AI is the kill switch on the human imagination | Hacker News Reader

AI is the kill switch on the human imagination

gavinchalcraft.substack.com

30 pointsdrcwpl11 comments

I grew up being told I was basically doomed. Our generation was inheriting 20% interest rates, resource scarcity, overpopulation, ozone holes, and nuclear war.

I'm tired of it. Somehow we always seem to find a way. It's time to be optimistic.

This makes sense. If one bad thing several decades ago wasn’t that bad, an unrelated bad thing cannot be bad in an entirely different way now

Or, the propensity to discount ingenuity and capability and to inflate the usefulness of doom based messaging, never really changes and I now find it ineffective and unmotivating.

And I will tell my kids (and you) that it's better to believe you can make positive changes than to try to bring about negative emotions in people all the time.

Don't tell me what to feel, show me what to do.

I like this reasoning. It is like being sat at the computer in March of 2020 and posting “These predictions of a bad thing happening can not be accurate — I should know, I lived through the 1973 oil crisis” in that “nothing bad ever happens” is more fantastical than saying something bad might happen.

We are quite literally living the aftermath of a Bad Thing that die-hard optimists were factually wrong about at the outset.

You're not listening. I never said bad things won't happen. I said we can manage it with good examples of policies and experimentation rather than fear mongering. How can anyone object to that?

Exactly. Negativity in headlines/attitudes gets higher engagement - whilst the challenges are real, the opportunities are also truly astounding. Distance yourself from the naysayers.

Focus on the positive, the possibilities and what you can control and do. It's always time to be optimistic.

while I appreciate the spirit of optimism here, I think it's equally important to recognize that blind trust in human resilience has often left us flat-footed. we've all seen time and again that things we once thought unthinkable: mass surveillance, algorithmic manipulation, ecological collapse, genocide, wars, all these things can and do happen, often because we assumed our better natures would prevail.

optimism without vigilance isn't hope, it's complacency. imagination doesn't just need space to flourish; it needs friction, scrutiny, and an honest reckoning with the systems that quietly shape or suppress it, and some prompt on an image/music/poetry LLM isn't going to do that for you.

Is AI adoption outside of our circle (and kids cheating on homework) really this substantial? My nontechnical friends don’t touch or or really care that much.

I would suggest that both optimism and realism are both important. Read the article, the author is suggesting that it is crucial to keep the human imagination active and not let AI take over.

> It's time to be optimistic.

Optimism is good for sanity and I try to trick myself into not being pessimistic at least but I honestly feel that's like burying the head in the sand. Those problems are still there aside from the ozone holes which have been fixed. In addition there are even more serious problems on the horizon. Having a kid makes me vacillate between optimism (for the sake of a sane family life) and horror our kids future.

No. I don’t think this is true.

The PC was always meant to augment human intelligence. Consider what we lost with “calculators” vs slide rules. And what slide rules took from mental math.

We have a new “partner” in design and creativity. It’s sad when something we did becomes automated and the economic impacts - but this is just another tool to learn and use.

Maybe we can finally stop with tired Hollywood remakes of things? Maybe we can shake ourselves out of writer’s block quicker?

We are a still a part of this story. It’s not a kill switch but it makes us do things differently?

At least I hope so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com