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Comment by bluegatty | Hacker News Reader

Yes, exactly, it's 'us' not the AI, which is great.

Why on earth would we ever remotely compare a 'tool' to 'a software engineer' ?

The 'great delusion' is not that 'AI can't code' - because obviously it can, and very well.

The problem is the 'anthropomorphism' and all this AGI nonsense.

If we called it 'Stochastic Mechanisms' and did not 'personalize' our prompts, refer to them as 'chat' or give them 'personalities' but remained in the domain of 'Stochastic Language CLI' ... then our metaphors would pbably not cloud our judgments.

Let the philosophers argue about AGI.

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Because the alternative would've been telling everyone "here's the Stochastic Machine. The more what you write looks like the sources we blatantly stol- I mean, trained from, the closer it gets to output working code". And we're not ready to admit we don't want to know how the sausage is made.

By anthropomorphizing it, we give it some sort of authorship, which clears our collective conscience from what's really happening.

The saner philosophers don’t need to argue about AGI because we’re absolutely nowhere near it.

Please give a well defined and agreed upon definition of AGI.

For all I know you're the same guy that says we don't need to talk about nuclear weapons in 1937 because we're nowhere near them.

You are a tool. You're a human resource, from the perspective of the organization. That pushes buttons on bunch of other tools. That's why you compare it.

Edit: I don't mean tool as a perjoritive.

I don't know why you are getting downvoted. Perhaps because people don't like the sentiment. But its true, people are hired as tools to write programs.

Both people and AI make mistakes. Perhaps the AI makes more, a lot more, but its so fast, and works around the clock, and has no ego, there is a chance that the benefits outweigh the costs.

I think the irony is that the perception of being called a tool as an insult, is exactly your meaning of it.

There are innumerable other software and process technologies that we use - and never before have we compared them to 'Engineers'.

The 'tool of the system' analogy is not an unreasonable point of discussion but it does not help us in this scenario.

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