Resist "AI"
ronjeffries.com
ronjeffries.com
For the pet projects, it’s not really a big deal. I’m the only user, and I as the user don’t care how it works under the hood.
Work is a different story. I have never felt more disconnected from my work than in the last 6-8 months. It takes a huge mental toll to read into our code and figure stuff out, almost like I just got hired and I’m working on new code for the first time. I’m asked to read “specs” written by LLMs that are unintelligible and I find my brain disconnecting immediately. Tickets, also written by LLMs pose the same problem.
I’m asking teammates questions because I want their answer and I’m told to just ask Claude.
None of this feels good, it may be where the industry is heading but as a professional it feels wrong.
PRs review more quickly when you have human written spec diffs to orient you and guide (or skip) the code review.
a danger to avoid is writing specs which are basically just really bad code (prose is terrible code). you can work towards patterns to avoid this pitfall.
also, dont coflate spec with plan. spec is durable decisions. plan is execution to turn decisions into code. plan is disposable, dont check it in.
either way, find the human layer and dont use LLMs there. make all the important decisions in the spec, delegate the other decisions to the LLM.
i believe this is the new craft.
that said, i expect a small but significant exodus from software. a lotta folks came for the "programming" that is now being outsourced. were becoming so tired, just absolutely burning out.
i hope we will eventually realize its time to go, instead of giving up our souls for a fucking paycheck.
If somebody told that humans are a form of creature which can forego their most important and powerful capabilities just for convenience, I'd call the person saying that batshit insane, but here we are...
I have no more words for this.
also, take some fucking pride in your work.
Then if people send you slop you can either point them to the guidelines or, if they don't stop, report them for violating workplace rules and make them suffer.
Code reviews come back with a ream of issues that I just want to scream "I don't give a fuck".
Pre-LLM no-one would have cared that if another class was configured differently ( it isn't ) and called the new class in a different way ( it doesn't ), that you'd in some race-condition occasionally leak a resource, but only on shutdown when the program is about to terminate anyway.
That's the kind of issue that claude loves to find and write up in a code review with the exact same verbiage and write up style as if it had just found a naive SQL injection from string concatenation.
Prior to LLMs I doubt anyone would even have spotted the first issue, let alone bothered to write it up.
But instead it's another round of review, another round of trying to decipher the LLM's comments to discover whether it's a meaningful problem or a nothingburger.
And it's all so tiring.
Copyright exists to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Not to enrich artists or scientists.
Ai is progress. Further, the works it creates are fully transformative. It isn't just spitting out Harry Potter verbatim, it's making new things from it.
To me, this argument is like staying that if you read Winnie The Pooh as a child then Milne owns your artistic output for life, because one of your many influences might have been his work. It just seems obvious at face value.
Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences?
Whatever it started out as (and I have my doubts it was ever a tool to help artists), it's now primarily a tool corporations use to milk creativity for profit and squash it where it might interfere with that profit.
No, but that needs new laws. Not an abuse of the old ones justified under the thinnest of pretenses.
I don't think that folks stop to consider what bending copyright law into these weird shapes to meet their ends will do to other aspects of copyright.
For example, sampling in music. How is that different from AI generated music? If anything AI uses LESS of any individual song. You can't just say "no derivative works." That would fully halt progress on many fronts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)#Legal_and_eth...
We reached that point with humans long ago. There's nothing new under the sun. Only remixes of dead peoples greatest hits. The pentatonic scale, for example, was not invented by the people who use it.
Science and art would have to start over from scratch if you expect things to all be genuinely new from first principles.
> who will make it if it means it's going to be consumed by data centers immediately
People who enjoy making it.
The demand for paintings did not disappear when photography was invented. Though many Luddites claimed it would. There were even those who wanted cameras outlawed to protect the artists livelihoods. Do you think we should have listened to those people?
Is this situation different from that one?
Copyright squarely exists so that authors of can get paid.
Patents exist so that the secrets behind inventions are revealed in exchange for a limited time protection, promoting collaboration and progress.
"The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
It's about promoting science and art, not "paying authors". Paying authors is of course the mechanism by which art is promoted.
Note that not all Arts are "useful" and not all Arts are "Writings".
Most art is not intended to be an open-ended product to be further collaborated upon and extended in order to drive progress.
Protections are purely so that the creators can get paid in some shape. There is still art if they don't get paid.
Copyright somewhat stifles that activity in art which consists of imitation; imitate too closely and you invite accusations of infringement.
