The People Refusing to Use AI | Hacker News Reader

The People Refusing to Use AI

bbc.com

29 pointsafaxwebgirl10 comments

I'm 20 year full stack developer who also does a lot of sales. So I have somewhat of a unique experience in both the technical and human sides of AI use. I use AI quite liberally for development, research, and troubleshooting. But on the sales side of things, I don't like to use AI beyond auto-complete. As a technician, I see it as a great tool. When it comes to selling to other people, I agree with the sentiments in the article. Why would I want AI to replace me? It literally makes no sense. The purpose of me selling is to sell to people that want to buy from people. If AI can do my sales for me, then great, that is about equivalent to a shopping cart, and the product is self service. So what I mostly disagree with is the impersonation of people.

In the sales/growth/outbound world, everyone is tripping over themselves to setup AI emailers, dialers, chatters, impersonating people. But I don't think that will give them the edge they think. I'm betting on relationship sales for the future so I'm working on (https://humancrm.io) as my take. I think genuine human connections are going to increase in comparative advantage.

Counter points:

1. Scam artists are more successful when they prepare lures that _most_ people dont fall for because if they don't fall for it, they won't swallow it, which saves the scam artists time. If, like many, we think of sales as fancy scams, AI will definitely improve their scope and capabilities.

2. The odds of predicting the right teams to win a football match are typically quite low. But if you generate all the predictions and isolate those predictions, say weekly, to a good sized group of people over several weeks, you're bound to have atleast a couple of parties who observe that you are either completely correct or very largely correct.

3. Grifting seems to be winning on all fronts, witness donald trump.

We have lost a great deal of artistry in calligraphy, and no doubt a printing press uses more energy than a pencil, but we can't really stop Pandora's box one it's opened. Regardless of how people feel about it, it's here, it's cheaper, so here it will remain. As defeatist and cynical as it sounds, we might as well give in and try to be on the side making the money.

Ms Adams' story in the article reflects this, in some respect unfortunate, reality.

There will be a subset of people that will avoid the harmful parts of this technology. But I see the strengths of using it. I like the parts where it helps humans improve there creative/scientific endeavors, like using the technology to run certain parts of a game engine to enhance a in-game world, but I will always prefer a human touch.

In my profession I avoid using because I really don't need it. There are part of my business where I want to focus and parts I would want to delegate to this technology. For instance, im not a coder by trade so I could see using some crash analysis AI[0] to help me debug issues.

[0]: https://svnscha.de/posts/ai-meets-windbg/

I think articles like this don't garner a lot of attention, because why would anybody even bother to engage? If you don't see this unstoppable steam train for what it is, well, enjoy your screaming in the void.

We can all agree the current generation of AI lacks humanity, but we are not going to stop using it because of that. Would be nice if we can get the energy cost down though.

So where is this unstoppable train headed? To me and a lot of others, it looks like a future where the two available professions are "manager of chatbots" and "doing some boring physical task that's not (yet) profitable to automate."

So basically the current system? I say that mostly, but not entirely, jokingly. : )

Idk. Outsource thinking to bots - we become its senses - even if only it is only about interacting with other people. There are things about humanity and ourselves we don't know much about, and I doubt machines do either, because all its "knowledge" comes curated from humans. I guess we become only the knowledge creators for a while, or guide knowledge creation with machines, have machines put guard rails around the knowledge creation, so we don't chase dead-ends as often, take care of ourselves better, health and relationships wise. We can now dream bigger, address intractable problems like recycling trash 100%, because we have little agents with intelligence that do our thinking for us. May be one day, we can edit DNA to have our own little bees with programmed intelligence flying around, pollinating flowers in the winter, making the earth truly human serving (and any animals we like - don't hate me, that's humanity as it acts). May be then we reach for the stars and go on doing more stuff. Its the beginning of infinity, dammit ;)

> We can all agree the current generation of AI lacks humanity

And testability. Is the AI validated ?

Generative AI taking off (especially LLMs) imo is a symptom of how full of bullshit jobs western economies have become. Nothing of value is created, we’re just “scamming” each other over and over and calling it GDP growth.

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