“Who cares about the immense harm AI is wrecking on our economy and society, it helps me create worthless throwaway software for myself and lets me be lazier at work.” - people on this forum
It wasn’t impressive when you wrote it by hand, it’s still not impressive when an AI does all the work for you.
Mocking the former is now culturally acceptable on HN, the latter not so much.
I have the opposite impression. In the past, I'd very often react "WTF who'd ever want to use it?" in my mind, whereas the comments were very kind and supportive.
Now, whenever someone submits their AI slop, they mostly hear some comments about this. The very fact that this whole thread is about bashing Simon speaks for itself. The HN community is split between those aggressively promoting it, those hating it, and the rest of us using it in one way or another, not yet sure about full-scale consequences for the future, and quite frankly powerless about it.
I think we can agree with this. The system that determines the fair distribution of productivity gains today will have to change entirely.
Would you rather feel justified in the knowledge that the Luddites were principally right and resist, or would you rather learn the lesson of their fate and adapt?
How would you even resist? Say the entire US population pushes back and gets protectionist regulations passed; there will always be hungry people just a few 100ms ping away willing to outcompete you using AI.
Really, at this point there are only two choices: change society to move beyond Capitalism, or adapt to the new economic reality. Either choice is valid, and I suspect eventually one will lead to the other, but there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.
Keep your poison. If everyone adapted this way, we would not have worker rights, and our children would still work in mines and factories for pennies.