A work of art being copyrighted is not what motivates and encourages activity revolving around copying that work's style. That's what it would mean for the work to promote Art as such: the work gets studied and it style becomes part of the artistic vocabulary. This will happen copyright or not; the only difference is the conditions for compensation.
That's not what the founding fathers said, and it's not what they wanted.
Madison thought that the two things were really the same saying: "The utility of this power will scarcely be questioned. The copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged, in Great Britain, to be a right of common law. The right to useful inventions seems with equal reason to belong to the inventors. The public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals. The States cannot separately make effectual provision for either of the cases..." — Federalist No. 43 (1788)
Whereas Jefferson, who not only helped draft the consititution, but was the first patent examiner, was deeply suspicious of them and wanted a restriction on length directly spelled out at length in the constitution itself.
"I like it [the Constitution], as far as it goes; but I should have been for going further. For instance, the following alterations and additions would have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding — years, but for no longer term, and for no other purpose." — Letter to James Madison (August 1789)
They all agreed that the purpose was progress for everyone, not one mans enrichment. They disagreed a bit about how best to accomplish that.
CMIIW
Because it was trained unethically we have a few moral obligations:
1) USE IT. Do not let only unethical people use a force amplifier on our collective efforts.
2) STOP PUBLISHING HUMAN GENERATED CONTENT. The more original human thought = the more they harvest our thinking.
3) Generate only known things in novel combinations. Do not provide new insights.
I could go on but strategically thinking AI is not going to be stopped in the way you are thinking. So you need to think a bit deeper on methods of optimizing the situation.
That said, I also think everyone who contributed content online deserves to be rewarded for their contribution, especially since OpenAI (which made the largest contribution) was a non-profit in the beginning. So there should be some kind of tax. Otherwise I agree, it's not ethical. It's not 'fair use' of copyrights.
Because none of what you said is true.
Copyright violation is not theft
From what I have seen AI doesn't understand the code. But even if you argue that it does understand the code it definitely doesn't understand the domain because it's only input channel is a stream of text and you didn't even type in a "full" text representation of the domain.
So you remain the only thing that can understand the whole system. If your competitor has no one (or no team) who can put together a full understanding of the system then you will have an advantage.
For a todo app that is fine. But for most projects your competitor will leave you in the dust with the speed at which they add features.
Same story, 25 years ago:
> But with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling us, we would have the new feature too.
Id wager that they would fare the same. The time saved on some tasks are outweighed by extra time spent on others. Everyone assumes that just because you can pump out more features, you're more successful.
workers that feel powerless and dont try to resist is great news for rulers who only serve to generate revenue.
Class warfare is nice to write about, but there's been 0 credible approaches in the last 2 years proposed. Do you think it will magically appear sometime? Are we generally prepared to stand with our less experienced colleagues? and immigrants?
That’s not to say that AI is all fine and dandy, I genuinely think frontier AI companies have deranged leadership.
Earth is two thirds water, and it rains. The water I drank this morning is million of years old. It will be around for millions more.
So, they pump some water out of the earth and it evaporates... It will come back down, and we aren't running out anytime soon.
Why do we care? Are they building these things in deserts? If so that's the problem. They should use closed loops if they want to build in the desert.
This your your typical HN take, aka "I thought about a random problem I barely understand for 12 seconds and I think I figured it out better than domain experts"
The 1/3rd that choose to live in arid places where droughts are a concern should probably just pass laws that require closed loop cooling.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/16/climate/lake-powell-reser...
https://www.dw.com/en/romania-shuts-nuclear-plant-hungary-da...
https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/06/17/colorado-river-desa...
> Fully two thirds of earths inhabitants live near large bodies of water.
Most of these large bodies of water are salty, it's expensive as shit to desalinate it completely infeasible to pump it in land for agriculture and people
Either the entire world is stupid and has been for decades and you're a genius. Or your 5 minutes take on the subject is completely unrealistic and you're missing half of the story ?
2) You replied that it was saltwater and desalinating it was expensive.
3) I pointed out that saltwater evaporates fine. You seem to have assumed that cooling can only be done with freshwater for some reason.
4) You now seem to believe that I'm a simpleton who is suggesting that the people who live near large amounts of freshwater should also import salt water for some reason? Honestly I'm lost. They don't need to, they have fresh water which will also evaporate fine.
If water is scarce where you live, you live in a bad (and relatively rare) place that humans aren't meant to live. You should be talking to your representative to make sure data centers don't waste your imported water just because it's cheaper.
