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Comment by sriram_malhar | Hacker News Reader

Everyone who writes enthusiastically about AI already has the benefit of having worked without AI. They have been schooled in the basics. Enough of us know about data structures, concurrency, networks, language design etc. from the ground up that the knowledge is passed on. I worry about the world that we will be living in when a whole generation has skipped learning the basics the hard way. Given the attendance rates at various educational institutions, I fear that day is already here.

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Right, I weirdly feel like we are entering an era where industry doesn’t invest that much in training the next generation - it feels like a rich getting richer scenario in all aspects of society

I think mathematics is feeling that concern with training acutely. The average math department pays its way by teaching in all forms and all levels: they don’t bring in the magnitude of grant money that concretely impacts a university’s budget. But they are already dealing with the consequences of that - that’s why universities that are cutting due to “low student demand” are going after math programs.

Herodotus wrote about finding people living in the ruins of a great city (Babylon) who had no idea who built it or how they built it.

The city of London was abandoned for about 400 years and fell into ruins after the people who built it left.

I think that anecdote is from the Anabasis by Xenophon and refers to Assyrian city of Nineveh. Babylon was still occupied during the time of Herodotus and was one of the biggest cities in the world at the time. (the book spends some time discussing Cyrus's conquest of Babylon).

I thought it was Xenophon. MSCopilot assured me it was Herodotus. The irony! ;0)

(I spent a few minutes checking, but couldn't find the original quote)

Given the context of the thread, what you have done here fits so perfectly.

We know that use of AI has a negative result for students: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/09/08/students-who-dont-use-ai-...

I think this has long been the norm without AI. Just look at a lot of politians cheating with their university tests, outsourcing the work that lands them their titles to low earning ghost writers. Why do you think so many incompetent people rise to powerful managerial positions to make terrible decisions without consequences. It's probably going on for much longer than we all think because it's not always easy to find hard evidence and we're all trained to treat circumstantial evidence. How many scandals were there of influential people buying their kids into elite colleges? AI is just accelerating what's been ongoing already.

I read your first sentence as:

> Everyone who writes enthusiastically about AI already has the benefit of not having worked with AI

... because if you really do, and you actaully a capable developer, you become much less enthusiastic.

Anyway, definitely agree with your point, and let us also remember that it is our human output and expression which LLMs are trained on.

Tech priests reciting blessings to the Omnisiah. Time to do the blessing of checking how much 5h usage I have left.

> I worry about the world that we will be living in when a whole generation has skipped learning the basics the hard way.

Have you been schooled in farming? Raising livestock? Milking cattle?

Does your ability to cook good food depend upon your ability to till soil and sow seeds?

I don't mean that in ass way but re: what other comments said:

> it feels like a rich getting richer scenario in all aspects of society

That's a problem with society, not technology.

Holding back technology won't fix society.

> Have you been schooled in farming? Raising livestock? Milking cattle? Does your ability to cook good food ...

Pushing that analogy, AI is the equivalent of automating everything from tilling, growing, all the way to cooking. It is as if the human is involved at the beginning in specifying what they want, and at the end, in plating up the food and consuming the product. The next generation will have no clue about the entire farm-to-table chain.

It's not there yet, but rapidly making it a reality.

Also, there is no one "tech". Different pieces of technology have different levels of effect on the world, and different timelines in which the world can come to terms with it. AI is the thermonuclear weapon introduced to a musket world ... it came upon us suddenly, and instantly flattened the talent/merit based economy. Now everyone has access to the same exoskeleton; the difference between muscles is not important.

The second huge difference between AI (and ordinary tech) is that a literal handful of people are in control of its economics. That kind of power breeds fascism.

> That's a problem with society, not technology.

Semantics. The tech directly enables the incredible power imbalance, and helps seize the means of consensus and debate and reporting. There is no incentive/mechanism left to fix society. An advanced society like the US is weaponized against vaccines, and social media and AI are to blame.

> That kind of power breeds fascism.

uhmmm and what have y'all been doing to prevent fascism and wealth inequality up until the point -before- AI became a thing?

What did you do about the mandatory government IDs required to access the internet?

