Playing in the Creek

It's not about AI development, it's about something mentioned earlier in the article: "make as much money as I can". The problems that we see with AI have little to do with AI "development", they have to do with AI marketing and promulgation. If the author had gone ahead and dammed the creek with a shovel, or blown off his hand, that would have been bad, but not that bad. Those kinds of mistakes are self-limiting because if you're doing something for the enjoyment or challenge of it, you won't do it at a scale that creates more enjoyment than you personally can experience. In the parable of the CEO and the fisherman, the fisherman stops at what he can tangibly appreciate.

If everyone working on and using AI were approaching it like damming a creek for fun, we would have no problems. The AI models we had might be powerful, but they would be funky and disjointed because people would be more interested in tinkering with them than making money from them. We see tons of posts on HN every day about remarkable things people do for the gusto. We'd see a bunch of posts about new AI models and people would talk about how cool they are and go on not using them in any load-bearing way.

As soon as people start trying to use anything, AI or not, to make as much money as possible, we have a problem.

The second missed takeaway is at the end. He says Anthropic is noticing the coquinas as if that means they're going to somehow self-regulate. But in most of the examples he gives, he wasn't stopped by his own realization, but by an external authority (like parents) telling him to stop. Most people are not as self-reflective as this author and won't care about "winning zero sum games against people who don't necessarily deserve to lose", let alone about coquinas. They need a parent to step in and take the shovel away.

As long as we keep treating "making as much money as you can" as some kind of exception to the principle of "you can't keep doing stuff until you break something", we'll have these problems, AI or not.

I noticed that, around the turn of the century, when "The Web" was suddenly all about the Benjamins.

It's sort of gone downhill, since.

For myself, I've retired, and putter around in my "software garden." I do make use of AI, to help me solve problems, and generate code starts, but I am into it for personal satisfaction.

In reflecting on my career I can say I got into it for the right reasons. That is, I liked programming — but also found out fairly quickly that not everyone could do it and so it could be a career path that would prove lucrative. And this in particular for someone who had no other likelihood, for example, of ever owning a home. I was probably not going to be able to afford graduate school (had barely paid for state college by working minimum wage jobs throughout college and over the summers) and regardless I was not the most studious person. (My degree was Education — I had expected a modest income as a career high school teacher).

But as I say, I enjoyed programming at first. And when it arrived, the web was just a giant BBS as far as I was concerned and so of course I liked it. But it is possible to find a thing that you really like can go to shit over the ensuing decades. (And for that matter, my duties as an engineer got shittier as well as the career "evolved". I had not originally signed up for code reviews, unit tests, scrum, etc. Oh well.)

Money as a pursuit made sense to me after I was in the field and saw that others around me were doing quite well — able as I say, to afford to buy a home — something I had assumed would always be out of reach for me (my single mother had always rented, I assumed I would as well — oh, I still had a modest college loan to pay off too). So I learned about 30-year home loans, learned about the real estate market in the Bay Area, learned also about RSUs, capital gains tax, 401Ks, index finds, etc.

But as is becoming a theme in this thread (?) at some point I was satisfied that I had done enough to secure a home, tools for my hobbies, and had raised three girls — paid for their college. I began to see the now burdensome career I was in as an albatross around my soul. The technology that I had once enjoyed, made my career on the back of, had gone sour.

You got yours. Now what?

I could have skipped sooner maybe?

Once I had kids though I found I had a higher tolerance for a job getting shittier, a lower tolerance for restarting in a new career. So I put up with a worsening job for them.

I quit the moment my last daughter left for college.

I'm not religious, but for this alone you deserve a life of blessings and happiness. The fact that I never ever have to fuck around with Adobe PDF apps to juggle PDFs is one of the load-bearing things keeping me sane in an insane world.