A plow enables you to till land you couldn't before with your bare hands.

The phone let's you talk to someone you couldn't before when shouting can't.

ChatGPT let's you...

Please complete the sentence without an analogy

This conversation is naive and simplifies technologies into “does it achieve something you otherwise couldn’t”.

The answer is that chatgpt allows you to do things more efficiently than before. Efficiency doesn’t sound sexy but this is what adds up to higher prosperity.

Arguments like this can be used against internet. What does it allow you to do now that you couldn’t do before?

Answer might be “oh I don’t know, it allows me to search and index information, talk to friends”.

It doesn’t sound that sexy. You can still visit a library. You can still phone your friends. But the ease of doing so adds up and creates a whole ecosystem that brings so many things.

>A plow enables you to till land you couldn't before with your bare hands.

It does not. You could still till the land with hand tools. You just get a lot more done.

ChatGPT let's me program in languages I was not efficient in before.

Anyway, I'm done with your technology purity contest, it has about zero basis in reality.

Why are you so mad? You're the only one in these comments dismissing arguments because you don't like them. Are you invested?

No. I'm just stating that a huge portion of these comments have their own emotional investment and are confusing OUGHT/IS. On top of that their arguments aren't particularly sound, and if they were applied to any other technologies that we worship here in the church of HN would seem like an advanced form of hypocrisy.

They tilled by hand for thousands of years before inventing a plow to speed it up.

They spoke slowly, through letters, until phones sped it up.

We coded slowly, letter by letter, until agents sped it up.

...generate piles of low quality content for almost free.

AI is fascinating technology with undoubtedly fantastic applications in the future, but LLMs mostly seem to be doing two things: provide a small speedup for high quality work, and provide a massive speedup to low quality work.

I don't think it's comparable to the plow or the phone in its impact on society, unless that impact will be drowning us in slop.

There is a particular problem that comes with your line of thinking and why AI will never be able to solve it. In fact it's not a solved human problem either.

And that is slop work is always easier and cheaper than doing something right. We can make perfectly good products as it is, yet we find Shien and Temu filled with crap. That's not related to AI. Humans drown themselves in trash whenever we gain the technological capability to do so.

To put this another way, you cannot get a 10x speed up in high quality work without also getting a 1000x speed up in low quality work. We'll pretty much have to kill any further technological advancement if that's a showstopper for you.