It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Many of us here would see our jobs eliminated by a sufficiently powerful AI, perhaps some have already experienced it. You might as well. If you use AI so much, what value do you really provide and how much longer before the AI can surpass you at that?
There's a lot of people in technical roles who chose to study programming and work at tech companies because it seemed like it would pay more than other roles. My own calculation is that the tech-but-could-have-just-as-easily-been-a-lawyer cohort will be the first to find themselves replaced. Is that a revealing a bias? Absolutely.
Actual hackers, in the true sense, will have no trouble finding ways to continue to be useful and hopefully well compensated.
A calculator needs direction on what to calculate because the machine doesn't have agency.
We are going to a higher level of abstraction and at that higher level you probably need a different skill set than before. Humans aren't going to get cut out of the loop but you always have to level up your skills.
I think there is just a generation of tech workers that got lazy and thought they were immune to change some how. I didn't even know anyone that had been on the internet when I graduated high school. Someone older and wiser though told me I would have to constantly reinvent myself, always learn new skills and will have several different careers. They were so spot on. Guess what? Nothing has changed.
A tip of my hat to you, sir/ma'am.
It a super power for the intellectually curious while the highly specialized that thought they were done learning can only see the threat to their intellectual moat. They aren't wrong.
I feel like I level up on a weekly basis practically.
I feel like this has become one of the most taboo things to even wonder about out loud, because it drives a different part of the Venn diagram into a freaking rage. How dare you force me to consider that perhaps I am only slightly above average in a population of billions?
And I could say this about just about every domain of my life. I've trained myself to ask it about everything that poses a question or a challenge, from creating recipes to caring for my indoor Japanese maple tree to preparing for difficult conversations and negotiations.
The idea of "just" using it to compose emails or search for things seems frustrating to me, even reading about it. It's actually very hard for me to capture all of this in a way that doesn't sound like I'm insulting the folks who aren't there yet.
I'm not blindly accepting everything it says. I am highly technical and I think competent enough to understand when I need to push back against obvious or likely hallucinations. I would never hand its plans to a contractor and say "build this". It's more like having an extra, incredibly intuitive person who just happens to contain the sum of most human knowledge at the table, for $20 a month.
I honestly don't understand how the folks reading HN don't intuitively and passionately lean into that. It's a freaking superpower.