What Happens When There's No Job to Learn On? | Hacker News Reader

What Happens When There's No Job to Learn On?

gideons.substack.com

12 pointspaulpauper7 comments

Outlier here. I'm retired and I have zero need for AI or even Siri in my more than full life full of the usual chores (way more in fhe foothills than in the suburbs I inhabited "forever") and hobbies, chief of which are piano and photography. I could let AI play music all day, but I wouldn't be engaging with the music. I could let AI create an infinite gallery of pictures, but I wouldn't be running outside in a sun shower to catch a fabulous double rainbow, fully engaged with nature (and needing only minor touch up to make the image match my feelings.)

I experience. I have agency. I co-create. I feel what a composer felt through my hands and ears. Absolutely nobody knew about the sun shower, but I felt it.

The proof that AI has already ruined life is that I sent that rainbow photo to a friend of some 40 years with lens data and it had full EXIF info attached, less location, which can be seen from only one place on earth. He asked me if it was real.

My philosophy is not that we seek meaning in life, but that we live to create meaning, as we write stories with our lives, and exerience the stories of others, stories that touch our knowledge (filtered, not a giant bag of dissociated bytes) and life experience, and as we process them with our minds and emotions.

To destroy meaning is to destroy life. Might as well be "living" in The Matrix. Someone else's idea of life.

Virtual steak.

> The proof that AI has already ruined life is that I sent that rainbow photo to a friend of some 40 years with lens data and it had full EXIF info attached, less location, which can be seen from only one place on earth. He asked me if it was real.

AI may have ruined his life, but it seems to have not ruined your's; it certainly hasn't ruined mine. This phenomena might be more unevenly distributed than we know.

> My philosophy is not that we seek meaning in life, but that we live to create meaning, as we write stories with our lives, and exerience the stories of others, stories that touch our knowledge (filtered, not a giant bag of dissociated bytes) and life experience, and as we process them with our minds and emotions.

If something can destroy that meaning-creating in a person without altering their way of life (as war alters lives), then it might be the case that the person's ability to create meaning was under-developed the whole time. It's somewhat related to consumerism and trend following; one makes so little meaning in one's life that an external, endless stream of vapid things feels meaningful. The current generation of AIs (and social media) seem to target that exact sort of person.

It will be worth paying attention when the AI companies crash and burn during the next recession. Our friends/families/co-workers who currently rely on those vapid streams might not take it well, and may need someone who can show them that it's not difficult to create meaning.

This is indeed my worry and I am sure others have similar experiences. I spend a lot of time thinking about a problem, designing solutions at different times and moods - and use the best of those. All that can be considered 'art' - for lack of a better term.

There is a project that I have spent years on, honing, refining, building, rebuilding etc. All of that I have seen reduced to a handful of prompts!

It was a bit disheartening - but I made peace with it because one is 'art' and another is 'science' (again for lack of a better term) - and both art and science have - and should have - a place where they co-exist and co-mingle.

It's literally the dawn of a new age - new age of thinking, new age of implementing, new age of building and so on.

Resistance is indeed futile / the genie is out of the bottle - but we should definitely have guardrails. And just like we have web and dark web, we will have Responsible / Ethical AI and Irresponsible / Ethical AI.

This is like asking where the next Mainframe COBOL programmers will come from, and the colleges don't teach it anymore. Only people my age, age 56, are left knowing DOS/VSE and COBOL from an IBM Mainframe. We aren't getting hired because we are too old or suffer from too many illnesses. No one wants to learn COBOL because it is outdated, but the Social Security check writing software is still in COBOL, and porting it to a modern language would be too hard and too expensive.

I know about 37 different programming languages, most of which are obsolete. So how can I learn if nobody wants to hire me?

You could checkout: https://cobolcowboys.com/ they might have some opportunities you might be interested in.

As for learning, I have always learnt new languages, environments in my own time and then having got some knowledge then together with domain knowledge found suitable contracts. When contracting your portfolio and network are critical resources.

The thing is, I'm so old that my former managers have died or retired. I don't have much of a network left. I'll check out COBOL Cowboys, thank you.

I find that I'm learning much more and much faster with AI. I have a tutor in my pocket 24/7. With AI, I can now learn in a day what would have taken me a week before. And the tutor will only get smarter, and better at teaching, and more knowledgable about a wider and wider range of subjects. If you're not learning now, then it's your fault - not AI's.

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