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Comment by sunir | Hacker News Reader

Why would there be a lack of original ideas? People who are born to code so to speak will do it. Information wants to be free as the saying goes. It only takes one time for an innovation for it to be to copied everywhere.

We don’t need the same volume of developers to have the same or faster speed of innovation.

And conversely if there is stagnation there is a capital opportunity to out compete it and so there will be a human desire to do the work.

Tl;Dr. People like doing stuff and achieving. They will continue to do stuff.

ps it’s too much to claim other people don’t experience creative ideas using AI. You don’t really know that’s true. It hasn’t been my experience as I have had the capability and capacity to complete ideas on my back burner for decades and move onto the next thing.

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That’s the big scary point at the crux of all of this - you’ve had decades without the tooling to develop instincts. Nobody knows whether it’s possible to develop instincts with the tooling or what those instincts will look like. Creativity takes a degree of skill to execute on and the concern is that we’re potentially graduating people to painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel before they’ve even learned to sketch.

At minimum, our current generation of leaders will have to get much better at managing resources and building people up. We have to up our games and build environments where the pursuit of deep understanding is permissible. Unfortunately with the current hiring issues, it’s totally understandable that young developers are scared to take time on tickets.

I can't repair my car, which used to be the hallmark of technical masculine skill in the era of Grease the musical, because mechanical maintenance is not primary in my lifetime. Nor do I have any idea how to manage a farm. I think the kids will be fine. On the other hand, I fear I will not survive once my Internet connection goes out.

That analogy brought another one to my mind: groceries.

We used to hunt and grow most of what we needed. For various reasons (good and bad) we are now completely removed from the whole process. That allowed us to prosper and evolve by focusing on other things. We took all of what we knew about growing/hunting, grouped it together with industrialization and abstracted it as "everything that happens before". It's a big shortcut - which is a big win for "other things" we may want to do.

AI is a lot like that. But the danger is that AI (or its dependencies - isn't Claude down this morning?) can disappear tomorrow, and then where does that leave us? It's as if all the animals and vegetation were controlled by OpenFoodstock.

I can't be the only one thinking we cannot let that happen.

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