The problem with AI is that it allows the wealthy to access skill, while not allowing the skilled to access wealth.

It's just another way for the rich and powerful to control access to the entire world. If we continue down this path the end result will be a world like that depicted in Elysium starring Matt Damon.

I recommend reading Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks. One of the themes overarching the whole story (or at least part of it?) is basically your post:

A famous composer is creating a concert for an important event. The "AI" (AKA a mind that would be offended to be called an AI) that controls the habitat he lives in could effortlessly compose a similar piece of music in seconds that would be technically more impressive; however, the audience doesn't just want to listen to music, they want connection too. When they listen the the famous composers music, they are also connecting with him and the hours he spent everyday for months and years creating it. The Mind, with all it's capacity and unknowable technology, cannot hope to replicate that.

That hollow feeling is the lost connection of solving a problem with another human. It's the same as asking someone for directions and they pull out their phone without bothering to actually think about it. When you ask someone if they know something and they "search it up for you". It's the death of community.

Totally get it!

We are remodeling a house and my husband keeps showing me AI'd options - different countertops, etc. I hate it. I gave in and had gemini draw a layout for a shed that we want to build and i feel sickening guilty for it.

There's too much emphasis on the intelligence; not enough on the artificial.

I've been thinking a lot about this too, and I've started thinking of it in terms of quality vs quantity, and how that relates to industrialization, commercialization and productivity vs handcrafting, art and joy, and how all these things are tied together into the things we value and the things we don't value.

AI, if it lives up to its promises (which I think it won't in the long run, but for the sake of argument let's assume it does), may produce many things in extraordinary quantity and sufficient quality to be commercially successful. This will likely become the standard way of acquiring most things we don't care deeply about, just like cheap plastic crap replaced wood and metal toys. However not all cheap plastic crap is actually crap. Some of it is actually good. Also plenty of wood and metal crap was made too. Some of it was very valuable. A lot of it was not. The value was dictated by the rarity and the complexity, but the value also represented how much we appreciated it despite or because of its quality.

There will always be things we do care deeply about even when it doesn't make sense to, and it frees us to make more conscious decisions about the the things we decide to care deeply about. It will not stop people from caring deeply about certain things, it will not stop enthusiasts from demanding better quality. The specific things people care about will almost inevitably change, becoming narrower in some cases and broader in others, or shifting directions entirely. Some things we used to have to care about the quality of, may no longer be so important to us. But with every closing door another one opens, we will find something new we very much do care about the quality of, and it may even be something better and more meaningful.

If you're not following my pretty abstract ideas let me try and make it more specific. Timekeeping used to be an incredibly complex and labor intensive task, an institution like a church would have an entire staff with various tools used to keep track constantly, and then ring bells to let everyone else what time it is. That work eventually became a machine, but still requiring significant effort to construct and maintain. Towns would build one clock tower to serve the entire town population at once. Only very rich people could afford their own. Each one was, large or small, by modern standards a hand-crafted work of art. Gradually, that changed. They became more common, cheaper in cost, and cheaper in quality too, but they were still significant pieces in a household, designed to be looking nice and placed in prime locations. Then they got replaced by more portable pocketwatches, and then wristwatches, and then digital alarm clocks and digital sports watches, each one cheaper and junkier than the last iteration and eventually now we're at the point most people just glance at the screen on their omnipresent smartphone that does a million different things all at once, few of those things being anything that anyone actually cares deeply about.

Lest you think this implies a depressing inevitability of decay and obsolesence that AI poses, yes I think there is potentially some of that ahead, and people often generalize that as "dying" and "loss". But if you continue the clocks analogy, there are still people who value clocks, and even make clocks, in all their sizes and forms. As antiques or replicas, as works of art, as pieces of nostalgia, as history, as things of beauty and practicality, as things of style and culture. From the outside it's easy to look at what's left of the clock industry as something small and sad and dying, but from inside it doesn't feel like that at all. It feels like joy and respect and appreciation and genuine enthusiasm. That is what we should be pursuing. The experts in their craft still have jobs, they might even enjoy their jobs more, crafting beautiful and skilled works of art to be sold to genuine enthusiasts that appreciate and value them instead of pumping out quantity and more quantity. There are lot of fewer of them, certainly, the experts and the enthusiasts and the clocks themselves, compared to the ones who used to be on every main street or high street and the market that used to include everyone and the clocks that used to be in every home and every pocket and every wrist. To capitalism, that means it's "dying", not worth investing in, belongs in the dustbin of history. To the people who choose to value it though, they don't (and shouldn't) give a toss what capitalism thinks. We value things as art because they are meaningful to us and they bring us joy.

