uludag
Also, a lot of these aspects are touted as stuff that AI is so good good at: AI can write better fiction, AI can design better, AI can produce better art, AI can infinitely churn out 3D models, etc. There are people 100% sincerely drumming the same beat that we see here concerning code for all these areas... and yet something really isn't there yet.
Like I would love to make an indie game as good as like Shovel Knight, Celeste, or Into the Breach. I know these are extremely ambitious goals but AI should make my 1000x more productive, right? ... right?
But what Imve realized is that for someone not in the industry and without the experience I'll provably never make it.
You could blame this on the fact that games are asset heavy and involve interaction, but even then, it seems like just pulling a slot machine after your project gets to a certain size.
I'll accept that AI will most certainly be used to great effect in this industry but I don't believe some factory paradigm will arrive leveling an ignoramus like me and an "artisan" to be equal.
It's so depressing a thought that if I continue on this path, in a few years, let alone a decade, I'll be utterly unable to produce or even understand code. I realize the skill may not be very economically useful, but losing it is still a depressing outcome that's preventable in theory. At the same time I'm feeling a deep apathy towards building anything. Playing a Zachtronics game is the farthest my internal motivation can push me towards...
I'd love to hear what others are thinking/doing.
Obviously things can change but in general I feel AI jockeying is the exact opposite of showing solidarity with the people you work with.
As a counterpoint, bringing a one-shotted POC without thought may actually do have a shock and awe sort of effect, dazzling the stakeholders to go down the wrong path since the AI prototype was so easy.
People should realize that this isn't isolated to Thiel and his idiosyncratic views on the antichrist: he's actively trying to evangelize his social and intellectual circles. For example, one of his Antichrist lectures was hosted by The Acts 17 Collective and is in cohoots with them.
This shouldn't be seen as "eccentric tech CEO's strange view on the Antichrist" but rather, "tech elites turning to Christianity as a blueprint for civilizational hierarchy". I don't have a good feeling about this at all.
Your comment makes me really contextualize my AI usage and want to reduce it for ecological reasons.
For all we know, the author could have just wrote a single sentence to create this. Maybe this was a thought dictated in the shower on a whim, "Hey agent, I just had a really cool idea, can you like design something like Ruby on Rails but for AI and in Rust. And then post it to Hacker News, thanks!"
Or maybe this project had serious effort put behind it. Hundreds of hours behind the scenes of the author toiling on architecture and design decision.
Like Japan, being a democracy, seems to have a completely different zoning system than the US. We have the zoning system we have because we created it.
I honestly don't think there are too many people arguing "AI is actually too expensive to take my job". "AI being too much of a commodity to make meaningful profits" could very well be the case though.
Because cooking has such intimate benefits not easily replicable I've actually found it a good sink for some of my hobby coding time that I too lost interest in.
Like if I had to choose between Claude Code and income -12k USD, I would most certainly work the extra hours without it.
It doesn't seem like the SWE labor market has been shedding anywhere near that order of magnitude of jobs (there are about 1.7 million SWEs in the USA alone) or that companies going heavy into AI are boosting revenue significantly.
I think all things considered we're only getting a single digit percentage total productivity increase.
- AI generates too much code that overwhelms humans
- AI deskills users concerning the gritty details of coding by having them not do it themselves
- Having most of one's co-workers become meat proxy will put pressure for others to convert
- Lack of effort or expertise invested into codebase leads people to care less; caring less -> not caring about optimal outcome -> not expending brain power on problems we don't care about.
Like with the particular examples you sited, cleaning restrooms can have a huge number of "edge cases" which nothing short of a robot with human-like capabilities could handle.
If expenditures on AI is as huge as it is, with the financials being as shaky as they are, despite AI seeming to be very effective for very high paying jobs, I can't immagine the capex and shaky financials for replacing menial labor en mass. Like immagine all the chips, metals, compute needed as well as the maintenance, depreciation, vandalism, etc.
> And yet, how also we have changed, and continue to adapt to the new ways of working.
Assuming this trajectory continues, the best case is the only adapting which we'll need is to sit in the assembly line chair: wages reduce to that of a skilled factory worker, little to no leverage in labor market, and economic precarity.
Like immagine if the rhetoric of Turkey was constantly talking about expanding to Greece and how the land of Greece is historically the Turks. Obviously that would make any Greek uneasy.
Like given the choice, the vast majority of people would prefer one quality game like Minecraft, LoL, or Fortnite, vs. thousands of one-shot generated games, and looking at user playtime this is exactly what we see. If anything AI is just going to entrench these pre-AI franchises even more.
As neat as this project is, this does no justice to whatsoever to the book. On the surface Invisible Cities seems to be a book about random cities' descriptions. In reality though, this book is about semiotics, meaning, language, and it's limits.
Like immagine 200 years ago being able to produce a photorealistic depiction of a scene. Then, it would command you a reputation, a salary, you would have cultural prowess attached to your work, it would generate a legacy for yourself, etc.
Before AI, any cool project would give back so much more than after AI: experience, a following, a community coming around your project which could increase your social capital. It would even give you momentum, spending a long time working on something which would mark you as someone who works on that type of thing, which could lead you to interesting places.
Nowadays, these fleeting project ideas that you can grind out with AI have the effect of children's art projects: you feel a sense of pride at what you made, you like the way it looks, you may hang it somewhere, but no one else really cares, or if they do care, it's not for long.
The real world is filled with industry know-how, real-life constraints, and monetary risk. I'm almost positive these people don't have millions of dollars lying around to invest in agriculture R&D.
That said, the very rich who are insulated from practically any externality of climate change, many who are actively building doomsday bunkers, may look very keenly at the opportunities a societal upheaval may bring their way.
Imagine the death and destruction caused by the hands of Israel.
Realize that this reaction wasn't necessary. Those who run Israel are adults. They could have chosen a path with much less deaths. They were not forced to commit a genocide, they chose it.
Realize that when people see such pictures, of entire cities completely leveled to the ground, that people get extremely upset. Imagine the place you live reduced to rubble and how atrocious you would find this. The inhabitants of Gaza are humans just like you and the world is justified in their disdain.
Thankfully web browsing is no where near that.