and why it's there.