A more modern and directly relevant example is video games. Gamers have, by and large, rejected all AI slop they can identify. This is partly framed as a moral choice yes, but it's also a practical one. AI games aren't likely to be as fun or valuable, and people are generally quite particular about the quality of the games they play, at least the ones without manipulative marketing, monetization and social aspects which is a whole separate can of worms. But no AI is ever going to create Baldur's Gate 3 (or 1 or 2 for that matter). People enjoy it for its quality, for the thought and effort that went into it. Even if AI did create the same thing, simply knowing that it was AI or that AI was used would devalue it. Because the value of such things is not purely utilitarian. Morals and quality do apply very significant premiums to value, especially in certain areas like entertainment.

When it comes to things like entertainment, and really everything, the things we choose to enjoy, we actually appreciate them for the effort involved, not the end result. The end result is merely a symbol of the effort. We appreciate our child's dance recital not because it rivals a broadway performance but because it is meaningful to us and we recognize our child's effort. And we likewise appreciate a broadway performance because of our ability to acknowledge the effort the performers and stage managers and lighting technicians and everyone else took to get it to that level. AI doesn't spark the same recognition of effort, because there is no effort. It is productive, but without effort it is not meaningful. It will not replace meaningful things, it will only replace things that are already pretty meaningless, that we are only still appreciating because we still recognize and appreciate the effort involved. When there is no more effort involved, we will not need to continue appreciating them, and many people will focus on appreciating more important things instead, and I want to believe that will include the education and the arts and the culture that actually matters to develop ourselves and our society and bring value our future, instead of the technology and tools that simply exist to make those things happen.

If you think high-quality software is something people won't continue to value far into the future, AI or not, then I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. You might have to pivot a little. You might have to learn how to take advantage of some AI to help with more of the scaffolding and templating and refactoring than you are used to doing, or you might have to move to a more discerning product category like entertainment software where AI is explicitly rejected, but I am confident that your expertise will probably remain quite valuable somewhere as long as you can remain flexible enough to find a new niche that fits your goals.

Change is scary, but it's not all bad. It's just change. The change is almost certainly going to happen, but it will be as good or as bad as we decide to make it. We're not doing a good job so far, but not all hope is lost. We all need to start to think about what we really value in life, and why, and the answer to what AI actually replaces will come from those collective decisions.

But you know what? I'm not interested in doing that. It's fucking boring to me - the same way I would find my professional life completely boring if I had an actual university student code monkey I could legally give orders to. I simply have no interest in doing that.

That is my exact sentiment. That's not a job I'm interested in. I'd have become management by now if that held any interest.

Also, at least so far, the LLMs really like to write very subtly wrong, weirdly over-complicated code in large quantities. So now you're wading through all that looking for bugs and wondering whether to (make the LLM) simplify it down to something that can be maintained (by the LLM).

It sounds dreary. Is it too late to switch to geophysics? They get to do fieldwork.

I'm an Art Lead for a major game publisher. I've been asked to review AI Tools and investigate how we could integrate them onto our pipeline.

I basically felt the same thing you described. I did my job but it felt completely empty. No sense of accomplishment. It was as if I had a mindless coworker. Finishing the project felt like eating empty calories. I was stuffed but malnourished.

There is value in the effort and challenge. There was recently a YouTube video about this, I forget by whom, that made the point really well. I'm as big into tech as anyone I feel. I love automating my home. I love the convenience of lights just coming on when you need them or fans or AC running exactly when the temperature dictates for efficiency.

I started self hosting and I stream my own music to everything. But I have found that my older Ford Focus having just the right song on my extremely large but definitely limited USB drive is so much more gratifying than streaming. Even over my own streams. I get why people are going back to CDs and cassettes. Well, kind of.

AI is also making the wrong things easy. I'm sure everyone has seen the meme about AI writing and making art when you want something to clean so you have time to make art. That's really it. We need some form of struggle to make us creative and skillful. Not to mention, the way the technology jumped onto the scene has prevented the more creative people from finding the best use cases for the technology as we go along. The purveyors of AI are just the most ambitious (greedy) not the most creative or talented. So what could be good implementation is making slow progress by the people creatively applying it. Meanwhile, an ambitious person is using AI to improve AI so they can corner pieces of the market which cuts off that real-world creativity.

