interesting perspective. as a creative - i’m a digital product designer I feel like AI gives me superpowers to do things that i wasn’t able to do before, and the things that I was able to - i can do much faster now.
I can bring my design to life and instead of static screens or a buggy prototype, I can share a working prototype with the company and customers. they can play around with it, experience it like a real product. it’s a much better experience and it’s way quicker than if I designed it manually.
obviously, there is still work I do manually, but that’s mostly the exploratory phase where I design things by hand and use AI to reuse the patterns and design language across other items.
I’m using AI in my work for over 1.5 years, I see how it’s evolving but it’s still far from solving all the issues and being good enough in creative fields.
when it comes to the replacement of employees - I still think that good taste matters a lot. AI is not good enough with it. you can have less, but more experienced people doing more stuff, but you still need good thinking and good taste, especially in the era where everything looks the same and is mostly AI slop.
I can see it in my company - people use AI to generate design and it’s awful.
but also it all might change in the next months/years, who knows
It’s worth remembering that, while Luddite has been conveniently redefined as a regressive oaf who is scared of technology, the actual Luddites were skilled, intelligent people who correctly identified that factory owners would use machines to consolidate their power and reduce the rights and privileges of workers. And Luddites didn’t simply want machines to be destroyed, they wanted them to be regulated, they wanted stronger workers’ protections and they wanted people to be compensated for work lost due to automation. Pretty insightful given that Marx hadn’t even been born yet.
The arguments that factory workers made in favour of their unrestricted use of new technology were unsurprisingly very familiar: it’ll make products more affordable, it’ll create new jobs, it’s impossible to stop the tide of progress, and if we don’t embrace it we’ll be outcompeted by rival nations.
They were trying to defend their own privileged position weren’t they?
Nobody is owed a job though, it’s better to take the attitude of making yourself useful to a degree that people would be foolish not employ you/buy your product. As opposed to demanding nothing in the world changes so that you don’t have to change either.
@odd_sundays posting here to avoid dragging the other thread off topic.
I’ll be clear: I’m not interested in a debate or discussion, and will not respond to any responses to this. This is simply my opinion, because you asked.
People are going to tire of spending hundreds - or thousands - on tokens to do this stuff. The ai companies are going to jack up the price at some point because ight now they’re losing tens of billions of dollars. This is the tech company playbook for the last 10-20 years.
People will get bored. The dopamine drip feed from the addiction will fade at some point.
I am not denying the power and utility of AI as a tool. I’ve found ways in which agentic tools in particular are helpful in small parts of my job. I am denying the long-term life expectancy of the current vibe-coding surge for casual end-users. Hardcore people will keep going, but the casual users will burn out or get bored at some point, as they do with literally everything.
I think there is a paradigm shift here. I just don’t think it’s sustainable for the average person, because the economics don’t make sense and because people are fickle.
nope. very well said and reasoned. the economics of tokens is something i had not considered at all, so thank you. and i agree, we all got sucked into ride share and food delivery the same exact way. i can’t predict where all of this is going but i can say you made a couple of great points.
also right now we’re at the point in time where every company feels pressure to use AI in one form or another, because it makes certain things faster and nobody wants to be left behind
which leads to people running like headless chickens and burning tokens like crazy
Some interesting takes and discussion happening here, one thing is for certain the technology is here to stay, and just like other technological eras after the dust settles, and the hype dies down it will become part of the background of modern life.
Fax machines
Copper telephone lines
8-track tapes
Laserdisc players
Esperanto
“The blockchain”
Thalidomide
Ether
Non-smoking sections on airplanes
Joe Camel
Lead paint
Asbestos roof tiles
Leaded gasoline
NFTs
Just because a technology shows up and gets adopted by some folks does not mean it is here to stay, even if it solves a genuine problem. This kind of forgone-conclusion thinking is why every house in my neighborhood has a decommissioned oil tank rotting away under its front yard.
LLM AIs might well go away, or at least be relegated to niche tasks, but only once a new more powerful mathematical idea comes about that can supplant it. Probably something far more elegant that doesn’t require all the world’s data to be useful.
In the cases of the majority of those things in that list; they were phased out but importantly the need for something that addressed that problem or use case remained. We still need fire resistant stuff so other materials took the place of asbestos, we still need long distance communication so fiber optic or wireless replaced copper lines. We still wanted handy ways to deliver media so DVD and then streaming happened.
Yep. I mentioned oil and asbestos for a reason. No one wants to freeze to death or have their house catch on fire.
At the same time, I live in an area that is paying dearly for the technological advances of my grandparents’ generation.
The same knife that sticks the sheep will stick the goat.
Or as my uncle said to me on the phone just now (he’s retired so he spends all day thinking up this shit), “what’s good for the proper goose is good for the propagander.”
One of the biggest disconnects for me is that I deliberately acquire hardware to get away from forced obsolescence. I have reveled in the durable high quality threads in elektronauts.
The stack of computer and tablet technology is susceptible to rug pulls, vulnerable to failure of anything in the stack - including exploits or simple retirement of “licensing”. I’m not anti-daw; I use them all the time.
Flooding forums dedicated to discussion of the instruments I use with zero-day home brew software development, whether deep or shallow, lowers QOL for me.
It all is a little bit like those replicators in star trek. A very early version of course. But somehow it is. So noone will buy expensive software anymore soon, instead we replicate custom hardware. And for people that don´t like custom stuff, there a replication presets. Giv me a DAW thats focussed on beatmaking. I like red and blue. So instead choosing presets in Ableton you go one layer obove and let yourself replicate a DAW. Strange times.
