this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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What a dumb comparison. Calculators are just tools to do the same mechanical action as abaci, which were also just tools to speed up human mechanical actions of calculation.
Writing, drawing, research are creative, not mechanical, and offloading them to a tool is very different from offloading calculations to integrated circuits
Most of what’s being offloaded to AI is boiler plate work. People underestimate how much of what we do every day is boiler plate, and the perfect workload to offload to allow humans to focus more on the creative stuff.
First off, no, not even boilerplate can be done incorrectly sometimes. Software that ingests words and outputs words can't check, say, official forms for correctness. Or test reports. You need a different type of reasoning for that.
And then, even if we assume that AI can do these tasks correctly, boilerplate isn't being just offloaded, it's being created. Sure, we've had bullshit generators before. But now our bullshit machines are faster, and spew out more believable bullshit. Google has been ruined by generated slop. That's work that wasn't performed before, doesn't improve our lives and yet is being done.
Generating boilerplate to get past the blank page phase is not the same as trying to make it check forms for correctness. That’s why I didn’t suggest it should be used for that, so I don’t know what use the strawman is to make an irrelevant point.
Many of you are very, very anti-AI. We get it. But that also leads to you having next to no experience with it, because you don’t practice enough to understand how to use it correctly, and it leads to y’all pulling nonsense criticisms out of your ass.