There was a stand up bit I remember from many years ago, before AI was a thing. It was about how having a search engine in our pockets has ruined human experiences. If you ask a friend a question it's like, I don't know, but I will in five seconds.

It used to be if you didn't know something... You just didn't know. Like listening to music and suddenly thinking... where is Tom Petty from? And you would ask your friends and they didn't know. And you'd go through life just occasionally wondering. And years later one day you would see a stranger walking up the street in a Heartbreakers T-shirt. And you would introduce yourself and ask where is Tom Petty from? And they would say Florida. And after so many years of wondering , a wave of emotions would come over you. And you ended up marrying that person.

That's what smart phones have taken from us.

It was a very funny bit and I feel like AI is that, taken to extremes.

AI can't build that deck, though. And it can't have a beer on it when it's built.

It's very similar to what I've been feeling.

Casey Muratori said the same thing in a video some time ago (paraphrasing) -
I don't like using AI not because I hate the concept, but I don't want to remove the part that I want to do.
Some people get joy in looking at their ideas come to life regardless of the process. They are the ones excited about AI.
Programming for me is not about getting the end result, but the process of solving the problem. And people who like this part are the ones who don't like it that much. If I like playing drums, I'd want to play the drums and not get a drumming machine that may play 10x better than me.

Tangential question - Is it possible to feel some way for a period of time and realize what it is (or close to what it is) after it has been articulated by someone?

Or better yet, can the brain, with its subconscious bias, trick you into believing like you've been thinking the same thing after someone has said something that broadens your horizons?

I never realised this until I saw the video, and then felt guilty that I may be "stealing" the reason from someone because I liked what he said. Video link if anyone's interested - https://youtu.be/suZ2Gt6i8do .

the fact that's basically owned and run by nefarious surveillance capitalists in bed with fascists,

welcome to the team!

AI is fascism.

Thank you. I've never read a better description of the feelings I've had the past few years with LLM "booming".

So what's the point of anything really?

Once the challenge of life is gone, so will be the drive to push ones self. Ennui is poisonous.

This is why I refuse to drive an automatic transmission car: There are things that should be a bit difficult in one's life. They keep one invested in growing and meeting the challenges of the day..

Also, having seen videos of 11 and 12 year old kids driving stolen cars, uhhh.. yeah. No. Fuck that shit. I want NO part of anything that infantilizes one's skills and diminishes one's experience..

When you can learn to use a clutch you are in a vehicle that most children can't operate. Perfect.

I view AI as a similar infantilizing device. Thanks, no.. have a good day, I'll work this out on my own and have a legit sense of accomplishment when I'm done.

The actual problems with "AI" are like grifting, pseudo-science, war, surveillance/spying, prison, environmental degradation, extreme inequality, etc.

If your beef is that "AI" sucks your life for the profit of others, that's all of technology under capitalism.

Setting aside the technical discussion, one of the challenges you've expressed is how tools leveraging AI can do passable work without the one building it needing to do anything.

The fact is, humans are wired to work for that dopamine hit of "I want to do this" "I'm now working on this" "I've finally done this!" and if you skip that middle step and don't put enough work in you quite frankly end up feeling very deflated by the end result no matter how much the end result matches what you wanted at the beginning.

From what you wrote it sounds like you're passionate about technology and AI is sucking the wind out of your sails. Honestly whether or not AI is here to stay, I'd say find a hobby involving making something in the real world because that can be what keeps you happy. Let work be work, roll with whatever the flow is at work and in the world that you can't redirect, but focus on making you happy

Like, I've been enjoying working on my model railroad. Seeing the little trains of yore trundle on their little tracks makes my brain happy. But what really makes me enjoy it is all of the work that goes into it, carefully curving the flex track, trimming it to length, then re-working and refining it so the trains run better. Super elevating the curves so the trains do that wonderful little tilty thing as they go around the sharp curves and theoretically derail less. Deep diving into overly-complicated wiring purely because I can! Avoiding pre-manufactured solutions for ones I can manually customize to my specific needs. Hand cutting, gluing and painting plastic card to make buildings. It's putting hours of time into building something and making it truly yours which is a joy that no AI can ever take from you!

You know, as someone who despises LLMbeciles in almost every field they get applied (I think once the hype dies down and the companies pushing them collapse that useful things will come from them, just not in the near future), I find myself in the uncomfortable position of disagreeing with someone's reasons for hating AI.

