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Comment by jdw64 | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the traits of people who feel a sense of loss about AI is that many of them value the bond that comes from discussion within their field. You could call it a sense of comradeship, or a shared sense of purpose.

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Old timey mining, or the more romantic eras of seafaring also provided more camaraderie than what modern jobs provide. There may be some longing for those more pure and valiant days, but we moved on. You can still discuss about AI assisted results with your peers. I guess it's like how people miss the days of heated arguments about factual questions whereas the smartphone era led to someone just pulling out their phone, googlimg and settling the question. Or heated discussion about Maradona's handplay, and today we have slomo VAR replay. Better at the task, takes away from the romance and the spirit. It's like beautiful winged hussars in the military vs people in an office piloting drones in VR and soon just prompting the AI piloting the drones. I get it. But this should be talked about head on, not just about petty academic career stuff, which of course matter to those involved but are not a society wide issue.

This is incredibly related to how people seek meaning in family, friends, or (hardly foolproof) new experiences. Because careers, skills, and other society-wide abstract purpose no longer provide a stable identity based on monthly guarantees of dopamine.

In a sense, programming (et tu, mathematics) has become a bullshit job. Though, it will take some time (~6 months) before "fulltime" investors or serial SaaS founders start to lose that high of shared purpose when celebrating around the campfire how they each surprised themselves with an artisanal leverage of "network effects" that one time..

Those of us still trying to extract personal purpose by commiserating on quirks of fable or astra in this warm-colored forum..

May want to contemplate the personal (but unrelated to ozempic or pharmaceuticals) meaningfulness of "month-scale network effects" next

There are examples of foregoing the use of known tech, like the Amish, but it really means a deep break with the western ethos and takes something like a deep committing to a religion to carry out. The default is that you work on things with the honest goal of making it work. Yes, we've become too good at making tech But a balance of camaraderie in honest effort, but not quite as much to be really successful is a knife's edge. In a way, solving all the problems in the textbook may be a sad moment, despite the fact that working on it hard meant that it would happen if you're competent. If you want to try hard but fail perpetually, like Sysyphus, you have to be intentionally incompetent. Like always try to solve your math problems when drunk. Then you won't get sad that there are no more problems because you will not be able to solve them.

There are warning examples in religion and myth, like Ikarus, the Tower of Babel etc that striving for more capability is not always good. Of course these religions are dismissed by modern people. Well, this is the result.

Sisyphus is apt because he was "punished" by a superhuman entity for doing basically the right thing (from a mortal's pov). Doesn't it remind of alpoge, who tried to keep it as traditional as was possible? Nice one!

Then there were the brothers Epimetheus and Prometheus. One was a thief and one was implicated in the opening of Pandora's box. Who is an inspiration, who was punished? (With the caveat that it should have been climate-neutral electricity he stole, not fire.)

So the heuristic seems to be: if you come up on the wrong side of AI, you did the right thing. Ikarus was not wrong to try.

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