You can call me a luddite if you want. Or you might call me a humanist, in a very specific sense - and not the sense of the normal definition of the word.

When I go to the grocery store, I prefer to go through the checkout lines, rather than the scan-it-yourself lines. Yeah, I pay the same amount of money. Yeah, I may get through the scan-it-yourself line faster.

But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.

Look, I'm an introvert. I spend a lot of my time wanting people to go away and leave me alone. But I love little, short moments of human connection - when you connect with someone not as someone checking your groceries, but as someone. I may get that with the checker, depending on how tired they are, but I'm guaranteed not to get it with the self-checkout machine.

An email from an AI is the same. Yeah, it put words on the paper. But there's nobody there, and it comes through somehow. There's no heart in in.

AI may be a useful technology. I still don't want to talk to it.

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SoftTalker 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When the self checkout machine gets confused, as it frequently does, and needs a human to intervene, you get a little bit of connection there. You can both gripe about how stupid the machines are.

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layer8 9 hours ago | parent [-]

So, the benefit of GenAI is that it creates human connection by everyone collectively bitching about it?

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joquarky 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I've observed on many occasions that complaining seems to be the primary go-to ad-hoc subject in spontaneous human interactions in the past decade.

	▲	layer8 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, there is a lot to complain about.

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ThinkingGuy 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you're not already familiar, you sound like you may enjoy the works of Douglas Rushkoff:

https://rushkoff.com/

https://teamhuman.fm

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Johanx64 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.

It's some poor miserable soul sitting at that checkout line 9-to-5 brainlessly scanning products, that's their whole existence. And you don't want this miserable drudgery to be put to end - to be automated away, because you mistake some sad soul being cordial and eeking out a smile (part of their job really) - as some sort of "human connection" that you so sorely lack.

Sounds like you only care about yourself more than anything.

There is zero empathy and there is NOTHING humanist about your world-view.

Non-automated checkout lines are deeply depressing, these people slave away their lifes for basically nothing.

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trinsic2 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

OMG are you this out of touch with reality? Do you think they have a choice?

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Johanx64 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Can you write out your toughts in complete sentences?

It's not that hard.

	▲	trinsic2 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Its not that hard to have discernment and feelings either.

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debugnik 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You think those people won't need to enslave themselves somewhere else if the checkout line is automated? Asking for your job to be automated in a capitalist economy is putting the cart before the horse.

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krainboltgreene 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It's some poor miserable soul sitting at that checkout line 9-to-5 brainlessly scanning products, that's their whole existence.

You're right, they should unionize for better working conditions.