I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone
For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel empty on new projects. You can produce so much things so fast, but if it should be something original - it is hard to get it generated by AI while still feeling that it is something that you came up with
At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog.
There are 1) the tools that let us surface the human, then there is 2) the human, and then there comes 3) the factory generated business (someone doesn’t care but has to do it) content pretending to be human to sell stuff to humans. The human 2) is drowned out by the “had to do it” 3) while there is a small corner of some of us who are making 1) tools to surface and reward more 2).
I think this kind of elitism also misses the point.
I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.
-Max Frisch
Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?
I understand the impulse behind posts like this, and it's important to remember to maintain human connections. (Arguably, once we learn how to do this because we think it's a good in its own right and not because we have to, we'll be better off.) But I just don't like being emotionally browbeaten like this because I have a question that I need an answer for that I don't have the time, money, or access to go get in a different way.
I really don't understand the need to torture alternate meanings out of the writing of people we don't agree with. Nothing in the author's writing even comes close to implying what you're suggesting here.
Even NYC has a fishing meetup group with over 1000 members.
Didn't that guy start his channel because he didn't have a father growing up? Seems like important context.
It's a channel that increases access to knowledge for those who wouldn't otherwise have it, but disrupts a status quo in a way that some might find harmful. But in that case people seemed to pretty universally recognize that the pros outweighed the cons.
I know, right? The author clearly wants you to starve to death for the lack of a friend to teach you to fish
You might not have a friend who is into fly-fishing, but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about. Maybe that's less efficient, maybe it's less direct. But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other, and technology is getting dangerously close to replacing relationships altogether.
I don't think this is meant to guilt you for using tech, but it is totally a wake up call to remembering WHY we fly fish and go to weddings and write memoirs and so on.
If AI is special, unlike any other tool, why aren't you using it that much?
I personally don't think it's anything special, and if I knew I'll die soon and were planning my last trip with my child, I'd use AI, just like I'd use a credit card, or my phone.
It allows me to spend more time with other people, getting boring tasks done much quicker.
Sometimes it feels like all digital technology is simply an enterprise to replace human to human contact.
When LLMs first showed up I thought “but doesn’t this take away a little bit of what my life is? Don’t I like programming and solving the problems and learning the unexpected things and so on?”
Now I use them extensively, daily, millions of tokens per day, and I still ask that question.
I don’t use them for recipes or toasts or camping trips. I use them for brute-forcing boring stuff. Like, hey we’re making this thing faster. Let’s measure all this stuff, and you come up with whatever I’ve missed to include in benchmarks. Make a benchmark harness for each approach we’ll try. Create tests to ensure none of the changes alter behaviour or outputs of the system. Make it pipe results into this database with this schema. Let’s try these approaches. Which other approaches could work? Keep slamming these benchmarks until statistically significant results appear.
The thing we’re speeding up is usually a single query in the armpit of an application that in prior years I never would have been able to address. But now I can. By doing this I can improve the user experience and scale back our resources and other stuff we like.
Am I missing out? I don’t know. I program less. I get a lot more done. My employer is very happy. My team expresses appreciating my work more than ever. It’s a stark contrast, actually. It feels weird.
I’m still not sure what the answer is. I do miss tinkering. Yet I suppose the point was never me tinkering. It was me having a job to perform for a specific purpose for my employers.
Did it take away a bit of what my life is, or did it change it? I’m still using my brain. I’m still thinking through problems. I’m still finding bugs and mentally tracing them to understand how to work through it with Claude. But the actual moving of bits? I don’t do it anywhere near as much as I used to.
I’m still very conflicted about it.
I’m so disturbed when I see friends and family using AI for ‘real’ stuff. Recipes, images, writing, etc.
Is programming ‘real stuff’ too, though?
I don't think it began with AI. We repeatedly catch the car we're very deeply programmed to chase. We want to minimize discomfort, risk, suffering, adversity. We want to maximize safety and comfort. We want all of our kids to make it to adulthood. We want to disinfect the planet of all diseases. We want our bodies to survive a career. We want our families to survive every winter. Those goals are all completely sensible.
But parents, for example, have been here before and recognize that optimizing these sensible goals have a consequence of missing the richness in the journies we no-longer need to take. So have those who have grappled with social media addiction or sedentary careers, or even the little things like timing getting an mp3 off the radio and onto your mixtape cassette.
I think this is going to be the supreme challenge. We're wired to want it easy, but I don't think that's what we really want at the end of the day. It was easier when we had no choice. But we're doing a great job optimizing the soul out of being human.
AI took their job. There have been mass layoffs by foreign companies in India; fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India.
As a result, many service companies are moving to product businesses.
We are certainly scrambling for productivity with "token maxxing" and scrambling for entertainment with AI companions, but I haven't seen many thoughtful takes on how AI might look in a life well-lived.
In that movie only the protagonist had the magic remote to fast-forward through existence. It was a tragedy of self-destruction.
But what if everyone gets the remote at roughly the same time?
I don't have anything intelligent to say really. This poem made me go "Fuck yeah, poetry! Humans!!", and I'm grateful to the author, the submitter, and the people who upvoted it, so that I ended up reading it.
I've seen other parents create AI videos of their toddlers being visited at night by Santa. I've seen parents happily throw their children into AI video generators to entertain them.
People are using AI recklessly. I can't imagine stealing the gift of a child's imagination away from them and instead, replacing it with these hollow representations of reality. It disgusts me.
I use AI all the time for coding, but I've drawn a hard line at the point of intermediation with others.
OP should consider a side career in poetry.
It's like we memory holed the last 20 years of social media that was supposed to be all upside; just democratic, global connectionism, empowerment, etc. I have too much exposure to people using AI in various, even sometimes subtle "wrong ways" to really agree.
This sort of comment plays exactly into the thrust of the piece.
> write a haiku for stop using AI for human things and use it for automating the boring stuff
Let humans create,
Leave the soul to living minds,
Let code do the chores.I am pleased that I can share musical discoveries with friends that were recommended by an AI, or make them laugh with some absurd image that fell out of Dall-E.
I am happy that, with the help of an AI, i can make a news reader that is full of bright patterns, instead of dark ones, that i can share with my friends so that their standard of life is ever-so-slightly better.
Reducing the commentary to "tool bad" is lazy, even when beautifully phrased
It's a pretty big stretch to liken a ranking algorithm based entirely on direct, intentional human inputs to what most people understand to be "AI".