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Comment by encyclopedism | Hacker News Reader

If I can 'speak' for the OP:

> I keep trying to ride a bike but I keep falling off

I do not think this analogy is apt.

The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do.

The article is lamenting the disappearing of something meaningful for the OP. One can feel sad for this alone. It is not an equation to balance: X is gone but Y is now available. The lament stands alone. As the OP indicates with his 'pragmatism' we now collectively have little choice about the use of AI. The flood waters do not ask they take everyone in their path.

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I think the disagreement is over what exactly will be taken away. Certainly, like any technology that came before, AI will automate something. A programmer that finds joy in the raw act of coding- thinking of how to solve a problem and crafting the resulting logic line by line will indeed have something taken away by AI.

But there is a spectrum here. AI is a cruder, less fine-grained method of producing output. But it is a very powerful tool. Instead of "chiseling" the code line by line, it transforms relatively short prompts along with "context" into an imperfect, but much larger/fully formed product. The more you ask it to do in one go, usually the more imperfect it is. But the more precise your prompts, and the "better" your context, the more you can ask it to do while still hanging on to its "form" (always battling against the entropy of AI slop).

Incidentally, those "prompts" are the thinking. The point is to operate at the edge of LLM/machine competence. And as the LLMs become more capable, your vision can grow bigger.

I think if OP had said "I miss getting paid for (a particular type of) thinking hard" I would find it to be a lot more agreeable. But he's just saying he misses it in general. I think that's what I (and, from OP's summary, many other people) find confusing. Can't you still do it? AI is not physically preventing you from thinking hard.

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