And note: I'm not saying you shouldn't hate AI, nor am I saying that your reasons aren't good reasons for you. I'm saying that your reasons may be symptomatic of something else; that your reasons have been said before about other technologies we all now take for granted, and that in a couple of places you're being extraordinarily self-absorbed.

Let's go over a few of these.

That instantly deflated me. This guy really hadn’t done anything other than forward my question, and that elusive keyboard of mine was one question away in some search engine. I should have been excited to finally find out what it was, but somehow instead it felt hollow and totally pointless all of the sudden.

To me this is utterly bizarre. Instead of feeling excited that something you'd looked for for ages was found, you got upset at how it was found. I'm sorry, I can't relate to this at all. I'm not saying you didn't feel this way nor even that you should feel this way, but to me it looks like you value years of frustration and failure over getting the thing you were looking for. This is hair shirt territory for me and I suspect to most people. Some of your other things you mention (c.f. below) I have some comprehension of and even sympathy for. But this one just strikes me as a low-grade form of masochism.

To see why, dial this conversation back to pre-1998 when search engines REALLY sucked (just like now!) and before Google came in and completely, radically changed the landscape (your searches actually FOUND things before Google enshittified!).

You've been searching for your keyboard on Ask Jeeves and Yahoo and couldn't find a thing. Then Google pops up and someone Googles it for you and up pops your keyboard. Are you similarly upset? If not, why not?

Fast forward a few years, the same thing happened with my builder the other day: I asked him if he could build a boardwalk in the backyard, so my disabled wife could go get some fresh air safely. I started explaining what I wanted and sketching things on a piece of paper. At some point, he simply got on his feet, whipped out his cellphone, shot a picture of the backyard and asked ChatGPT to draw a boardwalk to my specifications. And in 2 seconds flat, it came up with a photo of the finished thing. And for the second time, it felt totally hollow, and the whole project felt meaningless. It was what I wanted for sure, but it’s now how I wanted it - if that makes any sense.

Here's where I think you're being extraordinarily self-absorbed. Sure, you may enjoy tinkering around with paper sketches, talking back and forth, and generally puttering around with manual processes. (I know I do. I mean I'm learning to hand-carve signature chops in a world where I can give a manufacturer an image file, pay under five bucks, and get back a custom signature chop made of any material suitable from wood to stone to brass that is done to perfection on a CNC. But I still prefer to learn carving them by hand with manual chisels.)

But here there's more than you in the loop. There's the builder. Whose livelihood this is. They're not going to want to sit there and futz around with your fetish for hand-drawing sketchy diagrams (pun intended) when there's a tool that gets exactly the information he needs to actually perform his livelihood in seconds. To the builder time is money, and you're in effect bemoaning that he doesn't want to waste time/money to suit your preferences.

Genuine, if pointed, question here: where do you draw this line? If you insisted on, say, measuring everything with a 30cm ruler and he pulled out a tape measure would you be just as upset? Or does that sound ridiculous to you? If the latter, do some simple substitution and...

You are basically demanding here that someone who doesn't share your fetish for hand-made stuff take time out from his livelihood to suit you despite them being entirely uninterested in it. This goes beyond having a preference for yourself and into the realm of inflicting that preference on others; and here I sharply disagree.

This then leads to these ruminations:

For instance, I’m a fan of 360 photography. I take pride in reworking the nadir in all my shots (don’t ask…) AI could clean it up in seconds and probably do a better job than me with Gimp. But what’s the point? I don’t want to do that! It’s tempting, but then I’d be totally disinterested in the photo after AI is done cleaning it up. So I do it myself.

Likewise, if I have a technical problem, I’ll look for the answer the traditional way, with a search engine. I know I could probably ask Google’s AI thing and it would probably give me the right answer rightaway, but then what would I have learnt? And more importantly, what’s the point of learning anything if the answer is always there? So I refrain. And yet it’s tempting…

AI makes everything pointless and bland, and it leaves me empty and not wanting for more.

Absolutely nobody is telling you to use AI for your own stuff. (Or, rather, nobody whose opinion is worth hearing is. LLMbecile pushers are not people whose opinions are worth hearing.) You can continue doing things the way you enjoy doing them. Like I enjoy carving signature chops by hand. Like I genuinely enjoy writing with a dip pen. Like I enjoy running tabletop RPGs in person instead of playing computer games or using online tabletops. And how I like designing RPG scenarios myself instead of asking an LLMbecile to make a half-assed one, but with lots and lots of fancy verbiage, for me.