Everyone else will be fine.
That's ridiculous and untrue.
If you live in the desert, stop doing that... or get them to laws for your specific place in the world. Where I live we have something close to an infinite supply of fresh water.
Some people just live in places that aren't suitable for human life and survive only through technology. Those places need to have different laws about water.
For example, I shouldn't be forced to use a low flow showerhead when I'm 100 miles from 1.3 quadrillion gallons of fresh water. If you aren't next door to lake Michigan then maybe you should be.
Also, it's not 3% of 2/3. It's more like ~1% of 3% of 2/3. Most of the fresh water on earth is locked up in glaciers or trapped deep underground. You can absolutely lose surface water, too - when pipes leak, for instance. And that happens all the time because a lot of the water infrastructure is ancient. Where I live, there are still thousands of miles of Victorian-era pipes. These crack all the time. You don't just get that water back straight away when it next rains.
Where the heck does it go? Space? You're talking about the entire planet here. There's nowhere for it to be lost to, unless you're cracking it into hydrogen and oxygen or something.
> Because you're the only person on earth who matters, clearly.
As I said elsewhere in this third 2/3rds of humans live near large bodies of water.
Maybe if you live in a desert. I'm not going to. We don't all live in the same place, and different rules are necessary. I suspect that much of the talk about evaporative cooling comes from treating places where it is sensible to do as if they are places where it's not.
There is a lake not far from that it would take about 3 days to cross on foot at it's SHORTEST point. Walking the full length would take about TWO WEEKS, someone would probably die of dysentery along the way.
Water scarcity is a regional problem that's being passed off as a universal concern for all of human-kind. It isn't. Earth has water, lots of it. Some places are just crummy places for humans to live.
They obviously shouldn't be doing it like that, but since clean water is cheap and business in absence of reason optimizes for lowest costs that's exactly what they did.
> I do not come to you with clean hands. > I am not here to dictate morality
These two things contradict eachother.
> My primary focus here will be software development > Environmental Harm > Stanley Tucci
These three things also contradict eachother.
> If we lived in a post-scarcity
Maybe this is your real problem, and you're just confusing cause and effect.
> We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die
Hyperbole.
> Look up the “Eliza effect”. Even the weakest conceivable program like this was seductive. These new ones are masters of seduction.
Sounds like software development alright.
This person has a familiar name, I'm sure he is amazing at something. This blog is not the peak of his work.
EDIT:
> I quote “AI” to emphasize that these things are not intelligent.
I was recently discussing with someone who wanted to put all datacenters into AI datacenter basket, and inadvertently labeled all consolidated computing bad. That person, claiming otherwise was not knowing what they were talking about,
But while having nuances, AI datacenters and heavy AI usage is harmful to the world we live in, as a whole. We should come into terms with this and go from there.
1. Reducing/replacing/automating highly complex work is fundamentally a good thing, it might be the case that society is not ready for the consequences of it, those are two separate things. Concluding that millions of people will die, is simply hyperbole.
2. Saying that AI is not intelligent is at best a non-sequitur but more likely intended misrepresentation and goalpost moving
3. The environmental harm of AI, however significant, is ultimately public knowledge and 100% clear in the public discourse around the current implementation of AI. This says nothing about AI in the general sense, only how we produce it today. This is like preventing cars from becoming a thing because they produce CO2. Do you think the world would be better off if cars were never invented?
None of this is about the 'artistic properties of their words', it is precisely about the core content being objectionable.
I don't think saying that millions will die is a hyperbole. It might be communicated poorly, but having no ability to work in a world with worsening quality of life (via climate crisis and economic changes) is being pinched between a rock and a hard place. What these people gonna do? Photosynthesis? One of countries which is among the leaders of this technology believes that social governmental systems is communism. So, yeah, perfect.
> The environmental harm of AI, however significant, is ultimately public knowledge and 100% clear in the public discourse around the current implementation of AI.
Yet the people who own and hype this technology is applying the Tobacco/Soda Industry Playbook: Deny and publish studies saying otherwise.
This is not fair, because who has the gold, makes the rules to increase their profit even more.
> This is like preventing cars from becoming a thing because they produce CO2. Do you think the world would be better off without combustion engines?
My current stance is not undoing things to zero, however forcing AI development to be more environmentally conscious and start regulating its power and water use. This is possible by prescribing energy source mix ratios, closed loop water cooling, etc. etc.
