What enabled us to create AI is the thing it has the power to erase

I totally agree with that feeling.

I have been trying to use AI for coding. Sometimes it is very bad, but I got to learn when it is surprisingly good.

Many times, the AI can show me some code that doesn't work, but that I can simply tune and make work. Many times the resulting code is good: it's not like some copy-pasting by someone who doesn't understand it. In a PR, nobody would think it's an AI, it could have been written by me. It was, in a way.

But intellectually, I did much less. I did not have to imagine what kind of API may exist that solves the problem, or read the documentation about those candidate APIs. I did not have to build the code from the ground up, maybe starting with a simple case, then adding a loop, then going for tail recursion, and back to a loop, etc.

Not doing that admittedly made me more productive. But it really feels like I didn't improve my skills by doing it. I didn't get to discover other parts of the API that I don't need right now but that may be useful later. I didn't get to build my intuition of whether a loop or tail recursion is better here. I just tuned stuff. What happens when I've been doing this for year and now need to debug that code? Will I have the intuition needed to find where it may be failing? Not clear to me.

It feels similar to learning a language: I may understand a lot, and if people talk to me slowly and offer me different alternatives, I may be able to say "yes, the second one!". But by doing that I'm not improving my talking in this language. The only way to get fluent, I feel, is to make this effort of constructing sentences, looking for the words, finding ways or working around words I don't know, etc. If I don't do that, I will never be fluent.

AI makes me more productive now, but may prevent me from becoming fluent at all.

The use of LLMs for constructive activities (writing, coding, etc.) rapidly produces a profound dependence.

Try turning it off for a day or two, you're hobbled, incapacitated. Anecdotally, ThePrimeagen describes forgetting how to write a for/range loop in Go after using CoPilot for a while (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQNyYx2fZXw). Funny stuff.

Competition in the workplace forces us down this road to being utterly dependent. Human intellect atrophies through disuse.

In the arts, we see something different. People don't seem to like AI-generated content. For example, I monitor a random sample of recent pornography (random 4-second slideshow from all over the Internet, some scary stuff, see https://rnsaffn.com/zg3/) and AI-generated porn is still very niche, comparable in frequency to small fetishes like elder or latex or rope porn. I expected it to be more popular, but generally humans prefer something else.

As Tim Cook recently said, (paraphrased) once you start using Apple Intelligence to think and work, it's hard to stop.

Those skills that you no longer use will be lost. This is the profitable new addiction, and programmers like us are the first group of people to become hooked.

This reads like someone who doesn't have a solid understanding of the underpinnings at generative AI.

Every major technology progression has come with 'sky is falling' predictions.

Generative AI accelerates the productivity of productive people, and potentially replaces the efforts of button-pusher types adding minimal value or creative input to a process. Not entirely different than personal computers, robots, locomotives, printing presses, and so on.

As technology evolves, humans lose their capacities as their tools get better.

What's the average human's mental calculation capacities compared to our ancestors when the electronic calculator didn't exist ? Who can calculate integrals by hand nowadays ?

AI is the ultimate tool. Who needs to get a phd when your computer can do the work / solve the task better than you would do and in a fraction of the time you'd require.

Sure there's still gonna be a need for specialists but on average most humans are losing their capacities because their tools get better.

All the AI researchers I know that also happen to be parents will not let their kids NEAR tools like chatgpt and photomath.

No, it's "traditional" things for their kids that are CHALLENGING and require practice, like woodworking, learning an instrument, sports, memorizing texts for fun.

The title is semantically questionable:

- US? - AI has power to erase?

I did not create AI & believe even autonomous AI systems are for time under human moral responsibility.

The effect of AI socially obviously is that there will be no public forums, so we get back to middle ages, except the peasant is smarter & more obedient, which is a good mix for mental health issues.

Regardless, when one needs more data: 1) Pick small nation with slow democracy & bureaucracy 2) Do massive AI horde campaign targeting politicians & keeping them busy 3) Simultaneously ship SpaceX connected drones in crates & humanoid robots. 4) Now the people cannot sleep in peace & you start gathering behavioral surplus very effectively. 5) Sell behavioral data & reinvest in sociological ruin of the government before they close OODA.

The interesting step is what happens when standard baseline human has eventually no more surplus to give. I would guess models develop far enough that you can nudge the non-wallnut humans who don't care about privacy or anything to vote for candidates that then pass laws to outroot more eccentric people by cutting the rights to any sort of privacy.

I personally believe in the instrumentalist view of philosophy of science & endorse the "instrumentarian power" term Zuboff coined for this. It's the very significant difference, Zuboff probably said it also but I cannot recall as I read the work young, that would you rather have no free will and no one else's interest dominates completely over yours or would you rather have no free will and some other human have chosen what matters?

As endgame, such state makes lots of AI alignment literature paradigmatically obsolete.

> the resistance of a surface against a pen or pencil creates an important friction that works its way through your body and into your mind. That resistance is valuable; it forces us to slow down.

Beautifully said and fully agree! In my personal work, I’m always trying to find ways to slow down my thinking when the problems get hard. Even using a pen vs a keyboard is a great way to do this.

AI is quickly blurring the line between makers and curators.

If the next wave of advancement in logo-generating AI will allow us to converse with it meaningfully and work with it as a creative director might work with her associate designer, is it really a fatal flaw that the AI is not able to conjure up an editable PSD file? Is it really necessary that the AI produce a pile of sketches that led to the final product instead of working backwards from the final design to fake a trail of inspirations?

As curators we still need to slow down and take our time to ensure that the design we select is a good fit for whatever requirements we're working towards. I don't think a blazing fast AI necessarily erases that or takes that option away from us.

It's a nice essay but the premise that human intelligence and creativity will be erased because we'll have AI to do it seems a bit silly. I know a lot of people who use LLMs and it seems mostly unchanged in them.

I wonder... LLMs currently work because they have a huge corpus of data to train against. Data generated by humans.

What happens when almost all available data is computer-generated? When no new training datasets are available? Will the models feed back on themselves? Will they stagnate and cease improving?

Perhaps we'll enter a world where everything new and unique made by human authors (text, art, source code) is jealously guarded in an attempt to keep the LLMs out - lest even a single model learn it and spread it to all the others almost instantly making the original author's work worthless.

Image-to-vector software will produce an editable file out of a logo image.

And there is AI for that! Within seconds of searching I found something called Vectorizer.AI, and others.

Not sure how well they work, but the basic premise is that you could use any text-to-image AI to come up with a logo and then image to vector AI to create SVG that is likely editable.

If that doesn't work well today, it likely will in two or three years.

Technology has diminishing returns. If technology does everything for us then what's the point of existing.

That's why it's so important for R1 to show the reasoning. The creative process has to be transparent and easily understood.

What evolved intelligent life is processes that intelligent life has the power to erase.

This, but all civilized society.

Vaccines are a great example.

I’m curious why the author choose to publish his message on the internet vs. walking door to door to spread it.

It’s almost as if his desire to use technology was to collapse the process between idea and transmission.

I appreciate a nostalgia for process to some extent. I enjoyed my 200km walk across the mountains Corsica far more than the plane ride from New Mexico to France…

However it’s possible that you can actually become more aware of and participate in the larger process.

Are I here to spend a month hand drawing my logo and refining it, or am I here to build an AI disaster response system to save a million lives?

While I can see the appeal of these sort of arguments, and agree with much of it, I’m not sold on the value of process in itself in the larger arc of the process of creating actual value for the world.