alt Hacker NewsHickey is being a bit narrow sighted here, and ignoring some of the ways that humans are using AI outside of coding.
I’m someone that is, and has been, for most of my career, someone from the in-between lands. I don’t use paper maps from the gas station, but I have not coded much.
I basically grew up with DOS 1.0 and on. Often made a living being able to sit at a Windows workstation and think and persist so I could figure out in four hours what other people could not, in that buggy strange world of microcomputers many of us grew up in.
Those situations, now, often take me five minutes to get past, instead of four hours. It has been a game changer for me.
Replies
Yes, a bit of a thought bicycle, as Jobs envisioned computers - perhaps more than a bicycle though because the cognition is not limited to my own powers but also the distilled powers of past men.
A ghost bicycle?
I figure it still requires someone who can pedal and knows where they want to go before you get anywhere useful, and perhaps that slightly aligns with Hickey's point. But on the whole I feel like Hickey is arguing about the meaning of words, which is shrug-worthy.
Heres another view. A tool is something you buy or use to accomplish a task. Its a commodity everyone buys a hammer to bang in those nails. AI is the same here, everybody thinks they are developing a new calendar app, they are actually developing the SAME calendar app. The person didnt actually develop anything they simply used the tool to accomplish the same goal.
The creativity and skill of the craftsman is gone. Craftsman/woman create new and unique or different things because they understand the problems or goals and create.
THe people using AI mostly dont know the basics of software and tahts part of the problem why we see really dumb mistakes, like little or no security.