And you all sound like luddites.
what's your plan for when the only humans needed for the world economy to function are Musk and Zuckerberg?
you certainly won't be needed
I don't think so
Yes. It does make me mad. And I should be mad. Everyone who cares about anything but the bottom line should be mad. The wholesale commoditization and destruction of human intellectual skill and creative talent in service of the relentless pursuit of capitalism through automation is a bad thing and you should feel bad for cheering it on. "Adapt or get left behind" isn't what someone who actually cares about the quality of their craft says, it's what the Borg say before injecting their nanoprobes into your brain. "we only want to improve quality of life." Fuck that.
Maybe the luddites made it clear that destroying capital doesn't make for a winning endgame, the Amish might be a better model - they still participate in the broader economy but they've built their pockets of antiquity where they get by with more elbow grease than they otherwise would have to, and have a spiritual basis for meaning that most of secular society lacks. I probably won't be joining them but could see a new movement that accepts diesel engines, lithium batteries and computers, but draws the line at anything that starts to mention "hidden layers" or "nondeterministic behavoir" (outside that randomness needed for accurate simulations and cryptography)
Haven't come up with a name yet.
>I don't want to simply be forced to adapt to a life where my only option is to blindly consume what the machines feed me like I'm in a tube in the Matrix.
How is that any different from your life now, except it's humans feeding you slop instead of human-guided machines?
>Everyone who cares about anything but the bottom line should be mad. The wholesale commoditization and destruction of human intellectual skill and creative talent in service of the relentless pursuit of capitalism through automation is a bad thing and you should feel bad for cheering it on
Go join an Amish commune then. I love the irony of a programmer (I'm assuming) complaining about automation.
Hardly anyone ever asks where this progression is leading, and if they do, usually the answer is to "more progress." Which, to me, doesn't really sound like progression at all! It's just a way to justify not actually changing anything that matters, and to make sure there is always some faux-horizon of greener pastures to promise your customers.
You should be angry!
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ae379k/luddites-definition-w...
https://doctorow.medium.com/brian-merchants-blood-in-the-mac...
For me personally, I just hate that they don't stop talking about it!
I think focusing on the AI-shit is missing my point: why do you even care about this? What is really at stake in this? Is it really just the idea that there is some kind injustice being done? An injustice to whom?
If you spend your life doing all the hard work it takes to excel at something, the rewards of that hard work are intrinsic to your new mastery. What someone calls you or not because of your skill is like the least important thing about the entire pursuit.
I too am quick to point out how annoying the AI stuff is, but I think if we are going to defeat them we need to hold on and affirm shared human capacity more than we need to protect titles.
Fine. Don't say you weren't warned, though.
At least for the first one: I definitely do! "Defeat" is maybe a little clumsy, and its less wanting to squash AI itself (for one thing, because this new stuff isn't really "AI"), but rather what it represents and who is going to use it, or even right now, who is going to use the bare idea of it to hurt workers and demoralize us in general. The whole hype train is a big jumping of the shark of an already fraught and misguided industry. An industry propped up by senseless financial instruments and false ideals of technological determinism. It is no good!
If you really can only see this whole argument as only a pure black and white dilemma, that either this guy is a "programmer" and AI is good || this guy is definitely not a programmer and AI is bad, then I would urge you maybe to invite more nuance into your thinking. But also not a big deal! It's more important we are on the same side about the big stuff, then whether we agree about words. Which was kinda my whole point all along!
You're standing in the dojo wearing the black belt you bought at Wal-Mart and condescending to the masters for acting as if any of the discipline and hard work they put in meant anything, because look - you have the same belt as everyone else, and didn't have to do shit for it.
This is why people hate AI and the people who use it.