by pessimizer | 2025-11-26 17:39:30+00:00
I vaguely agree with the fake conclusions at the end, which are vapid and do not arise from the arguments. "Be kind to babies, brush your teeth twice a day, always tip the waitstaff, blah blah blah whatever Bernie said, etc..."

The real conclusion is:

> No matter how well “AI” works, it has some deeply fundamental problems, that won’t go away with technical progress.

which you can tell from the title. There are zero arguments made to support this. It's just faux-radical rambling. I'm amazed how people are impressed by this privileged middle-class babble. This is an absolutely empty-headed article that AI could spit out dozens of versions of.

I care how well your AI works. I also care how it works, like I care about how transistors work. I do not want to build my own transistors*, although I like to speculate about how different ones could be built, just like I like to think about different machine learning architectures. The skills that I learned when I learned computers put me in an ideal position to understand, implement, and use machine learning.

The reason I care about how well your AI works is because I am going to use it to accomplish my own goals. I am not going to fetishize being a technician in an art most people don't know, I am not a middle-class profession worshiper. I get it, your knowledge of a rare art guarantees that you eat. If your art becomes obviated by technology (like the art of doing math by hand, which you could once live very well on from birth to death), you have to learn something else.

But I care how well your AI works because I am trying to accomplish things in the world, not build an identity. I think AI is bad, and I'm a bit happy that it's bad, because it means that I can use it to bridge myself to the next place before it gets good enough not to need me. The fact that I know how computers work means that I can make the AI do what I want in a way that somebody who didn't have my background couldn't. The first people that were dealing with computers were people who were good at math.

Life is not going to be good for the type of this year's MBP js programmer who learned it because the web was paying, refused to learn anything else so only gradually became a programmer after node came around, and only used the trendy frameworks that it seemed they were hiring for, who still has no idea how a computer works. AI is actually going to give everything back to the nerds, because AI assistance might eventually mean you're only limited by your imagination (within the context of computers.) Nerds are imaginative. The kind of imagination that has been actively discouraged in tech for a long time, since it became a profession for marketers and middlemen.

I almost guarantee this call for craftsmen against AI is coming from someone who builds CRUD apps for a living. To not be excited about what AI can do for the things that you already wanted to create, the things you dream of and couldn't find enough people with enough skills to dream with you to get it done; to me that's a sign that you're just not into computers.

My fears of AI is that it will be nerfed, made so sycophantic that it sucks down credits and gets distracted so often that it makes it impossible to work, be used to extract my ideas and give them to someone with more capital and manpower who can jump in front of me (the Amazon problem), that governments will be bribed into making it impossible to run them locally, that governments will be bribed into letting corporations install them on all our computers so they can join in on the surveillance and control. I'm worried about the speakwrite. I'm worried about how it will make dreams possible for evil men. I am not worried about losing my identity. I'm not insecure like that.

* although I have of course, in school, by stringing a bunch of NANDs together. I was a pioneer of the WAS-gate, which is when you turn on the power and a puff of smoke comes out of one of your transistors.