Hacker News Reader

Comment by onetrickwolf | Hacker News Reader

I would agree with you but this is what it was like with search engines as well. Search engines got so good it felt like anyone could just Google anything instead of paying someone.

I think the surprising part is that, no matter how easy it gets, the majority of he population would still rather pay someone else to do it for them.

Honestly the first ten years of my career was just me being baffled I was getting paid to Google stuff. I get worried about AI in the same way but continue to be baffled that I am getting paid to just prompt AI now.

Maybe this time is different but honestly the world is so ridiculous sometimes that I honestly don’t think it will be different.

View on HN

That's all true when you're working in a space where people have already solved and written about similar problems, for instance with web dev, or simple enterprise application dev. When you work in a problem space that is novel and tricky, googling or AI doesn't answer your questions (correctly).

Google wasn't a magic answer box, it was a collection of things people had written about the problems they faced. AI isn't a magic answer box either, it's trained to spit out the best guesses based on things people have written about the problems they faced. But all this is based on actual humans who are exploring, wrestling with problems, and writing things down. I don't think people can assume that AI will take all that over and push things forward.

Very few of the problems we have to solve are novel and tricky.

That's what web devs assume. There is a lot of novel difficult work to be done in other industries.

I would argue that all of the problems we have to solve are novel and tricky. The rest we've already solved but constantly reinvent (not novel) or already solved and just need to piece together like Legos (not tricky).

Search engines were very interesting and had a lot of myths surrounding them. People claiming that typing out full sentences worked better, vs others entering just keywords. A lot of people learned to utilize the special operators.

I thought I got really good at googling right before the engine started becoming really bad around Covid years.

I'd love to read something about the topic.

About 80% of my career could be generously described as typing what someone asked me into Google and giving them the answer back in a way they can understand. I don't even mean my interactions with non-technical folk. It's far too common with my "peers" as well.

Search engines couldn’t analyze your local files and give you a specific root cause and fix it. Agents can. I don’t think the two are comparable, really, other than at the most superficial surface level.

They’re comparable in an exponential view. I remember the librarian teaching us how to look through boxes of cards. Then Google came out a few years later. For a couple decades, Google-fu was a superpower that most people didn’t know they needed.

> Maybe this time is different

It is in the sense that you performed tasks for people, and knew which tasks needed to be performed. The advent of agentic programs now means those same tasks can be deduced by the agent and also performed by it. There's a very thin moat between you and that, now.

some people, most people i'd say, don't really enjoy working with computers. if you ask anyone on the street they know chatgpt of course but ask them what an agent is and they will have no idea.

That's okay, though. Agents are an abstraction no one will really need to understand. They will still benefit from it when they press a button to 'do the thing' which previously required a human.

Yes, I just think there is a huge mental barrier that will gradually have to disappear through slow diffusion of information. People think it's too complicated, it must be hard to use since it's a complex technology etc. etc. So even when we reach the stage that it would be easy to use, many will just not even try or know about it.

I mean I would think that, but I've literally tried to train product owners on contracts I am on to use AI and not pay me anymore and they still get overwhelmed by the idea of a terminal and ask me to do it. So I really don't know.

GUIs exist for AI and will exist even more widely soon. If even that is too overwhelming, there will be AI avatars (controllable video generation and speech synthesis) that just talk to you and you can talk to them. If even looking at a screen is too overwhelming, there will be robots.

But I think the key is none of this, but the responsibility. That's what they want to offload on you. They don't want to worry, they want it off their own shoulders, they want someone else to take care of it. AI cannot take on legal and social responsibility, since it doesn't have the same kind of social reputation at stake in a community or in a professional network or in law.

> Search engines got so good it felt like anyone could just Google anything instead of paying someone.

I mean this is probably true enough to have had real economic impact! I've made a whole lot of fixes via YouTube & Google that I would have had to pay someone for otherwise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com