Something a friend and I were discussing today was that you can’t really avoid AI and remain productive right now. (We both teach university Computer Science.)
Ignoring how so much of modern society is running on it, you’d have to complete isolate to avoid it and it’s reach entirely.
Additionally, the tooling and infrastructure to support how things were done just a few years ago has all been stripped away. Online search is ass on every major engine right now, most of the forums are dead, documentation and discussion lives inside of private Discord channels. It feels like there just isn’t a back to go back to anymore.
They weren’t using their brains before ai, what made you think they would now?
Are YOU using your brain right now?
Imagine this: someone do turn ai off for a week. Govs learns 97% (everyone except few scientists, me and Joe)… 97% of voters are stupider than anyone ever though. Govs will know exactly what to do with stupid rams. Scientists will panic.
No, lets not do this. (it is done already, facebooks, tiktoks, instas, reddits already proven and provide exact datas, with daily updates and per subgroups.
Holy fuck, what are you trying to say?
Turning AI off for a week will not reveal anything to capitalist institutions whose stated purpose is to influence elections that they did not already know.
What it will do is reveal within friend groups and within communities who has a brain that they’re willing to use and who’s been skating by on other people’s brains since long before ChatGPT came along.
you said things, some say many things, but it was certainly a thing you did.
great job.
Semi-related: I turned off spellcheck and autocorrect for a month to see what happens. Turns out I’m more dependant on it than I realized.
I can totally turn it off, but it’s going to slow me way down as I’d re-read everything and go back and make edits.
True. I’m also using it a little bit to much. And also a little problem for me. Using Spellcheck for two Languages.
The funny thing is my friend was all on the AI train. Lately he finally agrees with me that it’s trash, they had him use it at work and he spent more time fixing the code.
did they work prior?
You are assuming they worked to begin with.
AI has been an amazing tool for those with no ability to think, to operate slightly like a person who can.
Like a peg leg helps a amutee walk. The issue is they are using to run and claiming they are the fastest.
Something similar happened in January 2013. In protest of the SOPA/PIPA bills that threatened section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Wikipedia went dark.
It got everyone’s attention, especially students, who had grown accustomed to Wikipedia’s ubiquity as a resource.
I’ve been hoping that something like this would happen for what feels like too long at this point.
oh okay
Seeing a sharp decrease in productivity, I’m sure they would take it as a sign that AI is effective.
Go ahead, i still haven’t used any of them and i would be happy to see them gone.
The global economy is probably already dependent on some Claude code instance updating an Excel spreadsheet on someone’s laptop with a note ”don’t close the lid!” attached to it
When I was a teenager I used to work at an airport and they had critical infrastructure running on things like Basic and Assembly, to transfer data between the computers and modern systems you have to use floppy disks because the computers that they ran on didn’t have drivers to support USB and we couldn’t upgrade the computers because the software wouldn’t work on any other hardware.
So the AI laptop will be at home amongst all the ancient but supercritical junk that seems to be necessary to run our world.
I wonder if Proton can run these old softwares
At a previous job, I had to build laptops that would multi-boot DOS, Win95, Win98, and XP, all on one laptop. Our field-tech’s software had to have those specific versions of windows for the machines that they serviced, because of how the software interacted with USB and embeded floppy drives.
If you want to scare yourself:
spoiler
They serviced Medical devices: X-rays, MRIs, CT-Scanners, etc.
That’s dumb. The “work” in maintaining this excel file was the prompting and overall agent logic. In reality you’d be using something like openrouter and the instant claude “dies” for whatever reason you swap to whatever the freshest AI is. This never becomes ancient, it keeps up with the times.
Reminds me of some stupid company maybe a few months ago that had their PRs failing due to copilot being down the dumbasses didn’t build an “if no AI” failsafe into their workflow. And no one knew how to recover it
I know my work already has reports built by running data through Claude and having it spit out an xls. Though, it’s not quite as integral as the all-important closet laptop.
So far, so good.
Outages via https://downdetector.com/Eff it. Turn off the internet and see if folks can figure out the Dewey Decimal System
Then you have to hope the library still has a card catalog to fall back on.
Or a digital database that is stored locally, which they really should have.
Why stop there? Burn all the books too, see if folks can figure it out again
You can’t do what you never learned in the first place
