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Comment by IggleSniggle | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, you could make similar arguments for the typewriter, the printing press, or the wheel.

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Nope, there is a fundamental difference that people who point out this analogy ALWAYS fail to acknowledge: AI is a mechanism to replace people at work that is largely considered creative. Yes, AI may not be truly creative, but it does replace people doing jobs, and those people feel they are doing something creative.

The typewriter, the printing press, the wheel, never did anything of the sort.

And, you're also ignoring speed and scale: AI develops much faster and changes the world much faster than those inventions did.

Your argument is akin to arguing that driving at 200km/h is safe, simply because 20km/h is safe. The wheel was much safer because it changed the world at 20km/h. AI is like 1000km/h.

This feels like people getting spooked by autocomplete in editors.

We're pretty far from AI being able to properly, efficiently and effectively develop a full system that I believe before that will take my job, I'd probably be retired or something. If my feeling is wrong, I'm still sure some form of developer will be needed, even just to keep the AI running

I absolutely disagree regarding handwriting, and maybe also on maintaining your own typewriter. The task of producing the written document, and I don't just mean the thoughts conveyed, but each stroke of each letter, was a creative act that many enjoyed. Increasingly, there is only a very small subset of enthusiasts that are "serious" about writing by hand. Most "normal" people don't see the value in it, because if you're getting the idea across, who cares? But I'd wager if you talked to a monk who had spent their life slaving away in a too dark room making reproductions of books OR writing new accounts, and showed them the printing press, they would lament that the human joy of putting those thoughts to paper was in and of itself approaching the divine, and an important aspect of what makes us human.

Of course I don't think you need to go that far back; the main thing that differentiates pre and post printing press is that post printing press, the emphasis is increasingly more on the value of the idea, and less on the act of putting it down.

The first iPhone came out 2007. 17 years and less what it took a modern and connected society to just solve mobile communication.

This includes development of displays, chips, production, software (ios, android), apps etc.

AI is building upon this speed and only has software and specialized hardware and the AI we are currently building is already optimizing itself (copilot etc.).

And the output is not something 'new' which changes a few things like navigation, post service, banking but basically/potentially everything we do (including the physical world with robots).

If this is any indication, its very realistic to assume that the next 5-15 years will be very very interesting.

I agree with you, it's true. I guess I should have been more precise in saying that AI takes away a much greater proportion of creative work. But of course, horse driving, handwriting, and other such things still involved a level of creativity in them, which is why in turn I am against most technology, especially when its use is unrestricted and unmoderated.

I'm highly sympathetic to your perspective, but it would be hypocritical of me to entirely embrace it. Hitting the spacebar just gives me so much joy, the syncopated negative space of it that you don't get writing by hand, the power of typing "top" and getting a birdseye view of your system, that I can't really begrudge the next generation of computing enthusiasts getting that same joy of "simply typing an idea" and getting back a coherent informed response.

I personally lament the loss of the experience of using a computer that gives the same precision that you'd expect from a calculator, but if I'm being honest, that's been slowly degenerating even without the addition of AI.

Those are tools humans use to created output directly to speed up a process. The equivalent argument for AI would be if the typewriter wrote you a novel based on what you asked it to write, and then everyone else's typewriter might create the same/similar novel if it's averaging all of the same human data input. This leads to a cultural inbreeding of sorts since the data that went into it was curated to begin with.

The real defining thing to remember is that humans don't need AI, but AI needs human data.

Humans also need human data. You might be better than I, but at least for myself, I know that I am just a weighted pattern matcher with a some stochasticity mixed in.

I don't think the idea of painstakingly writing out a book, and then having a printing press propagate your book so that all can easily reproduce the idea in their own mind, is so very different.

I think this is why the real conversation here is about the lossiness of the data, where the "data" is conveying a fundamental idea. Put another way, human creativity is iterative, and the reason we accept "innovative" ideas is that we have a shared understanding of a body of work, a canon, and the real innovation is taking the canon and mixing it up with one new innovation.

I'm not even arguing that AI is net good or bad for humanity. Just that it really isn't so different than the printing press. And like the Bible was to the printing press, I think the dominant AI model will greatly shape human output for a very long time, as the new "canon" in an otherwise splintered society, for good and for bad.

Proprietary models, with funding and existing reach (like the Catholic Church when the Gutenberg press came along), will dominate the mental space. We already have Martin Luther's nailing creeds to the door of that church, though.

Still, writing by hand does still have special meaning, encoding additional information that is not conveyed by printing press. But then as now, that additional meaning is mostly only accessible to those closest to you, that have more shared experiences with you.

I'll accept that there's an additional distinction, though, since layers of communication will be imported and applied without understanding of their context; ideas replaced, filled in, rather than stripped. But let's be honest: every interpretation of a text was already distinct and uniquely an individual's own, albeit likely similar to those that shared an in-group.

AI upsets the balance between producers and consumers, but not in the way that it's easier for more people to be producers, but in this day in age, that there is so little time left to be a consumer when everyone you know can be such a prolific producer.

Edit: typewriters and printing presses also need human data

> Just that it really isn't so different than the printing press.

The part that makes the goals of the AI crowd an entirely different beast from things like the printing press is that the printing press doesn't think for anyone. It just lets people reproduce their own thoughts more widely.

The printing press lets people reproduce other people's thoughts more widely. As to reproducing your own thoughts more widely, this is why I was describing a cultural "canon" as being the foundation upon which new ideas can be built. In the AI world, the "new" idea is effectively just the prompt (and iterative direction); everything else is a remix of the canon. But pre-AI, in order for anyone to understand your new idea, you had to mix it into the existing canon as well.

Edit: to be abundantly clear, I'm not exactly hoping AI can do very well. It seems like it's going to excel at automating the parts of software development that I legitimately enjoy. I think that's also true for other creator-class jobs that it threatens.

Humans/life don't need data. Life survives off of experience and evolutionary pressures. Data is a watered-down/digitized form of experience meant as a replication of that experience, the same way you can hear/analyze music on your computer. It's just usually close enough that most people can't tell the difference. All of that was fed by human "data", which means AI as ultimately a copy of evolutionary pressures that it never went through.

Typewriter/printing presses are for faster propagation or execution. AI in the cultural sense is about replication, hence the Artificial Intelligence tag. Typewriters aren't attempting to replicate or substitute, they are tools like a hammer. They are designed to be operated by humans since they are analog in nature, like your keyboard. AI doesn't need a keyboard, it's operating off our end contributions directly. It cares about the final, digitized form of the novels we feed it, no how we made it or came up with it.

That is the key difference here. It is the same thing when someone creates something based on their own direct experiences versus someone who is simply copying something. It is why AI art for example is increasingly looking bizarre in my opinion: it's completely recycled/fake.

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