Something a friend and I were discussing today was that you can’t really avoid AI and remain productive right now. (We both teach university Computer Science.)
Ignoring how so much of modern society is running on it, you’d have to complete isolate to avoid it and it’s reach entirely.
Additionally, the tooling and infrastructure to support how things were done just a few years ago has all been stripped away. Online search is ass on every major engine right now, most of the forums are dead, documentation and discussion lives inside of private Discord channels. It feels like there just isn’t a back to go back to anymore.
They weren’t using their brains before ai, what made you think they would now?
Are YOU using your brain right now?
Semi-related: I turned off spellcheck and autocorrect for a month to see what happens. Turns out I’m more dependant on it than I realized.
I can totally turn it off, but it’s going to slow me way down as I’d re-read everything and go back and make edits.
True. I’m also using it a little bit to much. And also a little problem for me. Using Spellcheck for two Languages.
did they work prior?
I’ve been hoping that something like this would happen for what feels like too long at this point.
You are assuming they worked to begin with.
AI has been an amazing tool for those with no ability to think, to operate slightly like a person who can.
Like a peg leg helps a amutee walk. The issue is they are using to run and claiming they are the fastest.
The funny thing is my friend was all on the AI train. Lately he finally agrees with me that it’s trash, they had him use it at work and he spent more time fixing the code.
Seeing a sharp decrease in productivity, I’m sure they would take it as a sign that AI is effective.
The global economy is probably already dependent on some Claude code instance updating an Excel spreadsheet on someone’s laptop with a note ”don’t close the lid!” attached to it
When I was a teenager I used to work at an airport and they had critical infrastructure running on things like Basic and Assembly, to transfer data between the computers and modern systems you have to use floppy disks because the computers that they ran on didn’t have drivers to support USB and we couldn’t upgrade the computers because the software wouldn’t work on any other hardware.
So the AI laptop will be at home amongst all the ancient but supercritical junk that seems to be necessary to run our world.
At a previous job, I had to build laptops that would multi-boot DOS, Win95, Win98, and XP, all on one laptop. Our field-tech’s software had to have those specific versions of windows for the machines that they serviced, because of how the software interacted with USB and embeded floppy drives.
If you want to scare yourself:
spoiler
They serviced Medical devices: X-rays, MRIs, CT-Scanners, etc.
That’s dumb. The “work” in maintaining this excel file was the prompting and overall agent logic. In reality you’d be using something like openrouter and the instant claude “dies” for whatever reason you swap to whatever the freshest AI is. This never becomes ancient, it keeps up with the times.
Reminds me of some stupid company maybe a few months ago that had their PRs failing due to copilot being down the dumbasses didn’t build an “if no AI” failsafe into their workflow. And no one knew how to recover it
I know my work already has reports built by running data through Claude and having it spit out an xls. Though, it’s not quite as integral as the all-important closet laptop.
I write well enough for the e-mails I’m required to send, I don’t code, I have no use/desire to generate “art,” and I don’t like search results I have to double check so I’ve been blessed (cursed?) to not have to use “AI” in my daily life.
If we shutdown AI there’d also be a massive hiring spree and wages would probably tick up a bit to compensate. AI is just the latest scam to suppress workers and wages. They want perpetual suffering for us and infinite gains for themselves.
…and only 4 years in.
Eff it. Turn off the internet and see if folks can figure out the Dewey Decimal System
Then you have to hope the library still has a card catalog to fall back on.
You can’t do what you never learned in the first place
As a millennial the only positive of LLMs is that younger generations won’t threaten my career
They will if you don’t use AI though
Don’t believe you, seems like useless nonsense to me
Considering how much competitive jobs have become refusing to use a powerful tool like AI won’t help. I’m not saying that you should use it just that people using it will be advantaged over these who don’t
I work in a creative industry, as far as we are concerned it is plagiarism
It is also non deterministic crap that developers should know better than to use
I work in a creative industry, as far as we are concerned it is plagiarism
AI can be useful in pretty much every field, if you are shoveling snow llms can help you making a plan and draw a route to do it faster
We have path finding algorithms. Large Language Models aren’t suited for that.
Probably speaking to the choir here, but I do feel it is worth pointing out that those same algorithms were considered AI until like 3-5 years ago when the zeitgeist shifted to AI=Transformers/LLMs
I know enough to understand it’s useless, it will fall apart when the psychosis wears off
Video generators are becoming excellent and image generators already are, what makes you think people will give up on these tools? The industry is already adapting, 1/3 of the ads you see now are made with AI
As a millenial looking to change careers, because I was done with the old one. No, it sucks!
I agree. I am more than happy to pass the torch when the time comes. I certainly don’t want to work forever, but I also want to be able to train competent replacements at some point.
Hint: they don’t
