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Comment by gonzalohm | Hacker News Reader

That's an easy question. First, people will forget how to do anything and become highly dependent on AI. That's already happening. I already see people not able to finish their work without AI. Then, once everything has become a "pay to do" business model (I know right, the wet dream of any CEO) we will be happy to pay to write code, write docs, do a presentation. We will pay both in money and environmental costs.

The last step is to just keep doing what we are doing with the environment. Let's not bother doing anything to reduce climate change.

Just sit and relax boys

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It's gotten to the point where most people don't even know how to forage, hunt, farm, start a fire, build a shelter, or make their own clothes.

Point being that technology elevates our highest capabilities at the expense of our lower level ones.

I think that makes sense, but still, you would expect a hunter to know how to hunt. I'm talking about people losing their skills for the job they are supposed to be doing without gaining any new ones

s/AI/the internet/g

The Protestant “laziness == death” thing just doesn’t really hold. Much, maybe most tech exists because someone was too lazy to ship file cabinets / walk 20 miles / carry buckets of water uphill. The strict “anything that makes life easier leads to laziness then death” is a moral opinion, not fact.

I am with you on the environment, which I as an entirely different problem. Even if it were desirable, feasible, and decided to completely eliminate all AI and ML forever, we’d still kill ourselves (really our descendants) by destroying the environment. It’s the ultimate externality: nobody alive today will see the costs.

It's interesting that on one hand, the labs decided to focus on oh, it could be AGI or oh, it could take all the jobs or oh, we're going to the singularity...

... without seeming to actually believe in any of the benefits. For example, why hasn't Altman shown up and said, "Sure, there's some environmental damage. It's a gamble. If this works, we can have AI build us the world's most efficient carbon cleanup system to absolute mathematical perfection and more than undo anything it cost. That's the kind of technology we're trying to build."

Exactly. Maybe it’s that kind of nuance doesn’t work in public discourse; today’s press would either run “we’re destroying the environment on a gamble” or “we can have AI do carbon cleanup” depending on ideological bias.

Or maybe, and I lean this way, it’s forest/trees and even Altman and crew haven’t really internalized this framing, and are operating strictly at the “what do I have to say to get the outcome I want” level.

Anyways, I really like your formulation here. So much better than “there’s no benefit, it will kill us all” and “there’s no downside, it’s a panacea” takes that are too common.

Because they know that many of our most intractable problems are primarily political, not technical. Climate disruption and peace in the Middle East for two examples. I don't expect an LLM to offer a workable plan for either. Would love to be wrong about that though.

> “anything that makes life easier leads to laziness then death” is a moral opinion, not fact

It's a moral opinion that we turn into an economic opinion when we mismanage a robust inelastic labor supply into soggy declining demand, which does great things for shareholder value but marginalizes most people in the economy. "Punish the workers because they aren't needed."

Extrapolating this along the trend of less and less work being needed leads to a dark place. One that's entirely of our own design. Or, rather, shareholder design. Better grab enough shares before you fall into the permanent underclass!

> That's an easy question. First, people will forget how to do anything and become highly dependent on AI.

That is already here. One example of somebody who probably cannot program desperately trying to push some AI slop without considering why they are repeatedly rejected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49693790

I am starting to see this everywhere. Its like an entire generation of developers just gave up and believe they could become expert developers in a week by pushing prompts into LLMs. For me this is the greatest danger of AI, people building garbage they will never be able to understand, extend, or repair and that garbage will enter production critical systems like traffic signals or medical equipment.

Yeah that's a really good point. Good luck maintaining modern infrastructure without people that really understand it

With or without AI this is still a thing. As we layer abstractions upon each other, eventually the lowest layers get forgotten entirely. Which in turn then becomes a security threat.

Deep seek is so good I’m happy to pay for it. Even if Claude or gpt is 1000x more expensive next year, I don’t care.

Hail the Omnissiah! He is the God in the Machine, the Source of All Knowledge.

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