You're coming across here like, say, a painter saying "I don't want to use a Kodak camera!" in 1888. Or like a photographer saying "I don't want to use a Land camera!" in 1948. Nobody says you have to, just like nobody told the painter they had to become a photographer or told a photographer they had to put up with crappy, low-quality snapshots. LLMbeciles don't change anything for you unless you want them to. (Or unless they're forced upon you by your employer, which is also relatable and something I'd agree with opposing.)

(Also I find it really funny that you're opposed to using LLMbeciles for search but not opposed to using search engines when in my lifetime there were people sneering at using search engines instead of doing proper research in libraries. "Google-U" was a real insult used by people who Googled stuff instead of doing "proper research".)

That’s my beef with AI. That’s what I realized today: it’s a bright future I’m utterly indifferent to, that holds zero excitement for me.

But ... it's not for you. Even if LLMbeciles weren't a hot mess of terrible ethics, fascist creators, IP theft, and hallucinations, even if they were actually as useful as the pushers claim they are, it's clear that LLMbeciles aren't for you. And I can respect that.

But ... I'm entirely unexcited by video games. Should I be writing long opinion pieces on why video games are bad because they don't suit what I want from games? I'm entirely unexcited by automobiles. Should I be writing long opinion pieces on why gearheads are missing the point of life?

I guess I'm trying to say that I find the nature of your objection really ... weird. In the "old man shakes fist at clouds" sort of way.

Have you considered just not using LLMbeciles instead of letting them drain the joy from your life and damaging your liver?

My biggest problem is that LLMs have mediocre quality at best. It's definitely a different world. But probably less different then you think.

Traditional forms, search engines, documentation all still have their place. Now it's just all that + LLMs. It's an additional tool but it doesn't replace the developer in the slightest

I started joking to a few friends that AI software development will turn me into a slop-jockey. I started using AI tools at work to keep my boss happy, and I could immediately feel my own indifference to the code. But then, when did I every really care about the code? Another CRUD service, another data processing pipeline, another web app that's a glorified redis cache... it's all the same anyway.

So I decided that work can force me to use whatever tools they want on their dime, but my time is for me. I started new hobbies where the goal is to learn by creating: Learn the fundamentals, work, identify a problem, research how people solve it, work again, etc. It's been slow, but I find I have stuck with these projects for much longer than I would have in the past. It feels like, if I'm going to spend all this time learning, I want something to show for it. To be able to take what I create, share it with people who care, and talk intelligently about what decisions I made and why.

A result of this is I'm (mostly) able to let go of my concern on where the profession is headed.

To play devils advocate, no one is forcing you to use AI for the things in life you want to do for fun. AI is a tool used to reduce the need for labor. You can still do your crosswords by hand, but let the machine do the ones you don't want to do.

But that's the point though. Progress makes things easier. That's the point of all civilization, to cooperatively make things easier.

When you eat an apple are you angry you didn't grow the apple? When you buy a car are you angry you didn't build the car yourself?

The problem is going to be how we handle this next step in human progress. Does it free us up to reach for even higher pursuits? Cancer hasn't been cured yet. There are still homeless people. There are still humans on this planet who die of starvation.

If the work that's required to keep our civilization humming has just been reduced by AI then we've freed up a ton of human resources to work towards making humanity even better. We now have humans whose output can be reallocated towards solving even bigger problems. Is that what's going to happen? Or will we descend i to a dystopia where all the potential of human civilization is squandered for profit?

This is dune, where they chose to not use computers at all and to force the human mind to develop.

The solution to this is to become interested in and occupied by something that AI can't do. Like shower tile.

This is a great write up, thanks for the efforts of sharing your thoughts - I've felt the same. I'd highly recommend reading The AI Mirror by Shannon Vallor; which does a great job of addressing the feeling from a virtue ethicist's perspective, and is just a solid intro to the whole AI machination.

Generally, I’m completely with you.

The questions this prompts for me …

Are there limits to what technologies can be aligned with a “healthy” human life and society?

I’m inclined to think so, which, if true, means that steering technological progress toward what’s “healthy” would totally make sense.

How adaptable are people over time/generations such that they can naively learn to tolerate poorer forms of society and technology? I’d say a lot, which makes the former question slippery. But, if true, suggests that maximising society should involve more experimentation and exploration over shorter inter-generational time lines …?

How privileged are we in this outlook of yours in being accustomed to controlling the solution and work from conception to materialisation? A work force of automation supervisors is maybe both viable and natural under capitalism (however dark)?