Hacker News Reader

Comment by Loquebantur | Hacker News Reader

Just like with mathematicians, is it all really just about people losing a random, replaceable job and what they enjoyed about it?

Being able to program means in particular, you can read those programs and understand what they do.

What happens when you don't understand them anymore?

Living in a reality where everything is a black box, doing its thing as if by magic, leaves you in a position devoid of control. The objects upholding your life are incomprehensible to you, you cannot change them or even only reliably exchange them with alternatives.

View on HN

> Just like with mathematicians, is it all really just about people losing a random, replaceable job and what they enjoyed about it?

For me it's about losing much of the entire career, because companies will come to expect AI-level work that I can't/won't provide.

> Being able to program means in particular, you can read those programs and understand what they do.

IMO This assumes that one views programming as more than just a job/career, but not everyone does so.

> Living in a reality where everything is a black box, doing its thing as if by magic, leaves you in a position devoid of control.

For some, this is actually relieving. Sometimes we want to be more ignorant, sometimes it makes us happier.

> One wonders whether a generation that demands instant satisfaction of all its needs and instant solution of the world's problems will produce anything of lasting value. Such a generation, even when equipped with the most modern technology, will be essentially primitive — it will stand in awe of nature, and submit to the tutelage of medicine men.

- Eric Hoffer

I think we'll be okay as long as we don't outsource our thinking to technology.

Wait... What's that you say?

That's the way the world's been since the integrated circuit was first developed, for better or worse.

No, it's not.

The point isn't some people not understanding whatever stuff with limited effects, it's no people understanding anything important.

Mathematics is about describing fundamental reality, so you can change it. When corporations own it exclusively, they can do whatever they want with it.

> The point isn't some people not understanding whatever stuff with limited effects, it's no people understanding anything important.

Using an LLM doesn't mean "I must write this code in a way that I cannot understand it". I'd encourage using the LLM to write code in a way that you can understand.

> When corporations own it exclusively, they can do whatever they want with it.

This is an argument in favour of open-weight models.

but so many things we have are black boxes now. do people need to understand how cars work to drive them properly?

And even if you understand how it works, how does it affect your day-to-day function or the advancement of the field? As Apple liked to say, It Just Works (TM).

A more apt analogy would be if self-driving cars fully take over, such that most people don't even know how to drive, let alone how an engine works.

Instead of driving you're telling a piece of nondeterministic software where you'd like to go and then watching the result as a passenger.

The difference is that people who make the cars and the mechanics who repair them still understand how that black box works.

Would you be willing to drive one if the engineers at ford were all fired and an almighty agent who kinda did the almost right thing most of the time was designing the black box?

probably not, but my main gripe would be that there would be no way to punish anyone if something went wrong with the car, not (necessarily) that human judgement or expertise is still needed as part of the car design process.

So yes, maybe we will all just exist to get sued at the end of the day.

Yes we do need to understand. We are already seing how things being black boxes is used against us via enshittification.

> What happens when you don't understand them anymore?

The chilling bit is that the machines are doing just fine on the understanding programs front (up to and including decompiling them from machine code).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com