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Comment by DocTomoe | Hacker News Reader

I like to think of AI as cars:

You can go to the Walmart outside town on foot. And carry your stuff back. But it is much faster - and less exhaustive - to use the car. Which means you can spend more quality time on things you enjoy.

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There are detriments to this as well.

Exercise is good.

Being outside is good.

New experiences happen when you're on foot.

You see more things on foot.

Etc etc. We make our lives way too efficient and we atrophy basic skills. There are benefits to doing things manually. Hustle culture is quite bad for us.

Going by foot or bicycle is so healthy for us for a myriad of reasons.

While this is absolutely true, “walking to Walmart” is a terrible example due to the lack of pedestrian infrastructure and distances involved :)

It is actually a great example. If the only way to go to Walmart is by car, it’s a sign of bigger problems with urban planning. Car is a hotfix, that becomes an environmental and public health problem. We shouldn’t try to get rid of cars or individual homes, but there exist plenty of other, more healthier ways of living (and the most livable cities in the world focus on them, not on car-powered suburbia). Same with AI: if it becomes the only way for people to achieve result, it may point not to complexity necessitating the use of an advanced tool, but to problems with education, developer experience etc. AI becomes a hotfix for things that could be fixed with more traditional approaches and in more sustainable way.

I think in a way this is a good analogy, because it also includes the downside. If you always drive everywhere and do everything by car, your health will suffer due to lack of physical activity.

And you'll randomly kill people on your way there.

( Of course dear reader, YOU won't randomly kill people because you're a "good driver". )

Do you really think it's random? 30% of car accidents are from drunk drivers. Some large fraction of the remainder are a result of some other impairment or distraction. Don't drive on two hours of sleep and don't text behind the wheel and your chances of hitting someone go way down.

And it will be the same thing with AI. You want to ask it a question that you can verify the answer to, and then you actually verify it? No problem. But then you have corporations using it for "content moderation" and end up shadow banning actual human beings when it gets it wrong, and then those people commit suicide because they think no one cares about them when it's really that the AI wrongly pegs them as a bot and then heartlessly isolates them from every other living person.

You got it backwards, there wouldn't be a walmart outside of town if there were no cars, you'd walk to the local butcher/baker/whatever in <10min.

Where you’d be able to afford much less (not judging the trade-off, but that’s the primary reason why the US is headed in the opposite direction).

Not true, food shopping cost in Germany are way less then in the USA and in my dense neighborhood >20.000 people/km² I have 3 supermarkets (also baker, butcher, etc.) within 5 min bicycle ride.

I thought the US went into the opposite direction because of ruthless corporate profit optimization, zoning rules and city planning that fuels suburban sprawl?

Economies of scale do mean you can get a fluffy blanket imported from China at $5, less than the cost of a coffee at Starbucks, but for food necessities Walmart isn’t even that cheap or abundant compared to other chains.

> Where you’d be able to afford much less

When 75% of the west is overweight or obese, and when the leading causes of death are quite literally sloth and gluttony I think I'd take my chances... We're drown in insane quantity of low quality food and gadgets

Yes, but there are cars. That genie has already escaped its bottle.

And you pay small local stores with higher prices - which leads to more people, even in such small-towns with local butchers and bakers to get into their ride and go to the Lidl or Aldi on the outskirts.

Much like companies will realise LLM-using devs are more efficient by some random metric (do I hear: Story points and feature counts?), and will require LLM use from their employees.

That’s a nice analogy! Though one might argue that the walk in of itself would be good for your health (as evidenced by me putting on some weight after replacing my 30 minute daily walk to the office with working remotely).

One could also do the drive (use AI) and then get some fresh air after (personal projects, code golf, solving interesting problems), but I don’t thing everyone has the willpower for that or the desire to consider that.

Oh man. I really hope AI doesn't do as much harm to us as cars have.

At the price of a sluggish, atrophied body.

which is why people now pay $100 a month for a gym membership.

Save an hour a day to spend it in the gym. That's what I call a bargain.

That’s why we need an AI infrastructure like amsterdam, where you can bike everywhere. It’s faster and more convenient than a car for most trips and keeps everyone fit and happy.

this analogy is flawed to its core. The car doesn't make you forget how to walk, because you are still forced to walk in certain circumstances. Delegating learning to an llm will increase your reliance on it, and will eventually affect the way you're learning. A better analogy is the usage of GPS. If you use it continuously, you will be dependent on it to get to a place, and lose the capacity to find places on your own.

Car culture societies are as bad as smoking for general health.

The problem is that when it's for work, the company now knows you have access to a car, so sends you on 20x the trips. You have no more quality time, and your physical health suffers from lack of exercise.

Which is exactly why many jobs actively require a driver's license where I live.

The car analogy has that covered already. When Guttenberg was printing bibles, those things sold like warm bread rolls - these days, printing books is barely profitable. The trick with new disruptive tech always is to be an early adopter - not the long tail.

Yeah, I wasn't disputing the car analogy, more the benefits. If I'm using GPT to benefit myself (e.g. working on a side project), that's great and saves me time to do other things. If I'm using it to benefit my employer, I won't save any time, they'll fill it with other things to do, or expect me to be X times as productive in the same time.

In this context: Brain only is going on foot/bike Search Engine is by car LLM is direct delivery to the home with the clerk packing your groceries (with them making the choices for you)

And then you drive to the gym to run on a treadmill for two hours.

Enter "Coding Bootcamps" and "Hackathons"

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