Of course this will slow some progress and make it a bit more expensive for a while, but in the end it'll be way more environmentally friendly.
All discourse doesn't have to be on a duotone plane. We can discuss in a 3D space with infinitely more shades.
If unemployment leads to death, there are many more things wrong than just AI. Why get mad at AI instead of at capitalism. This is nonsensical.
> Tobacco/Soda Industry Playbook
Except both of those succeeded in destroying health for decades, whereas AI had like a 2 year run before all the datacenter madness came to light.
> My current stance is not undoing things to zero,
This does not at all answer my question, my question is about the past not the present. The author is arguing to resist AI, what if resisting cars had worked? This is my question.
Systems don't break instantly, but after many blows. There's already many more things are wrong. AI is a very potent accelerant in this case, not the sole problem.
> Why get mad at AI instead of at capitalism. This is nonsensical.
I'm not mad at AI, but how it's built, operated and for what end (i.e. capitalism). I believe I'm pretty consistent about this for quite some time (i.e. my comment history).
> whereas AI had like a 2 year run before all the datacenter madness came to light.
Being known is not a guaranteed precursor to change. It's one step closer to change, yes, but nothing is guaranteed because the supporting forces are too strong. We'll see how the discourse and reality will evolve. We're just starting.
> my question is about the past not the present. The author is arguing to resist AI, what if resisting cars had worked? This is my question.
My bad, misunderstood what you said. Maybe it didn't work in the distant past, but resisting cars in Paris worked, for example. Being adamant about Diesel cars' problems eradicated them from passenger sector and pushed them to the high-torque, special application, heavy haul niche.
Unfortunately, humans don't get motivated to make changes until they experience the proverbial near-death experience, and there's always suspicion about early alarmists, but at least maybe we can sow the seeds of awareness earlier this time and reduce the time to change, IDK.
But there's one thing I hate (and I don't use the word lightly): Being right early, being shot down by others with accusations of being stupid, and being right on the long run. This cycle is really wearing me down, and this is the third or fourth time I'm going through this about large world events.
The Anti's have been cranking up their submissions of this junk lately.
All of these arguments presuppose we're losing something that's not worth losing.
I want someone to start one square earlier and argue to me why that matters. I've read enough of these "your skills are atrophying!" arguments; I'm also making like 10x as much revenue as I did through a business that delights my clients. Why should I care about my "skills" if I'm still able to make money, pursue hobbies, and enjoy life?
I just don't think it's that serious.
For what it's worth: I went freelance right around the time that agents were starting to become extremely capable, and I've never enjoyed my work more. I'd believe the claim that my hands-on coding skills are atrophying to some degree, but I'm also developing other skills that have much higher leverage in my new setting.
It really depends on how you define "coding", right? Throughout my career coding meant many different things. In the beginning, coding was really Assembly. Then it became C. Then C++/OOP. Then Java/C# and managed memory languages. Then Python etc.
These languages aren't the same thing with different syntax. The details that matter in the act of "coding" changed dramatically. It really went from "bit thinking" in the assembly era to stitching open source libraries in the Python era. Many would excel in one paradigm but not the other.
Coding with AI requires a different set of skills. I see the proper command of AIs through prompts and human-made specs as hand coding as much as building line-by-line micro algorithms in Assembly.
I think the noise in this discussion comes from putting vibe coding and AI-assisted coding in the same bucket. I'd argue that pure vibe coding is perhaps the one thing that doesn't resemble traditional coding as much. But the AI coding approach where people gradually build applications through the accumulation of components and layers built with heavy AI assistance is hand coding.
I can see that relying on AI assistance for too long could atrophy the skill of manual line-by-line mental model transcription, but I never really cared too much for this skill. Once I have the right data structures and algorithms in my head, actually entering the if, else, class, struct, for, etc statements are a giant annoyance.
Imagine a Michelin chef who previously invented delicious menus but whose boss has declared he now can only serve microwaved Sysco food. The revenue for some reason hasn't decreased. Why should he care about his "skills" if he's still able to make money, pursue hobbies, and enjoy life? I think that should be obvious here.
For some reason HN readers love this sort of content, largely by periphery players who mostly think it gives them an angle for clicks. And, I mean, as someone who uses lots of AI to delight clients and stay competitive, you be you. It leaves more for me.
I had to google him to even figure out why he's relevant (his About Me on the linked site is literally "I’m Ron Jeffries, the same old one. This is my new site. It’s where all my new articles will go" very helpful smh.) Xtreme Programming? When was that last relevant, 20 years ago?
