Why I am not going to buy a computer

datakan

The uncanny valley is happening with enterprise work. My boss is in love with Copilot writing documentation that we've sorely needed for many years. He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before. We do this and then no one reads it. I've asked people about it and they seem disillusioned. It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. They view it as AI writing documentation for another AI to summarize to them and then another AI to reply or comment. So they don't care or are actively repulsed by it. I think AI has a long uphill battle in winning over the average Joe.

ge96

I like buying old flagships since I couldn't afford them like 5-10 years ago. Still a few on my list would be neat to try like Specter 360, eventually I want one of the current newest XPS-13s I recently got a Pixelbook for $80 running Ubuntu on that, great little device as far as thinness Also like buying/trying out weird computers or old, like the ASUS Eee PCs or Librettos

alain94040

Neither the original 1987 story nor the blog post make any sense to me. I feel the authors are focused on a niche aspect: exchanging deep human thoughts with other humans. For that use case, sure, don’t use a computer, don’t use AI. But there’s nothing wrong with a car made by a robot factory. The car is useful, regardless of how it was made. AI lets some people create new products, those may be useful.

freediddy

> AI is probabilistic and any probabilistic system can inherently never be perfect as it also still makes numerous mistakes. Work still needs to be reviewed by humans. I don't know why people keep saying this. I don't believe code needs to be reviewed by humans. Are humans infallible? I think 80%+ of code is basically human slop. Do we review the assembly language that is generated by compilers? I think given where AI-generated code is, and where it's going, all we need to do is test the outputs, basically turning us into QA. As someone who loves to code, yes I find it distasteful, but we don't get paid for our code, we get paid for our programs. I prefer being paid. If you want to write beautiful code, you can do it as a side hustle at home, but I think very quickly, this is what our industry is turning into. In January, someone told me that an expert told him that software engineering would be dead in 3 months, and I scoffed at the time, but now I think it's pretty accurate. It definitely won't survive this year.

brador

Why must everything be art?

biscuits1

"I am not without hope." I am not without hope that these writings offer a small respite to the AI weary.

garlic_enjoyer

>AI is not so elegant, to make a comparison similar to Berry, as the humble, sterile Microsoft Word. This is much like Berry drawing the line at a typewriter instead of a computer. To call a computer "sterile, untouched, factory made" and still use a typewriter is comical. Now let me tell you why etching into stone is the best medium. People can have their preferences, but this kind of "I'm old fashioned and here's why that's better" posts are just nostalgia bait.

asimpletune

I grew up learning how to write by hand, and when I was in college we were required to code by hand. It was cool. When I need to do something hard I still reach for pen and paper. Sometimes though, writing long stuff with pen and paper is just hard. It hurts and my handwriting isn't excellent. I was curious about typewriters and so I learned about them and bought a few. They're amazing devices. Much closer to writing by hand with a pen then a printer. Composition and editing happen in separate stages. You can write very fast though with perfect handwriting. I think from doing this, and other things, I realized that software was so well designed in the past because it was built by people who grew up with better metaphors for the work humans do. Computers were made because their benefits were so enormous that it was worth trying to get them even 1/10 as close as doing real work was. That experiment has largely succeeded. The only failure is then people grew up without seeing the computer as a metaphor for the work, but as the work itself. That's why software is so poorly designed. Just take a cork board for example. You put your stuff on it. When you want to see something you just turn your head. If you leave for the day and come back everything is still there. There's no on or off. Everything is persistent by default. Input and output are universal. You just write on stuff. You want to share a file with someone, just give it to them. Or make a copy. I think we have forgotten how great real life was at getting stuff done. The computer was supposed to assist them and for a time it did. That is until we forgot what it was for and made it replace life altogether.

lilerjee

> The body characterizes everything it touches. What it makes it traces over with the marks of its pulses and breathings, its excitements, hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. On its good work, it leaves the marks of skill, care, and love persisting through hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. And to those of us who love and honor the life of the body in this world, these marks are precious things, necessities of life. Full of intelligence in the statement. It makes me feel the warm. AI is not intelligence or a person, even not the real AI, current AI is useful for some things, but not so useful for real value or real world, and it will waste too much your energy, resources, and money in the end.

munificent

As a user and consumer of objects, sometimes I want a meaningful experience with a thing made lovingly by human hands. I will take a dinner cooked by my friends over take-out any day of the week even if the restaurant makes objectively better food. But sometimes I am happy to use a mass produced utilitarian object because it solves the problem. I don't have an emotional relationship with my stapler. These two perspectives are not completely separate. In practice, every object has some mixture of human care and machine optimized productivity. Likewise, as a producer of objects to be used by others, I want them to have a meaningful connection to me as the maker. But I also want to be able to produce more objects more efficiently so I can affect the lives of more people. Again, those are not entirely separate stances. With my books, I hand-lettered every single word in the illustrations. But I scanned those and cleaned them up in Photoshop instead of painting over mistakes with correction fluid, and I use the magic of the web and print on demand to put those books in front of thousands of people. I think most people have had a very uneasy truce with the amount of soulless manufactured junk in our lives versus the crafted things that we cherish. Most of us have a nagging feeling as we sit in our IKEA-filled homes watching parasocial videos on our phones that despite all the material boons industrialization has given us, we are suffering from a poverty of meaningful connection. But, also... we keep buying that stuff because stuff is nice and solves real problems. AI has set off a bomb right in the center of that uneasy truce and now all of us are struggling to work through the psychological fallout. It is a true fact that AI will make it much easier and cheaper to produce more digital goods with real utilitarian value. It is also a true fact that it will flood our social spaces with slop and make it even harder to find a real connection with a real human in that hazy smoke of AI bullshit. Reconciling those is the existential question of our generation. I don't believe it will be solved by taking a side. It will be solved, if at all, through some sort of more meaningful synthesis of the two halves.

olalonde

The quote accurately mirrors a lot of the anti-AI sentiment in my experience. The pushback comes from a visceral, emotional aversion, and the technical or economic arguments proposed against it are largely post-hoc rationalizations.

gausswho

This is a response to a short essay by Wendell Berry which you can read here: http://tipiglen.co.uk/berrynot.html

wxw

> As we become more disconnected from the work we do, let writings and art be created by AI, we forgo the meaning, emotions, and learning behind such work. Excellent post, and thanks for the introduction to Wendell Berry's essay. Link for others interested: https://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/be...