Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

Unfinished Side Projects

AI is starting to look like a net negative for humanity. I remember the early days of OpenAI. I was super excited about it. There was a new space to uncover and learn about. I was hopeful.

Now I have this love/hate relationship with it. Claude Code is amazing. I use it everyday because it makes me so much more efficient at my job. But I also know that by using it I’m contributing to making my job redundant one day.

At the same time I see how much resources we are wasting on AI. And to what end? Does anybody really buy the BS that this will all make the world a better place one day? So many people we could shelter and feed, but instead we are spending it on trying to make your computer check and answer your emails for you. At what point do we just look up and ask… what is the damn purpose of all of this? I guess money.

> But I also know that by using it I’m contributing to making my job redundant one day.

I don't see how this is the case if you're anything more than a junior engineer... it unlocks so many possibilities. You can do so much more now. We are more limited by our ideas at this point than anything else.

Why is the reaction of so many people, once their menial work gets automated, "oh no, my menial work is automated." Why is it not "sweet, now I can do bigger/better/more ambitious things?"

(You can go on about corporate culture as the cause, but I've worked at regular corporations and most of FAANG. Initiative is rewarded almost everywhere.)

> Does anybody really buy the BS that this will all make the world a better place one day?

Why is it BS? I'm shocked that anyone with a love and passion for technology can feel this way. Have you not seen the long history of automation and what it has brought humanity?

There is a reason that we aren't dying of dysentery at the ripe age of 45 on some peasant field after a hard winter day's worth of hard labor. The march of automation and technology has already "made the world a better place."

And I’m shocked that anyone into tech can be so blind to the adverse effects the current tech industry is having on our world and our society.

We owe it to the world, as the experts, to be critical. The march of automation and technology has made the world a better place in some ways. I sure love modern medicine, but those drones flying over Ukraine and Russia sure don’t seem like they are making the world a better place. Nuclear bombs are not making the work a better place. Misinformation in social media is not making the world a better place.

Any belief you drink blindly will eventually find a way to harm you.

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Oh yeah, no you are right. Sorry for focusing on that little part of space and time where I and everyone I know and love is alive and being affected by our decisions. How dumb of me!

It actually is genuinely wrong to prioritize your little bit of space and time over the needs of the species as a whole and the benefit of untold future billions.

If everyone thought like you we'd be stuck in the pre-Industrial phase. How miserable that would be!