I really don't understand taking the author's silly hyperspecific examples of unique humans in his life as berating the reader for not knowing exactly those same people. I read it as "remember all the unique people you know and try reaching out to them instead of going to AI or the internet."

>If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?

I really don't understand the need to torture alternate meanings out of the writing of people we don't agree with. Nothing in the author's writing even comes close to implying what you're suggesting here.

You underestimate how easy it is to get someone who's into fly fishing to talk about fly fishing. You don't need to have known them for more than thirty seconds.

Even NYC has a fishing meetup group with over 1000 members.

> This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.

Didn't that guy start his channel because he didn't have a father growing up? Seems like important context.

> If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?

I know, right? The author clearly wants you to starve to death for the lack of a friend to teach you to fish

Eh, the poem doesn't suggest technology isn't ever useful. It's highlighting that the inefficiency of human relationship is a feature, not a bug.

You might not have a friend who is into fly-fishing, but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about. Maybe that's less efficient, maybe it's less direct. But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other, and technology is getting dangerously close to replacing relationships altogether.

I don't think this is meant to guilt you for using tech, but it is totally a wake up call to remembering WHY we fly fish and go to weddings and write memoirs and so on.

>they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.

Much of the anti-AI sentiment has this sort of false dichotomy as its foundation. An imagination that the alternative to AI is the purest form of manual labour in some sort of idealized, bucolic form.

So every time I'm thinking about what to make with the ingredients I have, I should text someone who cooks (I cook, so this is a hypothetical)? What a ridiculous canard, and absolutely no one would appreciate that. I can enjoy human contact without inventing ridiculous justifications.

Further, to quote from Unlearning Economics, everything already was AI [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg], at least in the demonized way that people use that phrase.

Wedding speeches? Overwhelmingly cliche bullshit, and if you've been to a number of weddings it starts to get incredible how blatant this is. The whole manner of "genres" of music, art, and so on, is everyone copying each other and mimicking styles.

Even the recurring "I can spot AI websites!" nonsense, as if everyone wasn't already copy/pasting the trend du jour.

Even programming, this site is stuffed with "I lament the loss of the craft" pearl clutching articles daily, yet most of you are terrible programmers. I mean this as nicely as I can. It's astonishing seeing the actual state of the industry and hearing people imagining the world's most skillful, conscientious, thoughtful developer as the only alternative to AI assistance. It's rather amazing.

And long before AI people were largely just duct-taping together whatever libraries they found mentioned in a StackOverflow post.

Is it possible to hand craft better creations? Absolutely. Was that the norm pre-LLM? LOL, not even remotely. People were churning out enormous volumes of garbage.