"The human species can change its own nature. What will it choose? Will it remain the same, teetering on a jerrybuilt foundation of partly obsolete Ice Age adaptations? Or will it press on toward still higher intelligence and creativity ...?" - E.O. Wilson "On Human Nature"

Does the Golden Rule perhaps apply here? If aliens visit Earth and can't quite decide whether we're conscious or not, how would we want them to treat us?

Every generation of engineers believes they experienced the "real" era when things were understandable / meaningful. The people who mastered punch cards probably felt the same way when keyboards took over. The people who wrote in assembly probably felt the same way when C came around.

Abstraction didn't start with AI. It's been a defining feature of computing since the beginning.

For most developers, writing code has never been the point. Rather, it's been a tool: a means to build something useful, solve a problem, support a family, etc. The craft evolves and so must we.

Posts like this expose the risk in tying one's identity to a specific version of the game. When the rules change, it's a loss. That's human! But the deeper skill - judgment, taste, style, etc. — hasn’t gone anywhere. If anything, it matters more when raw output becomes cheap.

We can mourn the loss of forced difficulty, or we can choose new challenges. No doubt that's harder when one has spent decades mastering a specific skill, but it's still a choice.

The magic was never the machine. Rather, it's the _agency_.

And that’s still available!

Chosen difficulty is a huge part of being human (music, art, athletics, games, etc.). AI hasn't taken that away.

- Seneca, "On Anger"

Sad to see such an otherwise wise/intelligent person fall into one of the oldest of all cognitive errors, namely, the certainty of one’s own innocence.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43392514

Points: 1

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40396240

Points: 8

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38539736

Points: 1

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In 2023, "Getting betting at programming" means learning how to use an AI.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37526146

Points: 3

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The basic idea is that when everyone in a crowd makes a prediction or an estimate, the average of all those guesses will often be more accurate than any individual's opinion because individual errors, biases, and idiosyncrasies tend to cancel each other out in a large enough group.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32783163

Points: 14

# Comments: 14