alt Hacker NewsModern AI tools are amazing, but they’re amazing like spell check was amazing when it came out. Does it help with menial tasks? Yes, but it creates a new baseline that everyone has and just moves the bar. Theres scant evidence that we’re all going to just sit on a beach while AI runs your company anytime soon.
There’s little sign of any AI company managing to build something that doesn’t just turn into a new baseline commodity. Most of these AI products are also horribly unprofitable, which is another reality that will need to be faced sooner rather than later.
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Spellcheck (and auto completion) is like AI - it solves one problem and creates another.
Now instead of misspelled words (which still happens all the time) we have incorrect words substituted in place of the correct ones.
Look at any long form article on any website these days and it will likely be riddled with errors, even on traditional news websites!
Its why executive types are all hyped about AI. Being able to code 2x more will mean they get 2x more things (roughly speaking), but the workers aren’t going to get 2x the compensation.
AI can’t do our jobs today, but we’re only 2.5 years from the release of chatGPT. The performance of these models might plateau today, but we simply don’t know. If they continue to improve at the current rate for 3-5 more years, it’s hard for me to see how human input would be useful at all in engineering.
It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter? Or is it all just pointless busy-work invented since the industrial revolution to create jobs for everyone, when in reality we would be fine if like 5% of society worked while the rest slacked off? Don't think we'd have as many videogames, but then again, we would have time to play, which I would argue is more valuable than games.
To paraphrase Lee Iacocca: We must stop and ask ourselves, how much videogames do we really need?