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Comment by va1a | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed, as a student, that many college students - particularly those not in STEM/engineering fields - have an almost irrational hatred of AI. It's to the point where they'll mock you for using it, even when it provides such an insane productivity boost. I understand the disdain for trying to inject the concept everywhere, and like any new technology, it's apt to be used where it is unneeded, and mentioned when it is irrelevant.

But this luddite-like hatred needs also to be addressed. You can't turn your back on a helpful new technology just because it shakes things up. Students need to learn to use it more than constantly boo and ignore it. Especially those in non-STEM fields, where its usage might be more optional currently.

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> You can't turn your back on a helpful new technology just because it shakes things up

Watch them :)

Seriously though, this happens every time technology is introduced, for better or worse.

And while it's annoying, it's actually very helpful too, but you need to get further into your understanding than the emotion arguments people usually have front and center in their mind, because there is real criticism that has real value in there, it's just behind all the annoying knee-jerk reactions.

But again, this happens over and over, every time, seemingly in every community. Even HN has these soft spots, maybe not for AI but for example blockchain and cryptocurrencies are still subjects that somehow bring out these knee-jerk reactions to people (again, sometimes for good reasons, although the initial reaction masks the real cause).

Best we can do is listen and actually understand, instead of just brushing it away as "irrational hatred", because it always comes from somewhere, sometimes personal reasons, sometimes illogical reasons, but always because of something.

Something I've noticed as a general trend is that tech news has seemed to breed an optimistic fandom, that technology for the sake of technology must be good. It's exciting and dramatic, it's science fiction becoming reality. Concerns about needing to adapt around it are diminished even when it could be devastating (losing their job) to those involved, and it's unlikely much assistance will be given to "just" retrain.

Everybody pays the price for AI, but relatively few benefit.

Power is more expensive because data centres are using so much of it. Climate change is a tougher problem to solve because we're trying to reduce emissions while the energy requirements of big AI companies is eclipsing that of some nations. GHG emissions are going up when they need to go down. Computer hardware prices are through the roof. Fresh graduates, including those in STEM, face uncertainty in a job market that's trying to replace inexperienced, unspecialized, non-experts (i.e. them) with AI. Many of them know how to use AI just fine, but that doesn't necessarily make them employable. You may dream of being a AI-powered super-developer, but the path to that job may go through entry level positions that become harder to find each day.

Critics of AI are not being irrational. They're paying the costs but not reaping the benefits and they don't see a clear path to changing that. I suggest you look into the history of the luddites and the industrial revolution. Today, we see the industrial revolution as a tremendous boon, but it wasn't that for everyone initially. Multitudes spent their entire lives being shafted before the benefits started tricking down. The real kicker is that only some of the people who suffered were luddites. Many were just like you. You can love a fission bomb for the beauty of its physics, but you'll suffer exactly the same fate as an nuclear abolitionist if one is dropped over your city.

> energy requirements of big AI companies is eclipsing that of some nations

I've heard so many different takes on this. Where did you get this information?

https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from...

If AI were a country, it'd be 12th place in the world for energy consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

It's gone up considerably since last time I looked. Jeez.

I use AI a lot for development, but I am not sure why students should "embrace" the new technology made to take the job they are studying for.

> particularly those not in STEM/engineering fields - have an almost irrational hatred of AI. It's to the point where they'll mock you for using it, even when it provides such an insane productivity boost.

What "insane productivity boosts" are non-coding fields seeing from AI? If anything, coding is the most affected space, and even there I'm not sure I'd classify it as an "insane" productivity boost yet.

Maybe they see it eradicating their job prospects and being used to cheat and invalidate their hard studying by others who want an insane productivity boost? That’s not fair to them if others are cheating and they’re learning properly.

You do realize luddites were people made unemployable and impoverished by new technology? Calling them luddites just proves their point.

They weren't made unemployable nor impoverished. Many migrated to the cities and worked in the factories. Their complaints were more about the move from being an artisan to being manual labor.

"Yes, and", to see young children literally worked to death, getting crushed in machines.

They were against that. And people were impoverished, as can be seen in the drop of life expectancy until labour laws were enacted.

Edit: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36335796/

How did you come to believe that the industrial revolution in England caused a drop in life expectancy?

That paper appears to be yet another case of social scientists not understanding that correlation isn't causation. They demonstrate a trend in a noisy dataset of some very specific forms of injury and then declare it was the industrial revolution which caused it. But their analysis can't show that.

As usual for HN, you do not indicate which passages in the article you cite support your assertion, so I guess I have to do that work for you. "expectancy" occurs 3 times in the article. Correct me if I misunderstand, but I think none of the 3 support your assertion:

>The initial wave of poor health during the industrial revolution gave way to increased life expectancy and decreased levels of infectious disease during the later 19th century, linked to various public health measures.

>By the latter part of the nineteenth century, life expectancy and health improved, and the growing health disparity between rural and urban areas started to decrease.

>Our knowledge of the living conditions of the 19th century, particularly amongst the urban poor, has led to a strong assumption that a significant decline in health occurred at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. We must be cautious not to overly sentimentalise the medieval and early modern periods, when air pollution (primarily from woodsmoke and also sea coal) was common (Brimblecombe, 1976) and adult life expectancy was lower.

And many didn't, but either way I'm not surprised that students don't like the idea of becoming sweatshop workers.

They weren't even against it! They were the users of the new tech. They wanted regulation and a cut of the increased productivity. They were a nascent labour movement asking for things you and I take for granted. The responses at the time was, of course, violent reprisal.

i think 'shake things up' is a doing a lot of work to minimize the impact this tool will have for this demographic in particular. especially for non-STEM college students, so in theory students who read/write a lot and therefore are probably sick of reading a lot of mid-tier, averaging slop.

I find my hatred of AI to be incredibly rational, and the cultlike veneration of the “insane productivity boost” it gives you to be truly irrational (whether or not that boost actually exists).

Productivity as the be-all-and-end-all of personal aspiration exemplifies what is rotten in our industry and society at large: more for the sake of more, faster for the sake of better, no matter the consequences and with certainty no mind for the quality.

As a software engineer I am so deeply ashamed of how quick so many in the field have done a complete 180 on "productivity cannot be measured by lines of code" to wearing lines of code like a badge of honour.

It's similar to the hype around the "internet revolution", the "microservices revolution", all the "codeless" solutions over the decades...

Every new technology brings with it much promise, MUCH bigger hype, grave disappointment once the people who have been using it wrong fail, and then the new batch of winners. This happens any time there's a big leap in our tools, and AI is no exception.

Productivity is how we make things better. We have enough food for everyone because we've leveraged new tools to make the task more productive (the fact that the food is unevenly distributed is a separate problem).

It’s always funny to me to see people in tech, who have largely been employed to put other people out of work for the last 50 years, change their stance on tech as soon as it starts to affect them.

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