- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
If today was ten years ago, this article would be excellent science fiction. It’s long, and written by someone I’d like to punch in the head, but it’s gotta be read and I couldn’t stop.
Anyone who wants to debunk it, tell me it’s all wrong, I’d sure appreciate that so please do, because it reads like the end of everything.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.
… Imagine it’s 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface. What would a national security advisor say?
First, I don’t like the implication there that AI is “thinking”. It doesn’t equate.
Second, while they might get better, they’re not as good as the author claims, and his evidence is anecdotal at best. I can give anecdotal evidence as well: we just let go of a trial hire because their code quality was so bad (turns out they used AI). Another one of my coworkers sometimes uses AI to write nix for my work projects and it’s always needlessly verbose, and it also sometimes leads to actually useless code that’s already implemented better in a module that we use; also when asked if my modules are correct, the AI says they’re not, while they actually are (just not structured like most modules you find). In most cases, usage of AI has increased the workload for others. And these are examples from 2026 mind you.
I already mentally skip AI summaries because chances are they’re wrong; obviously, this is true for everything, but it’s been painfully ridiculous with AI. An example from my life, I used Google to search for “is train X on time”, with one of the first results being a third party site tracking all delays for that line and correctly showing that it was delayed by an hour. Meanwhile, the AI assured me it was on time. Now you might say “of course, it can’t reflect such recent events” (which then wouldn’t be agentic, but whatever…), but then why present me with the factually wrong information in the first place?
We’ll see how all this turns out.
Whoops, my original comments above were written for my blog, where everyone knows I’m anti-AI, so yeah lemme state clearly, I don’t buy into the author’s subtext. It’s definitely more gee-whiz and “AI is thinking” than I’d endorse. To me the article is a report from behind enemy lines, telling me that even the enemy is starting to worry.