Love the Santa analogy. I often think about AI like the innovation of cars. Cars let us travel for indefinite periods throttled solely by our capability to maintain our attention to the activity. We still walk and bear the limits of walking distances when doing so but stopped looking at walking as a way to get places and instead a form of personal gratification. Walking becomes almost an indulgence. Feels like thinking is getting that way. If you aren’t using AI you are being wasteful despite the irony of AI being immensely wasteful of resources required for life like energy and water.
This is brilliantly diagnosed, but I don’t think it is a necessary conclusion of doom that I feel from the piece. I think what a shrewd “worker” can find is that uncompromising limits (no work past x hour… practicing a sabbath, etc) and a discipline of engaging the tools (writing architectures and problems and specs by hand first, etc) can find a way to engage these tools well. Having said that, im not sure it is possible, but that is what I’m trying to find out for myself.
Thank you very much. I can only draw from the well of my own experience and its waters (when using AI tools) is particularly distasteful. Enough seems ever elusive and “off” all but impossible when I’m “on.”
Rarely have I seen this effect so perfectly encapsulated and crystalised into such a clear analogy. The warning is all too clear: the adamant and rebelious phrase 'Enough is enough' may simply disappear as we realise too late that enough will never be enough.
Truly horrific and dystopian. I felt even more helpless reading this. A pendulum swing between two extremes.
We must keep going and find refuge in our fellow human beings! There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see.
Love the Santa analogy. I often think about AI like the innovation of cars. Cars let us travel for indefinite periods throttled solely by our capability to maintain our attention to the activity. We still walk and bear the limits of walking distances when doing so but stopped looking at walking as a way to get places and instead a form of personal gratification. Walking becomes almost an indulgence. Feels like thinking is getting that way. If you aren’t using AI you are being wasteful despite the irony of AI being immensely wasteful of resources required for life like energy and water.
I love that. I think our interaction with a new technology follows a predictable course: first we embrace it; then we abuse it; then it abuses us.
This is brilliantly diagnosed, but I don’t think it is a necessary conclusion of doom that I feel from the piece. I think what a shrewd “worker” can find is that uncompromising limits (no work past x hour… practicing a sabbath, etc) and a discipline of engaging the tools (writing architectures and problems and specs by hand first, etc) can find a way to engage these tools well. Having said that, im not sure it is possible, but that is what I’m trying to find out for myself.
Thank you very much. I can only draw from the well of my own experience and its waters (when using AI tools) is particularly distasteful. Enough seems ever elusive and “off” all but impossible when I’m “on.”
Rarely have I seen this effect so perfectly encapsulated and crystalised into such a clear analogy. The warning is all too clear: the adamant and rebelious phrase 'Enough is enough' may simply disappear as we realise too late that enough will never be enough.
Thank you, Simon!