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Comment by randusername | Hacker News Reader

> And I think that’s the biggest danger of AI. You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not.

Building technology to overcome relatable hardships and frictions is a worthy challenge full of meaning.

Using someone else's technology to erase frictions and hardships from your life can erode meaning.

On my worst days I am convinced programming and technological optimism is a theft of meaning; personal satisfaction at solving a human problem awkwardly mapped to technology, at the expense of users dating, socializing, or consuming with discomfort and therefore the possibility of growth and meaning.

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I agree with your overall sentiment, although maybe the article and this sentiment more generally are going a little bit overboard with the skepticism/negativity.

It is a little alarming the way people treat AI as another human relationship, yes.

But AI is also a pretty useful research partner and rubber duck for ideas so long as you know going into it that it’s going to have a bias toward agreeing with you.

This situation reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes comics that mock the idea of Calvin’s dad’s idea of building character.

For example, I was debating ECC memory and cheap used business workstation hardware for a homelab recently with an AI. It helped me pick a system out of some eBay listings and verified whether the model and Xeon processor SKU supported ECC.

When I went to buy the RAM, it actually caught a mistake where I thought a listing was for UDIMM when it was actually RDIMM.

It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store.

> It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store.

dealing with the consequences of my mistakes sounds like growth to me

And when a mistake is deadly? Should we remove all safety systems so we can deal with the consequences?

The number of mistakes you can make is infinite in comparison to the number of correct choices you can make. Since you don't have infinite lives and time there must be some manner of problem space reduction to ensure you get anything done.

Luckily for us humans evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just that for us. Modern technology has made it so you don't spend your entire life trying to get something to eat every waking moment of the day. This leads to some problems of your ideology of hardships lead to growth. Which hardships? Which growth? Should you go back to living in a cave like a mammal to get the full experience?

This is a good time to point out that slippery slope is a fallacy.

Saying, "Experiencing some friction is good for building character" is not equivalent to saying "We should demolish all technology and force babies to survive on their own in the woods."

That the extreme position is wrong does not strictly imply that the moderate position is too.

There being a more extreme position that is wrong, doesn't mean that a supposedly moderate position isn't extreme. See: Overton window.

This is the particular problem with deciding a position, it's all shades of grey.

200 years ago a good number of humans thought that owning other humans was a-ok. Today that's mostly not true. In 200 years it's likely the vast majority of humanity will look at eating meat and owning pets at the same level of horror. Which is the extreme position? Which is the moderate?

> evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just that

Magnitude pedantery incoming: 1 billion years is "only" about 10 trillion hours.

Thank goodness it was only one bacteria doing all that evolving!

Think of combined manpower. If you have 2 people working an 8 hour shift you've spent 16 hours.

/Pedantry crisis averted.

Oh good, that does make me rest easier. Though technically the units should be man-hours (or bacterium-hours?). Now this makes me wonder how many life-hours there have been...looks like ^40 'beings' over all time[0], and ^43 being-hours total.

Fun math!

[0]Crockford et al. (2023) estimate about 10^30 cells exist today, and between 10^39 and 10^40 cells have ever existed on Earth.

Yeah, but it would be more-or-less in parallel, spread over however many organisms

yep

Mistakes without a significant lesson or takeaway aren’t a useful avenue for growth.

I think it’s possible that this concept that AI is an easy shortcut is a form of gatekeeping.

We had the same reactions to StackOverflow and web search when those technologies came around. And there’s certainly partial truth to it. Maybe reading a full book really does make you more well-rounded than googling your answer, but sometimes blowing a lot of time searching an index in a physical book hoping to find the piece of knowledge you need is just spending time for sake of spending time.

The more attention you give a thing, the more it changes you. Significance is up to you.

Maybe you never learn to check your own details. Maybe that's ok.

Yes but what would they learn from their mistake?

"I should run my purchase decisions past an AI in the future."

Yes, but it's dumb to deliberately provoke a mistake that could be avoided, just to "build character"

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