I'm not who you are responding to, but I do similar things with AI.
Think about it this way. We all make decisions like this pretty much every day, but I am especially careful with them in my personal life where time is limited and sacred: "What amount of time or money (X) am I willing to spend to get something (Y)?"
There have been many times that X has been "too much," until I later discover some new tool, library, or technique (or simply a price drop) that reduces X below the threshold of pulling the trigger. AI is that new tool for a lot of people and contexts.
If my barrier to some cool new one-off home automation feature is something like, "I would need to know Ruby but I don't know it and don't have time or desire to learn it," then I can have an LLM do the heavy lifting in a tiny fraction of the time it would take me to learn. Of course the feature needs to be something straightforward enough for the LLM to handle, and you have to be able to test it. And it goes without saying that since I can't properly review the code, I wouldn't use it for something that could cause a lot of damage or a security issue. But there are lots of tools/areas where that is not applicable. (Not all code needs to be bullet-proof and in reality, almost none of it is, even when it should be.)
Because, why not, just because I don't attach importance doesn't mean they don't make my life or those around me more convenient. It's just a good motivation tool in general.
Also if you buy an ultimately useless trinket, well that's just life. Everything we do can be considered 'ultimately' useless.
> Also if you buy an ultimately useless trinket, well that's just life. Everything we do can be considered 'ultimately' useless.
Dumb philosophy. Some things in life are at least worthwhile, like spending time with friends and making the lives of others better. But increasing efficiency for intellectual stimulation in a narrow domain truly useless and shows how pathological we have become.
Fact is, there is some level of meaning in life if you accept there to be any meaning at all, and making mindless diversions certainly isn't within that domain.
> like spending time with friends and making the lives of others better
Those are good things, but they are not the only things. Life is short, but there is room for "mindless diversions," as you phrase it. Without this, there would be no creativity, no craftsmanship, no art. Is it not also important to enrich oneself with hobbies and side-projects? Further, there is no authority who can make the judgement call on what is "worthwhile" to spend time on and what is not.
> Without this, there would be no creativity, no craftsmanship, no art. Is it not also important to enrich oneself with hobbies and side-projects? Further, there is no authority who can make the judgement call on what is "worthwhile" to spend time on and what is not.
It's not binary. There is nothing wrong with mindless diversions, but there is a healthy proportion of them. And when it becomes pathological (i.e. when AI allows spending a disproportionate amount of time on them), then it's a serious problem.
AI is a tool that has to be learned and the research is compeletely flawed in my opinion. For me AI is a sort of a colleague that is always there on demand which helps me see projects to the finish (this is really the fault either a variant of adhd or some other disorder). I don't know if it's healthy seeing AI this way, but I know for sure that I wouldn't have come close to the amount of progress I've made on projects that I have been pushing off for years. (replied to the wrong thread, but oh well)
> but I know for sure that I wouldn't have come close to the amount of progress I've made on projects that I have been pushing off for years.
Of course, at its inception, AI will mainly be seen as something that can help improve efficiency. Same with the smartphone: it was an entire optional tool that was mainly beneficial. But after this initial inception, technology tends to grow, and now smartphones for example are often mandatory due to 2FA, or at least difficult to avoid. And they constantly find new ways to bother people.
So for now, AI can be helpful for some, but it will grow, become more entrenched and insidious, and in lots of cases entirely replace people or at least be annoying and difficult to get rid of.
It doesn't make sense to argue for AI by stating its benefits in its nascent stages. Babies are all basically innocent creatures that bring emotional benefits but some can grow up to be killers, and this is what will happen with AI.
Well I kinda do agree with that, it feels like using not getting the hang of AI will leave you behind because AI in 10 years will be so much better - to a point we can't even estimate right now. But I think AI will make life a lot better and will actually help solve inequality since providing quality development during early years and help support children after the first few years of becoming independent (I still consider people children until around 21 to 25 years old).
AI will help close the gap between the people who were privilidged and given the environment to learn versus those who didn't.
However, beyond that I have absolutely no idea what will happen because I had a friend sending me porn that grok generated (the moderation is a joke). AI girlfriends will definitely be a thing and a lot of people will use those services, but I can't really wrap my head around what that entails for the future.
It's like buying a trinket just because it's cheap. It's still ultimately wasteful.