Our devs have been outright complaining about getting dumb, losing touch with the codebase and getting lost in weekly switching between models/agents that have been gushing as if from a firehose, but the management (read investors) knows better and there's a culture of self-censoring the opposition to AI among employees.
Additionally, when it comes to the software field, it will be a sure way of selecting yourself out of the work pool.
If, as an engineer, you rely completely on AI then you will be selected out of the work pool. Some engineers will still be needed. If I was interviewing them (I used to do a lot of this) then I will want the ones who understand the code. If they only use AI then it will quickly become clear that they don't understand it. Why would I hire them when another person can understand it?
It's a disappointingly un-thoughtful quip to see on HN so commonly. It's the kind of thing I would mostly expect to hear from non-technical people out in public spaces.
i'm ok with that
I have a suspicion that people who reject AI related stuff is just scared under the hood. They fight against AI because of the fear against loosing job, money, or control.
There were many manual jobs. Lets say carpenters. They had manually created things, often pieces of art. Now many things are soulless, created by factory output, and by robots. It is true that we lost some artistry. It is true that every line of code will not be a work of art. There is no going back though. Adapt.
Oh yes, buddy, those stupid people should better act out of love, not fear, right?
> There is no going back though. Adapt.
“He who would live must fight, and he who does not want to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has no right to exist.”
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925.
Oi. Discussion on this site gets more difficult each day. Instead of pointing out where you disagreed you just pulled out the most egregious appeal to authority and said, "oH yEaH?"
> I'm also making like 10x as much revenue as I did
I'd not even bother to reply to someone who has all the skin in the AI game to perceive every criticism of it as a personal attack on one's wealth.
Don't forget to turn all your revenues into real estate before the bubble explodes.
Yes, you've shown yourself quite ambivalent to any notion of truth. You'd just as soon call someone Hitler and be on with it rather than try to understand another human's perspective. Pat yourself on the back, friend.
It's as if all man-made change was placed in the same ballpark as tectonic movements and extinction events - as a blind force of nature.
Humans are given intelligence not only to construct things, but also not to construct things that better be not, FFS.
If Mao had said it, it would've been "absolutely communist", if Washington had said it, it would've been "absolutely Patriotic".
It's a spectacular bit of pride in oneself to try to silence someone's opinion because you found an abstractly-similar statement made by an evil man. Why probe the idea when you could just assign Hitler's evil intentions directly to them?
It's gross. It's tired. I wish people cared more to engage in good faith.
Sometimes, it will be fascism. "It's never fascism" is not a good heuristic.
That's what wartywhoa did to a commenter who was in no way suggesting a fascist view.
That's not worse faith, that's simply pointing out that aligning your ideological opponents with Hitler is intellectually dishonest.
In this you and I agree: "dismissing all criticism because it draws a parallel you don't like isn't reasonable."
If we actually agreed on the principle, you wouldn't be engaging in the behaviour.
I feel compelled to point out that Kagi does offer AI-backed answers if you want it to. Just pose your query with a question mark to trigger the AI response in addition to the usual search results. It is not ever the default or only answer, and I pray Kagi keeps it that way!
I use the AI option more often than I thought I would, usually for things that I don't consider controversial or complicated.
But I do think that for the atypical user that is "information-hungry," AIs are a massive productivity booster. I've probably asked ChatGPT 1,000 questions over the last 2 years that I otherwise would have needed to spend 15+ minutes researching. Prior to AI, I would have just... not spent the time looking them up.
The danger is just when you start using AI but otherwise continue doing exactly what you were doing before.
You mean letting AI write the code, but still trying to write the same code by hand?
Joke aside, this is still what I am struggling with. I don't really code anymore - not worth it, when I want something done, but I miss it.
I guess the analogy could be: with AI you should be doing more complex and more (quantity) programming than you did before. But don't quote me.
Programming is mostly exactly that. You gather want information you need to get the job done. What are the names of the API you call, what are good patterns for this kind of situation etc.
But your point still stands as in use of AI can make those skills detoriate. And regarding to coding, that you don't know anymore what is in your codebase, how it actually works. Can happen fast if you let AI run in auto mode.
> Prior to AI, I would have just... not spent the time looking them up.
You're putting yourself in the group of people who are 'information-hungry', but your own evidence suggests that's not the case.
Being curious about a lot of things doesn’t mean you’re willing to invest 15 minutes every time you have a question.
