logoalt Hacker News

furymantoday at 12:56 PM9 repliesview on HN

Mario Savio said a few lines when the industrial revolution peaked:

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious Makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels Upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it That unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all

Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well. I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.


Replies

kibwentoday at 1:29 PM

> take human intelligence to another pinnacle

I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber, and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders will accelerate that trend.

show 12 replies
stasomatictoday at 4:06 PM

Why do we need to promote intelligence? If we are all “intelligent”, what is the difference? At best, we have about 50 healthy years on this rock. I do think myself “intelligent”, relatively, but also that the notion is overrated. I want to be dumb and carefree, I’d rather bike, shoot some arrows at the sky, eat some escargot and die in my sleep when it’s time. Instead, we must toil and research nursing homes.

Epa095today at 2:33 PM

Did the previous tools, which freed us from physical work, take human physique to another pinnacle?

show 1 reply
imjonsetoday at 2:52 PM

it wasn't about industrialization, but about not being complicit, the machine was the metaphor for the system (this was the 1960s)

fgaanbtoday at 2:09 PM

Who is "we"? Do you operate a machine in a factory? Do you know how someone operating a machine felt in 1900?

Mechanical replacement cannot be compared with thought replacement anyway, but the most thoughtless pro-AI comment tends to be at the top.

lacedeconstructtoday at 1:14 PM

A slop fork machine is way different though, I dont know why authors never thought about this but imagine a machine that can detect the features and replicate whatever it sees, show it how to make bread once and it can do it infinitely, make it listen to a song and its able to find why it sounds the way it does and just spam variations, even if it doesnt make anything original it demotivates any attempt to push the boundaries or make anything new

show 3 replies
coldteatoday at 2:42 PM

>and yet we all function well

Sure...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/694199/u.s.-depression-rate-rem...

>this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.

Between the endless slop, loneliness and depression epidemics, record low reading comprehension, attention shortage, we're not in any pinnacle today. We're in a regression from a few decades ago, getting worse.

thefztoday at 1:28 PM

> Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well. I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.

How? It's undermining what the human intellicence is made from, learning.

i_love_retrostoday at 1:07 PM

Hasn't all automation up to this point been same input equals same output though? Automation using LLMs feels different to anything before and I don't think there's a comparative time in history to point at and say "look it happened before and we are now better off"

show 3 replies