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Comment by ggoo | Hacker News Reader

I realize there is some “old man yells at clouds” in me, but I can't help pretty strongly agreeing with this post. So many advancements and productivity boosts happening around me but can’t stop asking myself - does anyone actually even want this?

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My whole life, I've always found myself excited about new technologies, especially growing up, and how they allowed us to solve real problems. I've always loved being on the cutting edge.

I'm not excited about what we call AI these days (LLMs). They are a useful tool, when used correctly, for certain tasks: summarizing, editing, searching, writing code. That's not bad, and even good. IDEs save a great deal of time for coders compared to a plain text editor. But IDEs don't threaten people's jobs or cause CEOs to say stupid shit like "we can just have the machines do the work, freeing the humans to explore their creative pursuits" (except no one is paying them to explore their hobbies).

Besides the above use case as a productivity-enhancement tool when used right, do they solve any real world problem? Are they making our lives better? Not really. They mostly threaten a bunch of people's jobs (who may find some other means to make a living but it's not looking very good).

It's not like AI has opened up some "new opportunity" for humans. It has opened up "new opportunity" for very large and wealthy companies to become even larger and wealthier. That's about it.

And honestly, even if it does make SWEs more productive or provide fun chatting entertainment for the masses, is it worth all the energy that it consumes (== emissions)? Did we conveniently forget about the looming global warming crisis just so we can close bug tickets faster?

The only application of AI I've been excited about is stuff like AlphaFold and similar where it seems to accelerate the pace of useful science by doing stuff that takes humans a very very long time to do.

I don't remember where I read this, there was someone making the argument that the whole marketing around AI is (like many tech innovations) based around its inevitability, but "we" should still have a word to say about whether we want it or not. Especially when the whole shtick is how profoundly it will modify society.

If you have a bit of time, I recommend the short story "The Seasons of the Ansarac" by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is about a society and its choice about how to deal with technological disruption.

https://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/seasons_of_ans...

(It's a little bit non-obvious, but there's a "Part 2" link at the bottom of the page which goes to the second half of the story.)

I am seeing from a dev perspective the benefit of using an LLM. I work with a person that has less years in experience than me but is somehow my superior (partly due to office politics) but also because they use GPT to tell them what to do. They're able to make something in whatever topic like opensearch, if it works job is done.

Probably the luddite in me to not see that GPT and Googling might as well be/is the same. Since my way to learn is Stack Overflow, a README/docs or a crash course video on YT. But you can just ask GPT, give me a function using this stack that does this and you have something that roughly works, fill in the holes.

I hear this phrase a lot "ChatGPT told me..."

I guess to bring it back to the topic, you could take the long way to learn like me eg. HTML from W3Schools then CSS, then JS, PHP, etc... or just use AI/vibe code.

I do think the average person sees this as a win. Your average person is not subscribing to an RSS feed for new recipes. For one thing, it's hard enough to find personal food blog / recipe websites. Most of the time when you look up a recipe, the first several results are sites littered with ads, and sometimes take too long to get to the point. Most AI does not have ads, (for now?) and is pretty good at getting straight to point. The average person is going to do whatever is most convenient, and I think most people will agree that AI agents are the more convenient option for certain things, including recipe ideas / lookups.

I am with you. For all the technological advancements "AI" provides us, I can't help but wonder what is the point?

From John Adams (1780):

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

For recipes specifically, yes. I am not much of a chef, and, when initially learning, I often used to search for a recipe based on a few ingredients I wanted to use. I was never looking for an expert's take on a crafted meal, I was exactly looking for something "that kind of resembles what you’re looking for, but without any of the credibility or soul". Frankly I'm amazed that recipes were used as the example in the article, but to each their own

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