AI Has Already Destroyed Our Minds, Not via Skynet
Everybody's Lost Their Minds
A security engineer argues that AI has already caused massive harm: wasting engineering resources on vulnerability discovery while patching remains the bottleneck, accelerating environmental damage, and dulling users' skills. The real superhuman intelligence is collective madness, not recursive self-improvement.
AI is the tool that dulls its users; it incrementally replaces understanding with a new dependency and addiction as you actively de-skill yourself.
- BadBadJellyBean
I feel this post. I am tired of "directing" agents when in reality it feels more like trying to herd a group of toddlers.
Sure they can mostly write better code than a toddler but this constant nudging and reminding and reiterating and stopping them from using the token budget of the whole company for a one off script. It gets tiring and I feel like I am losing brain power while doing it. Maybe it's faster but explosive diarrhea is also a faster way to produce shit.
- kragen
This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example.
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring […]
- 8bitsrule
I enjoyed this lovely rant by Timnit Gebru today. It's titled something like "AI companies are stoking fears of extinction to avoid discussing actual harms,"
- grebc
I’ve had a pet theory for a long time that society loses it’s collective mind every 10ish years or so, usually starting with a good reason, but the outcome is mass stupidity followed by mass forgetting leading to a new cycle. War on terror, GFC, crypto, covid, now AI. Although the cycle does seem to be shortening.
Also we’re just so damn stupid to learn from history, or even just people 10 years older than us, that we repeat the cycle.
And there I guess is where saying a new sucker is born every minute is from.
- sandinmyjoints
> human resources are still a zero-sum game, and every individual feeling super busy in their agentic silo doing a thousand things at once does not, in the end, help solve the kinds of projects that require cross-functional collaboration and team work.
This rings true.
- bucket2015
It's interesting how there's an increasing split of software engineers into those who're very happy with AI and leaning more into it, and those who're increasingly skeptical or dejected.
I don't know how this will play out, but I haven't seen anything like this before.
- limaoscarjuliet
I hated AI from the start, but then gradually warmed up to it. It does help me to write code. And it gets better every day, sometimes literally.
Today I think it is a tool. Like a framer's nail gun. It helps us to be faster and potentially better at what we do. Oh, and got to ride Waymo recently and it got me places, alive and well. So it does some things right.
But the true answer is not so simple. A friend of mine recently asked me a question: "My child wants to go into software dev, should I let him?" Well, crap, maybe consider something else?
- 3pm
I think there were always two camps when it came to writing code, a strong bimodal distribution. People that care about the perceived code quality (aka the ‘craft’) and people who treat the code as a means to an end. At least I always felt this tension. And there is always an exception, and a person can shift between two camps during the same day. But would generally lean towards one. I know I do. And one is not better than the other, they could both be very smart and well meaning. And you need both for success in a for-profit business. It’s been discussed ad nauseam but one particular metaphor I like is Jesus Christ vs James Bond. James Bond would win most of the time. Most people tend to think like James Bond, and if they don’t, the organization strongly nudges them in this direction, promotions get decided and it becomes self reinforcing.
Now a new powerful tool shows up and I think it is time for the Jesus Christ camp to throw in the towel.