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Comment by OutOfHere | Hacker News Reader

This is another nonsensical AI-hate article. HN has a cluster of users motivated to posting AI-hate. AI is a general-purpose tool; you can trivially use it for learning or for evading learning.

Consider for example something as familiar as coffee. It can stimulate you, but if you chronically over-consume it, it will inevitably ruin your sleep and make you more fatigued. This doesn't make coffee antithetical to energy.

A fairer title to an article would be "AI reshapes learning", but people prefer making bombastic, clickbait, and false claims instead.

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It's a reasonable article (not that I agree with every word, just that it's not "nonsensical"). It doesn't encourage hatred for AI. AI is not like coffee (or a hammer, or the cotton gin, or...).

Are you just reacting to the title? "Antithetical to learning" is an exaggeration, I think. But AI obviously has fundamentally changed learning. It makes active learning easier, but with some caveats about the nature of its output. On the flip side, it heavily reduces the passive learning that once happened while working. It pushes more responsibility onto people to take time to actively learn, while at the same time reducing concrete motivation to learn, which is a bad combo.

Which part of this is reasonable:

> This is the result of companies whose goals are not aligned with humans learning things, or humans staying engaged and in the loop. To motivate their astronomical valuations they need AI to replace everything else. It has to be used for everything. For these companies to ever become profitable all the software engineers in the world need to become dependent on their products. They want to be the landlord and for the rest of the world to pay them rent.

The simple fact is "Humans learning things" can't be put in an automated RL loop. This is not a conspiracy by the evil AI companies, it's a simple technical reason.

> The simple fact is "Humans learning things" can't be put in an automated RL loop.

Nobody said it should. "Humans learning things" should be outside of any technical loops.

You're using a technical arguments to counter an important political observation which apparently went over your head. The problem is the pressure exerted upon workers/engineers by the political control machine above them - pressure to do everything with AI, quick, without understanding and without time to learn.

Big AI's message is "leave the thinking to us and you won't depend on your employees, have fewer of them, cheaper and easily replaceable" - what they leave out is that you end up being dependent on them - a much more concentrated monopoly. Big AI is pushing that message with all of their power and they have $ trillions of it.

a handgun is a tool you can trivially use to trim your trees or to shoot someone it doesn't mean it's meant for killing

That's a blatantly false pseudo-analogy. Your claim about a handgun itself is bogus.

A gun is not a multi-purpose tool; it is a weapon. AI is a general-purpose tool, and not a weapon.

That's the point. A gun is also "just a tool". It's a lazy argument.

Edit: This was written in response to an earlier version of the parent post.

I'm not sure I fully agree with the article either, but I think that comparison is kinda nonsensical, over generalized and just handwaves a bunch of points and arguments about the article.

I don't think this brings your point across at all. If you disagree with the article, just saying "no, it's a tool, like coffee" does not meaningfully engage at all with any of the points made.

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