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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

It feels like spending your teens practicing football, playing varsity level in high school, getting really good at the college level, finally recruited into the NFL as a pro football player (dream came true!!) and suddenly, the team owner says, "No more football playing for you. You get the same salary but you're managing robots who play the football. Deal with it."

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Considering how punishing a football career is, that sounds like a good deal.

Look at Andrew Luck.

OK, replace football with any other sport then.

Swap it out for chess. Tell Magnus Carlsen he can't play chess anymore. Instead he gets paid to run a Stockfish team in an all-engine tournament.

Computers can destroy Magnus. Yet he still plays and nobody gets to tell him or anyone else they have to stop.

If people stop being interested in human-played chess, then yes he's out of luck. But that could happen with or without computers. Same for football and anything else.

So I don't think this analogy works either.

Of course the analogy works. It’s an analogy, not an exact duplicate of the situation.

The important parallels of the analogy are that:

* Magnus dedicated his whole life to chess, just as many programmers have done with programming.

* Magnus enjoys the craft of chess, the human elements of creativity and cleverness, just as many artisan programmers do.

* Both prefer to be hands on and don’t enjoy being relegated to managerial / supervisory roles, and would probably move on to something else if they could no longer do the part they love.

* Many outsiders do not have any idea how much time and dedication it takes to reach the upper echelons of a skill like that, and struggle to empathize with those who have done so, and perhaps even feel Schadenfreude to see these folks “taken down a peg.”

Mathematicians have recently been lumped into this category of knowledge workers at risk. Many are grieving gratuitously and suffering a lot of flippancy from Schadenfreude-feeling onlookers.

No, it doesn't work, because both analogies (basketball and chess) are entertainment/games. Magnus isn't being paid to produce the best possible chess moves, he's being paid to be the best human chess player and beat other humans. A basketball player is similar. So the act of playing chess, and the act of playing basketball, is what provides the (entertainment) value.

A computer programmer, on the other hand, is paid to produce something. They aren't entertaining anyone (except themselves). The act of producing code doesn't matter to the person that wants a binary. The binary is what matters. So if a computer can out-program a human, then the human is in trouble. So it's different.

But, nothing is stopping a human from programming for entertainment purposes. And nothing is stopping humans from being entertained by watching other humans program, maybe competitively. Like chess, or basketball. Or from getting together and solving programming problems. Then it doesn't matter that a computer can run circles around them, and nobody can tell them to stop doing it.

I get it, though. Younger people in tech should be worried.

But I don't really understand the "grief" by people who say they're losing their hobbies. Like the top comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50158159

But I don't really understand the "grief" by people who say they're losing their hobbies

If you don't understand grief then I'm wasting my time. Sounds like I got suckered into arguing with an AI yet again.

> If you don't understand grief

This is not what I said and you're being rude. I'm saying that I don't understand the grief being expressed for the loss of a hobby. Because as I explained, computers can't invalidate hobbies.

> Sounds like I got suckered into arguing with an AI yet again.

Nope. I'm a human and didn't use AI for anything I wrote. But thanks?

The point is that what was once a life's calling is being reduced to a hobby. All these activities were more than hobbies, for example for people like myself solving significant math problems all day or at least for a significant portion of my day was my life's purpose. I felt like I was contributing to something greater than myself. Math can still be done but that feeling is gone now and with it is much of the motivation to do it in the first place.

The “entertainment value to the customer” is the product being produced by the professional game player. That’s what the team owners pay them for. I don’t see much of a difference. The programmer is being paid to use his skill at programming to create business value. The sportsball player is being paid to use his sports skill to create business value.

We've commoditized programming because it often gives an output that can lead to many beneficial things. But that does not mean that programming itself isn't entertainment.

Making art is often considered entertainment, and it can also be commoditized. The difference between entertainment and work is often thin, dictated by personal enjoyment, not how one is paid. I can be paid for something I find very entertaining. I can also be paid for something I find dull.

If the thing I find entertaining disappears, it's reasonable for me to feel grief. For something I enjoyed is no longer available to me, at least not in full.

There's a community around programming, much like chess and basketball. Seeing that community deteriorate into solely programming for profit, and using AI to do so, is tragic. Programming has been very focused on profit for a long time, but now even those who think it fun are debating on whether or not to offload their work to a machine that does all the work for them.

I hadn't thought of that type of comparison, but it's apt.

"Also, we only need two of you"

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