Absolutely right! Honestly, I hate AI even though it COULD make me 10x more productive in what I do. I can think of a dozen tasks that AI could help me with.

Audio processing for instance: I process audio by hand, it's more of a rote task, and it takes me hours a week to do it. AI COULD give me what I want in probably one minute. One minute instead of one hour.

But firstly, I've built up my audio processing skill over years and I enjoy it. It's calming. It's not creative, thinking up new stuff-type work but it's calming. And secondly, I want to do things myself. I don't want to let a machine do everything so I can concentrate on the high level stuff.

In fact, what I've found is that my mind works best when I'm NOT concentrating on high-level stuff. When I just go about my tasks by hand.

Do I write code to save time? Yes I do. But I write the code by hand and I understand how things work from first principles, as far as possible of course.

So, I don't use AI. AI could take away hours of work for me and I don't use it because I hate it and I hate the idea it represents.

There is no study showing a 10x productivity improvement. There are a few studies showing a productivity decrease.

> Why are they being forced to that dubious trade?

Because it's just the prisoner's dilemma in disguise. Most people don't really like the idea of AI, a lot of people especially outside of programming hate it, and I bet deep down inside a lot of programmers would prefer if AI never existed.

But it's easier to say that AI will bring great wonders because the alternative is acknowledging the reality - the diminishing returns of technology. And that brings a lot of cognitive dissonance if you're a programmer.

It wasn't programmers who brought us the idea that all problems, obstacles and goals can be conceptualised as an insufficiency of code, apps or gadgets, without any thought to politics, negative externalities, institutions, or philosophy.

That came from SV technocrats and associated capital owners.

I am a professional programmer whose employers have compelled me to use genAI.

I have no qualms about saying I hate it, every workday is utterly miserable, I can see my skills eroding, and I see almost nothing but downside to it.

FWIW, a past manager once dubbed me "the Luddite programmer," a badge I wore with pride.

Make no mistake, I do love computers, and writing software. Steve Jobs' metaphor of a "bicycle for the mind" captures well the role they played for me in my teens and twenties.

Alas, LLMs are like a freight train for shipping all minds to one destination, instead of freeing them to all find their individual ways to unique places.

...and also, the freight train's destination is hell.

I'm not sure it maps well to game theory. I think it's more of a false dilemma.

There is the old adage in many academic fields that "progress happens one funeral at a time." It's an age-old, rueful take on how our own learning and adaptation proceeds within a collective society. It is a rendering of an objective truth seen at the intersection of evolutionary processes, memetics, and the human condition. It is not a call to action.

Sometimes, I think the most worrisome thing is the ever so slight possibility that some clever, naive upstart will hear this adage and, rather than ponder the lesson about patience and complex social systems, instead conclude that the short path to a lot of progress is a bunch of killing.

Even if we ignore the obvious psychopathy it takes to embrace such an idea, it is still fantastically myopic. Yes, in a hypothetical way it might happen... after the great chaos, some new civilization might emerge with an impressive growth spurt.

But, it is infantile fantasy to believe that such chaos can be applied in a goal-directed fashion, or that the perpetrator(s) can expect to survive it and enjoy the result. Nobody can control who nor what knowledge passes through the gauntlet, nor what direction it spins after that.

What troubles me most, perhaps, is that the current zeitgeist makes me think some people are oblivious to these caveats.

> What troubles me most, perhaps, is that the current zeitgeist makes me think some people are oblivious to these caveats.

Same here. "Are we all going crazy?" is the feeling I often have.

I don't know if the OP is opposed - maybe they just want an explanation? I mean saying something is ironic isn't really a harsh insult or a bash.

I agree mostly, but people won't necessarily have to buy stuff in the future. If the rich can operate an autonomous supply chain from raw materials extraction to manufacture with AI and robots, then they don't even need the economy to function. They can just bypass a people-working economy altogether.

I don't understand this perspective. Not all change is analogous to previous change. For instance, human beings invented the automatic rifle, but we never even thought of implementing a global non-profileration treaty like we tried with nuclear weapons.

AI could possibly throw the world into a great chaos. We've seen financial collapses before like the great depression. Who's to say that something even more disastrous couldn't happen with a tool that's unlike one we've ever seen before that can replace labor a lot faster than any tool we've ever seen before?

Tools are never just tools: they also influence the change of society to a great extent and societies have breaking points. Sales, management, and maintenance could eventually be automated also.

Lots of people would have sworn a decade ago that creative mathematical thinking was outside the domain of a machine. Now look what's happened.

I think you have to accept that life is full of change. The world all around you is changing and you are best prepared by not having a fixed mindset or rigid skill set.

Regardless of how automated parts of society become, there will always be a need for someone to do something.

You should always tinker and experiment with new things, that’s where you find opportunity.

I think that's a pretty odd framing, because the upsides are pretty relative and lopsided to those receiving certain benefits. The people who are anti-AI often are those who can acknowledge that AI does cool stuff, but that it's not worth it and doesn't provide any real benefit except by helping people keep up in a frenetic arms race to develop new tech.

Personally, I'm against AI but even if it could never be smarter than us and if it were at the state that it was last year, I'd still be against it due to the environmental cost.

I'm mildly pro but agree on the environmental costs. I think they should try to make it green energy only though not much chance with the current US admin. I'm not so enthused with current AI. I use last years like language translation a lot and I'm interested in the possible sci-fi future like curing diseases, some sort of immortality, abundance etc.