What did you do to reduce police brutality and unaccountability in the USA?

AI is the ONE thing that COULD give the common peasantry a chance.

..maybe that's why so many fires are being stoked against it.. *thinking emoji*

You do realize that the same powers that have bred fascism and mandatory id requirement are hand in glove with the AI oligarchs, no? They gain with rampant use of AI disproportionately more than the peasant.

The peasantry stands no chance. Unless there is a French Revolution style uprising

> Unless there is a French Revolution style uprising

Yeah civilians are not going to win with weapons anymore. The imbalance there has been ridiculously disproportionate for decades.

But the common peon can use AI to look up laws and rights and other information and shit to see what we CAN still do.

USE it before they take that away too.

You can look up laws all night long. Check out all the laws broken by Potus, ICE (just to name a few) on a daily basis.

The peasantry is not on the side that enforces the law. AI is. AI is a force multiplier. The more force you have, the more multiples of it you en up with. Flock uses AI to do surveillance at scale. Every cloud service has NSA backdoors.

So we stop AI, uninvent it,

what then?

We go back to how it was before AI

And everyone will have a better life?

Let's hear your plan

It isn't just AI. I would like a world without the poison of social media, without guns & bombs, without dangerous chemicals. Yes, in many many ways we'd be better off. We are accelerating the destruction of our planet.

I don't have a better plan for humanity. I only have fear.

> a world without the poison of social media

No radio, no newspapers, no town criers, no gossip at the alewife's house?

> I don't have a better plan for humanity. I only have fear.

So your best move is to go around spreading that fear without offering ways to fix shit or inspiring anyone else to do so?

C'mon, you know better than to invoke a slippery slope.

My best move is to influence the people I care about to reduce dependence on these things and seek happiness in non-tech things (where tech is defined as those controlled by corporations), from community, live life from first principles. You are forcing me to answer a strange binary ... propose a fix for the world at large, or let me continue with all this shit. The world isn't as black and white.

Anyway, I'm done with this thread.

I would like to recommend, to both of you, Sarah Wilson’s I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World. I am heartened that both of you are still trying to find solutions. -https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/241715900

I haven't been schooled in farming, but my understanding of food has greatly increased since we started growing our own vegetables.

Yes, but that still has little bearing on actual cooking skills, no?

Knowing how to go from whatever is fresh today in the garden to a meal is a cooking skill, yes. And how to preserve gluts of fruit, also a skill.

I mean, if I grow my garden and just provide you with the vegetables,

does that affect your cooking skills in any way?

In fact, if you divide your time between growing your own produce AND honing your cooking, both of those skills may suffer

compared to devoting your time to just focusing on one ability.

Otherwise if you try to do everything you'll never be as good as a full-time farmer or a full-time chef.

or how about another analogy:

Say one day your idea for a dish requires softer or sweeter carrots, etc, but oops you spent the last season only growing crunchier and mellower carrots, what're you gonna do now? With external suppliers you always have a wider choice of ingredients better suited to the end product you want at any given time.

Constraints are a good thing. I'll get creative with what I have, instead of having to rely on a supply chain that makes everything available to everybody all the time. I don't have to have apples grown on the other side of the planet.

Some people are schooled in farming. Farming is not some kind of lost knowledge people dont practice anymore.

>Have you been schooled in farming? Raising livestock? Milking cattle?

No! And good thing I'm not a farmer!

>Have you been schooled in farming? Raising livestock? Milking cattle?

You're equating life skills to professional skills. I was not taught to milk a cow, but my milk comes from someone who was. The topic is whether software engineers in a professional context learned certain things about software.

> my milk comes from someone who was.

Your milk likely comes from an automated milker machine..

The tooling for industrial farming is reliable on the scale of millions though, and the same for any other innovation that has replaced older ways of working. AI is in a weird place because it is not 100% reliable, and we do not know if it ever will be, but we also do not know if it will eventually good enough to where we are irrelevant.

If tractors plowed reliably 95% of the time, but unless carefully monitored the other 5% of the time they would blow a big hole in the ground, it would be difficult to abandon your shovel entirely.

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