I understand the seductiveness of this line of thinking, but it does well up a despair inside of me.
Mundane tasks are what puts food on our family’s tables, and are by definition a constantly moving target that AI will just shift, not eliminate. Spending our time on junior level tasks is how we become senior. Giving juniors tasks is how we nurture those who will come after our valuable time is up. Talking through problems with our peers is how we build community.
Conversely, chasing constant novelty is unsustainable; “talking” with bots is dehumanizing; and, if social media is any indicator, both are immensely damaging to the human psyche, even if solving interesting problems does itch my ADHD something powerful. Value-maxxing our attention and energy for the benefit of corporate shareholders is not, in my opinion, a way to value our valuable time.
I wanna be part of the human experience, dammit. That’s what makes my time valuable, not my productivity. I don’t want to sell that out to become more efficient, though I will have to if these winds continue to prevail, and I resent it immensely.
For me personally it’s first and foremost a political question.
It’s rather obvious powerful forces want to delegate (some) “decision making” to AI.
Let’s just say that would be a problem.
In summary I would say anyone who advocates for personal responsibility “must” by extension reject AI.
Fair point, but I think the answer like most things is “it depends”.
Why can’t you be part of both experiences. I love tech and I love humans, why do they have to mutually exclude each other? The time saving for me isn’t necessarily about producing more for shareholders (no doubt some higher ups are thinking this), its about using my time more valuably. I still converse with my peers at work and now we chat about AI too. AI hasn’t locked me away.
I still do both.
In fact, I think AI is already highlighting how interesting and varied the analogue output of humans is. Working with AI now on a daily basis, I look forward to watching movies, listening to music, going to sports etc..
This seems like a pretty amazing study result and jibes with my limited AI usage.
Summary: “When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.”
I wonder if what is really happening is that the study doesn’t account for overall effort. In engineering jargon, total power required. Where power = work per unit time. Doing 50% work for 2 minutes requires the same power as 100% work for 1 minute.
Thinking is hard and equates to work. So if AI allows someone to work easier by thinking less. It can require less total mental power which feels like a savings. Even if the time taken is slightly longer, you still feel like you did less.
In other words, which is preferred, doing something easy for 30 minutes or extremely difficult for 15 minutes? Assume they require the same total power.
Most advocates I know who claim they benefit from it cite productivity boosts, which is power / time, which makes the study more damning. I’ve seen a counter argument that it allows for more concurrent low-power activity, but studies on multi-tasking are also pretty damning.
I think we also need to factor into this study that our usage of these tools is new and that we are still figuring out how to best use them (at least I know I am). I would expect that to improve.