AI makes the cost of asking these questions functionally zero. Previously I’d ask maybe 1/10 of them on Reddit, get a smartass negative answer, if I get an answer at all. Now I have an assistant that answers an infinite number of questions on demand.
I suspect that a lot of AI-hostility from tech/nerdy people is because they don't have the ability to display their expertise as easily as they did on Stack Overflow/Reddit/etc. A huge percentage of comments on HN are still just people trying to display their knowledge. (And I'm very guilty of that as well.)
I'm rather tired, personally, of the HN trope of people saying that AI is bad for/mis-used by everyone except a carefully-defined group that consists of exactly them.
If you're curious now only with AI, I'd say that makes you less curious--"intellectually hungry"--than the people who were curious before, without AI. It's great that you feel you can be more curious now, but I wouldn't be so quick to declare yourself superior to others with no more evidence than that you use AI the same amount.
I'm seeing it at small scale around me. I view it as a Dunning Kruger enablement - AI gives confident answers and long-winded explanations on domains distinct from the person asking, making it hard to verify. The user of AI now feel they have replaced someone's advice. I see it in Technology at work (particularly in architecture) but also in non work things like plumbing, law, medicine. We're all doctors and physical therapists now, for example. Also we don't need psychologists, either. Everyone is obsolete. Just upload the MRI report to Claude and let it tell you what you should do.
When people talked about AI being a catastrophe to befall us, I thought people were picturing killer robots. What's happening instead is something else - the enablement of stupidity.
This does not seem like a honest framing of an experiment... Wouldn't that be to create a true trial to assess strengths and weaknesses, or to figure out in what ways AI is effective for your team as a tool?
The JetBrains one is particularly bad, in that it seems very clearly worse than their (excellent, arguably best-in-class) deterministic autocomplete.
Listening to developers complain about AI doing things to their life and the world at large when they have spent the past 30 years automating just about everyone else they could out of a job (Since this has been one of the primary uses of software) is ... something else. It sounds like a a a mix of hubris, arrogance, cognitive dissonance, ignorance, etc.
Only when it started to affect their world did any developers start to care, and even then nobody seems to ever stop and say "hey what were we doing the past 30 years, maybe we should think about this", it's instead "hey look at what these other people are doing with AI, someone should think about this".
It feels like, to paraphrase a movie quote - "Nobody gets to destroy jobs and the the world but us"
In fact, we already pretty much have proof of this: devs didn't care when software destroyed the journalism industry twenty years ago. Turns out that people ultimately only care when their only jobs are on the line.
I would care if even these machines could only write articles, and I cared when software destroyed multiple forms of media delivery.
I won't say it was all bad, unequivocally, but it made me sad and I tried to think of solutions.
Turns out, alas, that make people are willing to trade away freedom, independence, privacy, and a functioning culture to save a few bucks and get dopamine hits on demand.
But I think it's important for the quality of public discourse that we forward only the best, strongest arguments for any given position (whether I personally agree with that position or not). A weak argument gives unnecessary purchase to unscrupulous haters who might use that weaker argument as a low-grade "straw man" to dismiss the whole position.
So with that preamble, some constructive criticism (very well-intentioned):
> I am not exaggerating: We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die.
On this one you are, in fact, exaggerating (certainly with "millions," likely with "thousands" as well).
The overwhelming majority of people who lose their job for whatever reason (and there are many reasons, not just this one issue) fall back on a support network of their family and friends while they "get back on their feet" by pivoting to another job or form of employment (sometimes branching into entrepreneurship, for example).
The alternative to employment at whatever FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company someone was laid off from is not "death." It is typically "some, sometimes quite significant, discomfort." Granted "AI Layoffs" are starting to ripple out beyond FAANG, but the story is similar in other industries.
If "layoffs kill people" is the moral hill we choose to plant our flag on, then mustn't we also campaign with equal vociferousness against all the other causes of layoffs in general? Since to do otherwise is to sit by while those laid off allegedly die in droves of thousands or perhaps millions?
It also occurs to me that this framing ("AI causes layoffs") also gives incompetent and unaccountable executives a pass by pinning the actual harm done by irresponsible layoffs (which to be clear, is not none!) on "the AI" rather than on the leaders who are in the positions to actually decide what happens in their organizations.
I think the argument is much stronger if we talk about the aggregate cost to humanity being paid in terms of displacement, life disruption, and curtailed opportunity (especially for juniors). We should not make the "toxic escalationism" move of equivocating things we don't like with negligent homicide, even if it makes for a punchy one-liner.
