Hacker News Reader

Comment by nixpulvis | Hacker News Reader

The issue with AI is not its obvious value, it's our dependence on it. I worry what will happen to me when I am cut off for some reason.

Local models are going to be really important and hopefully computing costs don't make it too prohibitive.

View on HN

Hard agree. I've felt it already during outages or when I was traveling and didn't have internet on a flight, I couldn't function at the same level. I've been writing code for over 25 years, worked at the top big tech companies (still do) and it's remarkable how quickly I became dependent on AI.

Take a week or two off a quarter to do it manually. I did it a couple weeks ago and it took about a day or two to get back into the swing of it and knock the rust off, no pun since it was TS, YMMV, but I didn't find that it was that difficult. Even in languages I don't really write routinely, as long as you use the deterministic tools (lsp, linter, etc)

Now, is my code better than the AI's equivalent implementation? No shot. It's nicer for people, artisanal hand crafted, but... there's a reason I use AI.

It's not even that I'm slower at manual coding anymore, though I very well could be, it's that my expectation of my own progress has shifted. I'll be frustrated to only get a fraction of what I could have done.

Oh, fair enough, my goal was just to preserve "if Anthropic and OpenAI are having a bad day, and the local model on my laptop is too dumb to pour water out of a pot with the instructions on the bottom, how do I fix a bug", I accepted a long time ago that my productivity is going to be 0.1x if I have to go back.

If you're cut off for some reason, you won't code -- but if you're cut off from a power plant, you also won't code. We're reaching the end of scalability for human brains, so we're offloading it.

Sure, it means that selling intellectual labor is reaching the end of the line, and the value of learning will drop, but there's a lot more wealth that will be generated.

But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

It's my understanding that this same debate raged when writing became a thing. Many viewed it with suspicious, or derision, as memorization was the big intellectual thing. So writing and reading back to remember was terrible. It's true it was a dependence, but the value was too high. With reading and writing a person could work on and synthesize from a far wider range of concurrent materials than one could with just memorization and recitation. Yeah, it's lame cheating, but writing enables a lot and so it won out.

Yeah, exactly -- when we automated muscles in the industrial revolution, it was fine. Today, we're automating thinking. And, while there are people that still lift weights for fun, it's not needed professionally any more. I think we'll end up in the same place with thinking -- education is probably going to be a hobby, not a requirement.

This is the solution to the Fermi paradox. Civilization just automate themselves into useless meat sacks.

I bet education will be more important than ever. Prestige, status etc to distinguish yourself. "Taste is all that's left," as someone said here.

I suppose, thought I don't imagine it's going to be so necessary to learn things. Maybe education will be about being impressive in person?

Taste also feels easy enough to automate. I'm not sure why anyone thinks it's harder than anything else.

Big difference though, once you know how to read and write, nobody can take that away from you.

Nobody can take local models away from you, either

Is the local model that emits rebuses in the room with us now?

Yea, that's sorta my point. We're not, or at least I'm not to the point I have a local model as good as Opus yet though.

We're only a few years into this whole thing...

In any case you can say the exact same thing about reading. Take the book away and bam, you know nothing. A person who memorized the book is not dependent on an expensive, heavy thing like a book.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com