Comment by educasean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by educasean | Hacker News Reader

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It took me a long time to master the pen tool in Photoshop. I don't mean that I spent a weekend and learned how it worked. I meant that out of all the graphic designers at the agency I was working for, I was the designer who had the most flawless pen-tool skills and thus was the envy of many. It is now an obsolete skill. You can segment anything instantly and the results are pristine. Thanks to technology one no longer needs to learn how to make the most form-fitting curves with the pen tool to be labeled a great graphic designer.

It's remarkable that reading and writing, once the guarded domain of elites and religious scribes, are now everyday skills for millions. Where once a handful of monks preserved knowledge with their specialized scribing skills, today anyone can record history, share ideas, and access the thoughts of centuries with a few keystrokes.

The wheel moves on and people adapt. Who knows what the "right side" of history will be, but I doubt we get there by suppressing advancements and guaranteeing job placements simply because you took out large loans to earn a degree and a license.

But what if the rate at which things change increases to the point that humans can't adapt in time? This has happened to other animals (coral has existed for millions of years and is now threatened by ocean acidification, any number of native species have been crowded out by the introduction of non-native ones, etc.).

Even humans have gotten shocks like this. Things like the Black Death created social and economic upheavals that lasted generations.

Now, these are all biological examples. They don't map cleanly to technogical advances, because human brains adapt much faster than immune systems that are constrained by their DNA. But the point is that complex systems can adapt and can seem to handle "anything," up until they can't.

I don't know enough about AI or LLM's to say if we're reaching an inflection point. But most major crises happen when enough people say that something can't happen, and then it happens. I also don't think that discouraging innovation is the solution. But I don't also want to pretend like "humans always adapt" is a rule and not a 300,000 year old blip on the timeline of life's existence.

Automating drudgery is a good thing. It frees us up to do more important things.

Automating thinking and self-expression is a lot more dangerous. We're not automating the calculation or the research, but the part where you add your soul to that information.

How is a pen tool in Photoshop equivalent to an AI that can perform your entire job at a lower cost remotely similar? There are levels to this, and I don't think the same old platitudes apply.

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