Oh man how did we ever survive calculators.
Your response would make sense to me if I was making a case against AI for professional use based on "skill atrophy among professionals who use AI" or something like that (which is a case that I see some people making).
I'm not talking about that, though. This is not me saying, "Slide rule is good, TI-84 is bad; because effortful work has good effects on practitioners and effortless work has negative effects."
I'm talking about youth, adolescents, and young adults who are voluntarily foregoing the effortful mental exercise of reading, understanding, and writing as part of their primary and secondary education—the very effortful mental exercise that our education system exists to "inflict" upon them, for their own long-term good.
I'm talking about people getting into the workforce who don't know how to learn because they've gotten all passing grades while having a chatbot generate the outputs that would previously have indicated that learning was occurring.
Maybe it's the case that AI/LLM usage is the primary skillset needed to thrive in the job market of tomorrow. But I'm not convinced of that, yet.
Just to be clear I don't think there's any way to put the cat back in the bag w/r/t LLMs and education—I think the education system as a whole needs to reinvent itself to account for the existence of LLMs. But in the mean time, until that mammoth societal initiative has time to make progress, I worry that there are many, many kids who are being systematically failed by an education system that was very rapidly outmoded by new technology (not that it was bleeding edge either right before ChatGPT launched, but that's neither here nor there). And that position, which I hold, is one supporting leg of my larger more ambitious position that, "AI is currently, so far, doing net societal harm."
Excellent point. Thank you for writing such a cogent argument.
It is clear that the rich and powerful are making short-term decisions that are causing widespread and long-term harm. Decisions such as, AI-pilled investors demanding unsustainable productivity from companies, and CEOs in turn forcing employees to use agentic coding and laying the rest off.
Such decision-making is not new, of course, but LLM technology is helping grifters and con artists to turbo-charge it. Founders can raise money using cool demos that achieve the impossible. Investment analysts can back up their AI story with huge paper profits.
The result, as you summarized, is life and career displacement and missed opportunities for young people. It's just too abstract and diffuse of an impact to influence people with, and it also seems to be railing against the holy cow of Capitalism.
"Data centers bad!", or "AI is disrupting humanity and the end is nigh!" are much more punchy slogans.
But what concerns me is that authors of articles such as this feel no need to differentiate themselves from other anti-technology arguments in history.
A world without steam engines, cars, computers, printing presses.
The point isn't that the world would be objectively better in every case, but rather that the arguments of "anti-technology people" are frequently rational (and often don't even necessitate an elimination of the technology in question), and using their name as a cudgel as if they were cavemen is a low-quality rhetorical trope haunting all conversation about writing that is critical of AI.
It's also a distraction. If the topic is AI, then it's better to simply talk about the ups and downs of AI than the ups and downs of e.g. cars.
There have been many other thinking technologies and they ALL have been attacked in exactly the same way.
* Socrates attacked the invention of writing, arguing it would make people intellectually lazy.
* Abbot Johannes Trithemius argues in "In Praise of Scribes" in the 15th century that the Gutenberg machine would make people intellectually lazy.
* Lots of people in the 1960s attacked punch card computers, and automation in general (!), on the basis that it would make people intellectually lazy.
* Nicholas Carr attacks Google in a famous article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", on the basis that it would make people intellectually lazy.
And so on and so on and so on.
"That which has been is what will be, And there is nothing new under the sun."
It is because of this history that any argument such as the author makes, arguing that AI would make people intellectually lazy, must start already from the lamentation of the downfall of human intelligence from the days of Socrates, or must explain why this is different.
It is obviously not different.
There are three mental skills being offloaded onto AI:
1. Domain-specific skills
2. General intelligence (g)
3. Recall
Of these three, the danger with 1 is offloading them too early, before the AI is "good enough" to be better than human experts. This is a genuine concern and we should do things carefully. However, if the AI is good enough, there is no danger here.
Recall is the mental skill that all of these innovations have "hurt", but it can simply be trained explicitly and synthetically. We will certainly have to structure our societies more and more in the future to synthetically exercising recall (like we're now synthetically exercising our muscles), but if we do this, offloading recall at work is not a big issue.
As for general intelligence, this is the most harmless to offload, because, as far as I know from the literature, it cannot really be trained, and it does not really degrade either.
The way the transformers work, getting to the point 1 will probably never be possible - more likely that the capital will just say it is good-enough "in the name of profits" and legislate to protect AI companies against any litigation from AI made mistakes. To a certain extent it is happening already - and all the IP and Copyright theft for model training has been brushed aside already. Yes there are few odd lawsuits here and there but they will be inconsequential and soon forgotten.
