> There's absolutely nothing wrong with using AI and it's something we should be celebrating.

Ok, but there's also nothing wrong with celebrating not using AI.

There is nothing wrong with walking or riding horses to get to where you need to go but I wouldn't celebrate that. It's a nice hobby bit not efficient. The same will probably happen to most of "human made code". It's fun but doesn't make much sense economically.

We must only celebrate that which is economically efficient.

This is horrifying.

Writing code by hand costs me zero money. If I were to use AI, I would have to pay thousands of dollars. How does that make more sense economically?

How much time does that investment free up for you to work in other areas with more impact than simply pressing keys and entering code by hand?

I enjoy pressing keys and entering code; I find it to be the most efficient way to communicate with my computer. Why would I not spend my time doing something I enjoy?

I thought you were talking about economic efficiency, not maximizing enjoyment. You can do anything you want with your time if you're not worried about economics, but that sort of contradicts your original statement.

> It took thousands of years of advancements across chemistry, physics, material science to reach the point in the tech tree we are today.

so did everything, these words don't actually mean anything

Pesticides represent a great achievement. People still pay more for organic though.

this seems like a terrible example. wish i could avoid "organic" products like i do "AI-first" products

You can! At pretty much every grocery store, you can get non-organic products.

> There's absolutely nothing wrong with using AI and it's something we should be celebrating.

In many cases, there are clear disadvantages to using AI, be it the effect on human psyche, the considerable resource consumption, the style of the output, or the fact that the resulting work was not authored by a person, which is a very subjective preference, but one that many people have nevertheless.

I agree that AI is a great technological achievement, but it’s not as if great technological achievements don’t come with any downsides. Celebrating them is reasonable, but also situational.

Horrible? You could have argued that celebrating both things is fine. But you didn't. The implication is simply the opposite: That I should be ashamed if I enjoy or am proud to have made something by hand.

Technology is not a universal good. That's a simplistic idea. We have taken thousands of years to develop all sorts of horrible shit with more downsides than upsides - things that only exist because they are inevitable, not because they are purely beneficial to the spirit or even the practical wellbeing of humanity.

Take a example. You could be a hunter gatherer, you could grow all your own crops from scratch, you could forsake all modern medicine and rely on superstition - would you be considered a wise person? You figured out things a lot of people didn't, you took the harder road - but most people would say this approach is just dumb.

What's wise isn't forsaking technology, it's using technology to improve things, and developing new technology as well. What's wise is using AI as a power user and seeing how you can contribute to the intelligence age.

Celebrating a foregone past where human intelligence was more valuable is hopeless and naive at best.

That's not an example, it's an analogy. I don't see the value in shifting the conversation to identifying all the differences in an (extremely removed) analogy. It's rhetorically low-quality.

Different people value different things. Some people run even though they could have taken a Waymo. Some people are into paperclipmaxxing. I avoid AI to the extent that it's easy and practical, but I don't do it to call myself wise. I just don't like it. Am I being inefficient? Possibly. There are some things I do where I'm not optimizing for KPI though.

Do you think it would be a good thing if all music (for example) was made with AI and not by humans? What a lot of people in tech right now don’t seem to get is that art is about how it transforms the artist, not just the final product.

The printing invention didn't change the fact that we are still today celebrating painters.

You're absolutely right!

How is digital intelligence different from every technology that has ever and will ever exist, in your comment? Why does your comment apply to it, and not to other things (nukes, bioweapons, slot machines)? Is every technology inherently worth celebrating?

Your comment begs the question. It's worth celebrating because it's a great achievement because you said so.