It should be incredibly exciting. I try to find the interesting parts that I can relate to, build on, survive with. But instead it feels like an ominous, featureless thief-of-joy grey goo coming for everything.
I think this feeling crystallised when I saw someone had used it to rebuild Prince of Persia and my immediate gut reaction was quite clear: I wanted to scream “could you please just fucking leave one good thing unsullied!?”
I don't care much about AI but hot damn it makes working on the things I do care about easier.
We use it a lot at work (soft eng) and my job has slowly morphed into "Okay how do we continue shipping sane software when we effectively 10x'd our org size in six months as agents became reliable?". That has been pretty fun. I care about creating good software.
And I care about budgeting and finance projections for home finances, especially as a new baby entered the room. But I am very bad at spreadsheet fiddling. AI has been super helpful in doing the fiddling so I can focus on the thinking.
edit to add another example: I really care about managing my team and keeping us effective, but I hate playing ticket monkey. Offloading basic ticket management (agent, make me a ticket; take this thread and create 3 tickets; respond back when tickets are done; etc) to an agent has been great
Yes! Lots.
It’s kinda similar to the concept that money doesn’t buy happiness, it buys time to do the things and see people who make you happy. Offloading drudgery to computers buys time to do the human stuff
For example: you can have a much more invigorating discussion with a coworker if every iteration takes 2 minutes instead of 2 hours. Moves from an async “let’s schedule a followup” to a lively real time collaboration
Or the budgets example, we could have a conversation about values and priorities because chatgpt made me a UI that let us drag sliders around and see the impact of our decisions in real-time.
Nowadays all the development is done at a bigtech lab, and you aren't going to be able to tell anyone about it. Everyone else is relegated to interacting with slightly larger and larger LLMs over an API. On one hand it's cool that the tech is now far more accessible and impactful, but on the other AI has become immensely boring.
It's a little uncharitable take as I know some people are doing some cool innovative stuff still, and not every tech needs to be new forever anyway. I would feel less strongly if it wasn't impossible to not keep hearing about it :)
To me, this is just how it is when a new paradigm hits the scene. Whether it's good or bad, whether you care for it or not, it is pervasive.
Personally, I don't think the interconnected "social" nature of the web turned out very well. Maybe (probably) the "one-man bubble" nature of AI also won't turn out well. But I'm skeptical of holding up the web's social nature as a positive. I think it turned out pretty bad. (I shared everyone's optimism in the late 90s and early 2000s and I used to just be mad at Facebook / Zuckerberg for screwing it up, but I dunno, maybe it was always going to end up this way.)
To try to demonstrate my point with an example: If you were a journalist, the web changed literally everything in a way that was inescapable. As a software engineer, it changed a lot for a lot of people but it was not inescapable. The situation with AI is, so far, the reverse. Journalists have mostly (and correctly IMO) concluded that this isn't actually that useful to their writing, and it hasn't changed their distribution channels in the way the web did. But for software engineers, it's changing things dramatically.
I guess my perspective is just that new paradigms are not uniformly disruptive.
It’s probably right that when looking at the total of all intellectual communities, the difference in influence of the web versus AI is more nuanced. Nevertheless, I can see AI being more disruptive there overall in the way the article describes. Though I hope that this will turn out to not be the case.
But I do think that my general sense is that it is both similar in scale to the disruption of the web, and also very different in ways that are hard to suss out at this point.