Recall is already being massively affected. I see it in our teams at work and I am also affected myself to a point. I very much doubt there will be a massive restructure of societies to allow us to work our brains out - mental gyms. They do exist now, in various chess clubs and are not that popular - that this will become a norm is a wishful thinking, and anyway, we will be too busy fighting one another for the last few remaining jobs.
General Intelligence without Recall and those hard acquired Domain-specific skills means nothing really - just our bioware defaults.
2. I'm sure mental gyms will become common, although I'm not sure if chess is a very good mental gym. It may take a hundred years or so, though.
The argument usually isn't "I believe X will not happen," it's usually either "I believe X should not happen" or "I believe we should manage how X happens".
Why should they? Other "anti-tech" arguments include
- Concern about global warming/pollution
- Resistance to nuclear/chemical warfare
It's not just, or even primarily, that anti-tech arguments are the equivalent of 'cameras will steal souls'.
There is your problem. You're making a case against technology that you don't understand. You haven't fixed esoteric bugs using AI or created whole new applications with AI. You haven't seen AI building new functionality in minutes instead of days of manual labor, at even better code quality.
Replace the word "AI" with Television/radio/internet/railways and you see how ridiculous this blog is.
But we as individual consumers have more power than we think. We don't need to use these AI features and products. We've survived perfectly fine without AI. Made plenty of scientific discoveries and lead enriched lives without it.
The biggest "fuck you" to the pricks who pushed this on us would be if we collectively went "meh".
AI are here, is it going to demolish and (maybe) reconstruct the world as we know it, trying to avoid it it's just silly. There is no sane world where we can "stop AI", even if every single researcher were to do vanish tomorrow and the hardware and schematics magically gone, it would still only be a stopgap.
So...What are you trying to achieve?
Likewise, arguments that other countries will have it therefore we must have it, are specious. Some countries have nukes, we don't let every country have them, we certainly don't let citizens have them; some countries produce CP, we don't let citizens access it; some countries have millions of guns among citizens, we don't let the guns cross the border. All this is to say that it would not be infeasible to broadly ban AI in most contexts. Obviously this won't happen in the current political climate, but it's not a law of the universe that AI pervading daily life is inevitable.
Sure we can't stop the technology, but we _can_ stop the importance and money heaped into it.
At the same time, maybe I shouldn’t, and I sometimes find all the AI skeptic and even doomer discourse heartening.
We really messed up with the Internet. I’m an Xennial and I had a minor role in it but I was there and it feels like the Internet was “our project.” I was literally born with the PC, discovered BBSes as a tween and the pre web Internet as a teen.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the net is bad. I think it’s more positive than not (still). But my god the addiction and disinformation and brain rot and propaganda and child predators and you get the idea.
The addiction is the big one, the root of all evil. “Maximizing engagement” is destroying civilization. But I digress.
Back in the 90s, nobody talked about this. Well not nobody but maybe this one person pissing into the hurricane. Discourse on the net and computing in general was 99.99% breathlessly positive bordering on delusional utopian.
We didn’t see it coming.
Nobody was talking about how this could go off the rails and do horrible things. Well almost nobody. I guess dystopian cyberpunk nailed some of it but it was too much in the realm of fiction. It wasn’t part of the real world discourse which was all Mondo 2000 and early Wired and open source movement and PC industry optimism.
So ironically all the anti AI discourse makes me cautiously more optimistic about AI. We are talking about the risks, the downsides, the ways it could go majorly bad. Maybe we will notice if it does and correct. If we’d done that with the net, noticed that maybe addictionmaxxing apps and sites was going to work “too well” or that flattening the discourse to 140 characters would harm the collective mind, things might be a little better today.
Even if we go in with one eye a little open and correct a little bit, that could make a big difference. Could have with the net too.
AI companies are racing to build empires on products built on the whole of human writing, charging rent to access it, then leveraging their scale to improve the model.
the big data era was a gold rush for greed. the AI era is has upgraded to a warp engine for greed.
the harms and manipulation of social media took ages to enter the social discourse, and are just now turning into legal action.
AIs warp-engine speed guarantees greed will fuel warp-engine scale harm before society catches up, and before America's greedy ass politicians are cornered into trying to do something.
resist fucking greed. if you gotta use LLMs, at least don't pay an AI company.