What AI Developers Could Learn from Charles Bukowski
What AI developers could learn from Charles Bukowski?
Charles Bukowski taught that creative blocks are temporary and that forcing output often leads to poor quality. Instead of obsessing over shipping code with AI tools, developers should embrace waiting, reject bad work early, and spend time with loved ones. True creativity comes from patience and self-rejection, not from burning out to produce endless lines of code.
It's always better to reject yourself before the editors do.
- drunken_thor
This is why there is growing anti-AI sentiment. It is always extractive. You can never just enjoy a poem, you need to use it. You need to extract its value for shareholders. Get a life.
- andai
All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. plumbers don't get plumbers block, and doctors don't get doctors block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working and then expects sympathy for it?
—Philip Pullman
- MisterTea
> If I had access [to AI] back then, I'd probably just spend more time on the beach.
If AI were marketed like this it would not be appealing to employers. So of course AI marketing is wrapped in hustle culture. Gotta keep the worker bees busy.
- andai
>Why aren't we spending more time on the beach.
I think this comes down to getting paid per effort invested (measured in time) vs getting paid for the result.
If the average person were self-employed and received income proportional to their economic output, then they would be rewarded for working faster, instead of punished.
If they increased their productivity, by means of technology, they could then simply choose to work fewer hours.[0]
I noticed this before AI. If someone does the same job twice as fast, do they deserve half as much compensation?
What if they find a way to automate an entire process? What if they replace months of "manual labor" (tedious refactoring) with a perl script that produces the same result, deterministically?
A friend of mine once automated a woman's entire job away. He thought he was doing her a favour, freeing her from the drudgery, so she could focus on the other parts of the job. She wasn't so happy, when she revealed to him, that there weren't any.
---
[0] But most people aren't in such a position, and have to stay the required number of hours regardless of how much has been achieved. And I'm increasingly hearing reports of some kind of burnout resulting from being expected to keep up with machines that work a thousand times faster than you.
And that's now... Just wait until the big providers switch to Cerebras in a week or two!
(Though at that token speed, the silver lining is the work becomes interactive again, so if you use it correctly, […]
- furyofantares
Some of it is fun and new, I'm spending a lot of time just making stuff I wanna make.
But regarding work produced for the marketplace, I think it is naive to think any productivity gains will ever produce more time on the beach for workers. The market is competitive. Some gains will be seized by capital, and others realized in the production of some combination of more stuff, cheaper stuff, or better stuff.