Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI? Do such people think that AI is truly miraculous and should be made as advanced as possible as quickly as possible? |
Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI? Do such people think that AI is truly miraculous and should be made as advanced as possible as quickly as possible? |
On the contrary, my experience is that Gen-X programmers are far more sentimental about the machine and languages, while Millenials have been raised in the cult of the VC backed startup money printing machine.
Just compare the zeitgeist of Slashdot circa 2000 with the ethos of HN nowadays.
Even our management is pretty honest about this. Our in-house AI platform running near-frontier models from the larger vendors requires manual confirmation of every command executed on a company machine. It's tedious, but aside from establishing a clear line of blame if the AI does something screwy, it also forces you to step through the AI's analysis which can be quite educational.
Interestingly, he hasn’t tried to do any coding with it. Though I didn’t send him a couple ideas for using AI to create basic throw away tools that I thought might be useful for his classes, if he wanted to explore that avenue.
Most of the folks I talk to in my age group are somewhere between anti-AI and "AI works for specific use cases". I find it is the younger folk who think it is miraculous and want to use it everywhere.
80s hobbiest programmers are GenX, and maybe most execs are GenX, but that doesn’t mean both groups share the same opinions.
Given I started on an Apple IIe with a green screen and basic, and have since had to shift languages and techniques repeatedly over the decades, I have to be someone that embraces new technology if I want to stay relevant and productive.
This means that I will adopt things that make sense and AI does make sense.
Moment we create software liability and enforce them, is that moment AI will ship-up or shape-out )I know it's backward(.
I think AI is a great tool, but requires safeguards. I use it every day, but I use a lot of tools to reign it in, keep it on task, check its results, and force it to follow an engineering process.
I don't know about the "as quickly as possible" part, since there needs to be guardrails, but improving AI should be done sooner rather than later. e.g, instead of training to give the answer it thinks you want to hear, it should be trained to give provably correct answers. instead of being trained and fine tuned and then let loose, it should be able to continuously learn and improve.
While people keep chasing tokens/second and vibe-coding, I'm more interested in correct results per kWh, sustainable and ethical AI. Also, I'm worried that there will be an increasing digital divide between the wealthy and the rest of us, so I do want AI to be available and not locked up just for corporations and governments.
To me, the fun is solving problems, and AI let's me solve more problems, harder problems and more quickly. I was happy to move from assembler programming to high level programming languages, to 4GL, to frameworks, tech stacks, etc. Moving to AI coding is just another shift in solving problems at a higher level with more productivity.
hacking microprocessors was fun. building complex systems using AI is fun, too.
But the majority isn't. In the same manner, the math people who were enthusiastic about AI (before Navier Stokes was proven by a human guided AI!) are the ones that are terminally online and were enthusiastic about Lean before. You simply don't hear about the rest.
Opposing AI under one's real name is dangerous, so one does not get an accurate picture.
And no, I'm not "overwhelmingly" pro-AI. Especially since many of us know that the AI concept is storied and goes a long time even before our generation, and this LLM-based AI isn't really AI in a proper sense.
This "AI" has some good uses, granted, but the cost-benefit ratio is stupidly bad. For all the benefits that I can see with AI, if this means that I have to put up with scrapers aggressively ruining the Web, data centers gobsmacking available resources, and getting GPU and memory prices gouged to death on me, I'd rather pass. It's not an attractive proposition, simply stated.
Worse yet, I teach; and AI-enabled cheating is making my work much harder.
So, pardon me if I'm a little unenthusiastic about this newfangled artificial intelligence that isn't.
Should the industry go this way, there very possibly will be some reckoning later with a misaligned model.
That said, there are certainly less risky ways to use LLMs positively in development!
It aligns with my general thoughts about mastering a craft.
The thing is 80's hobby programmers also read a ton of science fiction which, unironically, was very pro-tech but also explored the social impact of tech.
Case-in-point: My favorite AI novel of that era was "The Adolescence of P1" which starts with an engineer innocently prompting P1 to dig a foundation for a moonbase as efficiently as possible. He expected it to start deploying robot construction equipment and take a week or two. Instead, P1 redirects a massive cargo of moon rocks in orbit and blows a crater in a few minutes from space.
From there, P1 propagates itself and gains control of everything from the global "Internet" to power grids to all nuclear bases and satellites. Not good.
We THOUGHT numerous cautionary tales like this would inspire rigorous "alignment" guardrails and controls once we needed them but, no. ... It turns out even when AI experts and CEOs themselves are saying there's a "10% chance of total human annihilation" by AI, our government and the tech oligarchs are kind of, sort of, thinking about, maybe, instituting controls.
Please, go back and read more science fiction.
But that's not the point. Science Fiction (speaking generally) takes a specific hypothesis, and then imagines a society that derives from that.
For example "The Space Merchants" (Pohl & Kornbluth, 1952) imagined a world run by advertising. Or "Profession" (Azimov, 1957) explores education. I offer these as the tip of a large iceberg.
Science Fiction is seldom about science. It's mostly about people and society interacting with that science. It doesn't seek to predict science advances, but rather predict how those advances will affect the society we live in.
Sure Terminator isn't real. (And frankly not something I'm terribly worried about.) But the impact of AI on society is real, and that impact will manifest in ways we have predicted (eg the movie Her) and in ways we've not yet explored.
What happens when there are no engineers left? Nobody knows how to use a slide-rule anymore because we have machines to do that work. What happens when building a bridge becomes "Claude please design a bridge", which it does then perfectly well? Why should coders, or accountants, or engineers even exist in a world where AI exists?
That's the kind of question Science Fiction sets out to answer.
I am not pro AI nor anti AI. since machine learning is not an interest of mine and is not programming I simply have no interest in it.
im also not interested in being a consumer of machine learning products as it relates to my profession.
If I need solutions coded with automation code generators are much faster and reliable. i write them all the time.
The only benefit I derive as a consumer of machine learning at this time is to avoid using the degraded and near useless google search engine for minor lookups of trivia I dont commit to memory. And I do value this very much given the pathetic state of internet search.
As an engineer I can do everything I need and want to do and dont need help building systems. People who do frequently need help enjoy machine learning consumerism more than I do.
As far as what I want in regards to machine learning in the workplace is to be allowed to do my job and not be bothered to use a bunch of junk I dont need.
and the noise around LLMs is annoying and I am anti building data centers and destroying general purpose computing over some corporate lust for power just because an LLM can string a few sentences together.
I am also vehemently against the massive theft of copyrighted content to train LLMs and view LLM output as a form of obfuscated theft.
Now, hobby entrepreneurs, that’s different.
It feels like going from walking to running. Love it!