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Comment by gh0stcat | Hacker News Reader

How does that make any sense? Why do you assume that someone more intelligent would not be able to wield any AI tooling better than an average or below average human? Just curious if you're thinking short term or long term on this.

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> Why do you assume that someone more intelligent would not be able to wield any AI tooling better than an average or below average human?

would someone who runs faster 100m also somehow drive better?

No, but someone who has trained their whole life to run fast, surely will be able to coach someone else to run faster than someone who has been on the couch watching television?

I use LLMs to great advantage, solving problems in my domain. I no longer make for loops.

> coach someone else to run faster

my point was that the new future where running faster doesn't matter any more might come, because everyone is driving (and potentially can't run much at all).

Would a rifle marksman be a better artilleryman than someone who never ever touched a gun?

See the beauty of analogies is you can make one to support any point.

but the analogy would be a riflemen trained to aim, and a person pressing button for guided missiles. How good you are at the original task is unlikely to matter when the new way supersedes the old way.

That's not how guided missiles work either…

so how does being a good shooter make you a better guided missile shooter?

Over someone who never fired any real weapon? Probably. You are not startled by violent sounds. You have intuition for ballistics, time to target, CEP, weather effects.

I mean, clearly "tooling" is not a perfect analogy for AI. As others have pointed out, if you pay money and get back a full website, app, game etc. it feels a lot closer to a service.

It's like asking why an expert pizza maker is not in a better position to succeed now that he has an excellent pizza delivery number he can call to have one available to his specification in an instant.

That's just a tool you rent and cannot own or make/improve/repair yourself.

This tool belongs to somebody (capitalist!) else and in a new world better tools will always win, not individuals anymore. And it feels like to go from being Rembrandt to CVS employee who takes passport pictures - result much better quality and cheaper but no skill and glory.

Interestingly, the dynamics strongly resembles the industrial revolution when from highly skilled manufactures society moved to factories with power machines. And it all came down who owns means of production. Now AI is a new means of production for all white collars jobs and if the industrial revolution taught is the way to go, nothing good will come out of it.

That’s like thinking that computers will belong to “capitalists.” It’s already clear that AI is going to be a commodity you’ll be able to rent for barely more than the price of electricity.

No matter how cheap it is, people will never be able to come anywhere close to affording what giant corporations can.

I'm somewhere in the middle on that. People used to think that computers would be owned only by large corporations, then home computers appeared and improved. It's getting tight now that logic scaling is mostly exhausted, at least with current operating principles. Even so, new specialized hardware and model improvements may help (for inference). Training seems to be the biggest problem, it seems hard to democratize.

And that's why Alta Vista still reigns supreme in search.

Yeah. Alta Vista died, and now there aren't any large corporations running search.

Nothing good for skilled labor you mean, especially in the short to medium term - just like in the industrial revolution. If the new technology is any good, it will produce desired things (let's say medical breakthroughs?) faster.

I don't particularly like AI, but if AI replaces developers and other knowledge workers, not everyone is worse off, and I don't mean just capital owners.

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