mikemarsh

Digital tools are made even more not value neutral by the fact that other humans are actively influencing them even while you're using them, via "the algorithm", "dark design patterns", etc.

At least with an AK-47 or a hammer, once you own it physically, it's yours and the original creator isn't sending you subtle psychological nudges to utilize it one way or the other.

This article describes the behavior consumers of AI, but I think the far more interesting spiritual question is about the producers:

How many of those involved in AI genuinely believe some degree of the "If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies"-style narrative where "AGI" is a kind of omnipotent destroyer god that can also somehow be harnessed for "good" in the hands of "the right people"?

I've shared this before in HN comments to surprisingly good reception, this seems the prime opportunity to do so again https://jordanville.org/the-spiritual-dangers-of-artificial-...

On this specific article itself, near the end:

> He recently used AI to research the history of false messiahs...

Anyone else see the irony here?

> No First-Person Output, No Apologies

This is precisely the appeal of AI though, and a key factor in influencing people's attitudes towards it. Why would any AI company want to stop this? (I realize the author knows this already)

> In the post-AGI economy, humans will eventually stop writing and reading code

What's the definition of "AGI" these days? I've heard everything from "sci-fi simulated consciousness", to "does really good on benchmarks" to "whatever makes OpenAI X amount of money".

Perhaps the definition in this specific case is circular, "whenever humans stop writing and reading code"?

Interesting, thanks for the recommendation!

Thus far I still am, but I'm in a very weird and atypical work situation at the moment.

Weirdness aside, I'm continuing to write code as I used to, despite the overall company _cultural_ push towards AI, given the lack of direct orders, and pray my output is good enough that the "powers that be" leave me alone.

I am also in the job search process, and am also still noticing plenty of listings that don't mention AI.

I remember seeing some JS cryptography library a long time (maybe 10 years?) ago that provided an async hashing function for exactly this reason: to split up what would normally be a simple synchronous computation and yield more often to the main thread.

Can't recall the name, but I remember thinking that was very clever once I understood why it was doing that, and am glad to see the concept explained directly here.

A key point that's always missed in this kind of discussion is that people in the past didn't worship comfort quite to the extent people do now (although of course they'd often prefer it).

Sure, a materialist could go back and psychologize any glimmer of satisfaction anyone in the past might have felt as some kind of "cope", but we should at least give our ancestors the respect of properly representing their hierarchy of values.

There's no reducing reliance on "other people", especially when embracing digital technology; in every realistic scenario you become tethered to the people in charge of Big Tech and all that entails, in Stallman-esque fantasy-land you're still relying on other open source maintainers.

In both cases you're reliant on other people's supply chains to get the hardware all of this stuff relies on.

As far as valuing some abstract ideal (global community) over the people actually in your life right now (local community), I guess all I can say is I can't see that working out well long-term, and hope you can find at least a few people to connect with now.

This is great; I'm a big fan of Crawford (mainly The World Beyond Your Head) and you've re-piqued my interest in these slightly earlier authors.

It's also worth noting that all of this musing on art isn't surprising in a way; the ancient world all the up to medieval times didn't really such much distinction between the craftsman and the artist, a sharp distinction between "functional" and "aesthetic" is quite a modern sensibility. Everything old is new again!

Any kind of accomplishment outside of having kids could also be boiled down to an "evolutionary" drive for status, power, belonging, etc.

Why is this nihilist lens applied selectively to one pursuit and not others?

An interesting "conundrum" (at least from my outsider perspective): how many of those bot requests are from agents that utilize Turso on their backends?

I would guess a real human, one with a good sense of humor at that.

Interesting symbolic angle: as LLMs plateau and are more and more ineffectual at replicating real intelligence, perhaps this is an attempt to keep the sci-fi mythos alive from the other direction: "Computers can't seem to create a mind, but the physical part of a mind creating a computer is basically the same thing, right?"

Always interesting how this kind of snark never seems to go to bat for modern man's average patience and self-control, thus actually proving the naysayers wrong, but always just assumes that "everyone knows" modern times are best and those silly past naysayers are thus wrong.

> what are those agents actually doing?

Providing material for attention-grabbing headlines and blog posts, primarily. Can't (in good conscience, at least) claim you had an agent running all night if you didn't actually run an agent all night.

> I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding

> Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?

Interesting mix of sentiments. Is this code you're generating primarily as part of a solo operation? If not, how do coworkers/code reviewers feel about it?

That's a great idea; a good chunk of interesting software design discussion has been crowded out by "here's how to better beg the machine to do the right thing", rather than discussing amongst ourselves what the "right thing" even is in various circumstances.

> A sanctuary from AI and vibe coding, focused on human engineering

Big fan of this project for this reason alone. I hope over the next few years we'll see this more and more not just as an implementation detail, but a public branding sentiment that like-minded coders, consumers or even (if we're living in fantasy-land) business clients can rally behind.

Maybe, just maybe, there's some inkling of truth behind what your political enemies are saying, and you can carefully acknowledge said inklings and even gasp integrate them into your own worldview, if relevant?

Nah, they're probably all just evil and/or stupid for no reason at all. That makes a lot more sense.

Beautiful, living in Southern Michigan and dealing with slightly more snow than usual this year, I feel like a wimp compared to some of my snowy-weather compatriots here from Norway, Canada, etc.

It's a kind of gaslighting, probably first and foremost for themselves before others.

Some people really do think of soft power, propaganda, shady covert operations, etc. as something "the other guys" do (China! KGB-Putin!), but assume the US is somehow above all that.

Basically a neoconservative-esque sentimental view of the USA as "the good guys" on "the global stage" (although many would rightly recoil at the comparison to neocons).

Surely there's a lot of CIA involvement there too ;-)

Is it even worth mentioning that the whole "AI is the reason for layoffs" line is a charade, or does everyone here know that already?

For anyone who doesn't: the economy is bad in general, but saying citing "AI" as the reason for layoffs lets companies reverse their public perception from "company going through a crunch" to "forward-thinking innovator".

The latest "Pivot to AI" pulls together a lot of mainstream financial reporting on this very thing: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/29/the-job-losses-are-real-b...

Truly the next uncharted, civilization-upending frontier in computing, definitely worth the unlimited consumption of any and all natural resources and investment money.

Presenting this quote without additional commentary is an interesting Rorschach test.

Thankfully more and more people are seriously considering the effects of technology on true wisdom and getting of the "all technological progress clearly is great, look at all these silly unenlightened naysayers from the past" train.

Late to the party, but speaking of "challenge your own biases", have you considered that "Christianity" as a blanket term equally covering

* historical American Puritanism (of the kind you rightly opposed)

* modern "rock concert and a TED talk" Evangelicalism

* Traditional Orthodoxy such as that of the Jordanville Fathers of the linked article

may not be the most accurate classifier? Anything more than a cursory inspection would reveal these are all very different things, even if they all use some overlapping vocabulary from time to time (word-concept fallacy).

Getting your definitions and worldview from 20th-21st century reactions (many justified) against goofy evangelicalism rather than actual theology and history is likewise frivolous and embarrassing.