Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> It's clearly ridiculous, yet at the point where papers or PRs are written by robots, reviewed by robots, for eventual usage/consumption/summary by yet more robots, it becomes very relevant. At some point one must ask, what is it all for, and should we maybe just skip some of these steps or revisit some assumptions about what we're trying to accomplish

I've been thinking this for a while, despairing, and amazed that not everyone is worried/surprised about this like me.

Who are we building all this stuff for, exactly?

Some technophiles are arguing this will free us to... do what exactly? Art, work, leisure, sex, analysis, argument, etc will be done for us. So we can do what exactly? Go extinct?

"With AI I can finally write the book I always wanted, but lacked the time and talent to write!". Ok, and who will read it? Everybody will be busy AI-writing other books in their favorite fantasy world, tailored specifically to them, and it's not like a human wrote it anyway so nobody's feelings should be hurt if nobody reads your stuff.

As something of a technophile myself.. I see a lot more value in arguments that highlight totally ridiculous core assumptions rather than focusing on some kind of "humans first and only!" perspectives. Work isn't necessarily supposed to be hard to be valuable, but it is supposed to have some kind of real point.

In the dating scenario what's really absurd and disgusting isn't actually the artificiality of toys.. it's the ritualistic aspect of the unnecessary preamble, because you could skip straight to tea and talk if that is the point. We write messages from bullet points, ask AI to pad them out uselessly with "professional" sounding fluff, and then on the other side someone is summarizing them back to bullet points? That's insane even if it was lossless, just normalize and promote simple communications. Similarly if an AI review was any value-add for AI PR's, it can be bolted on to the code-gen phase. If editors/reviewers have value in book publishing, they should read the books and opine and do the gate-keeping we supposedly need them for instead of telling authors to bring their own audience, etc etc. I think maybe the focus on rituals, optics, and posturing is a big part of what really makes individual people or whole professions obsolete

Reply on news.ycombinator.com