You probably mean the Solvay conference. I just wanted to append this link to your comment: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6e/So...

It really is a remarkable picture, but I'd like to note that it's all physicists, not scientists in general. It was the golden era of physics.

Perhaps you are thinking of the 1927 Solvay Conference? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solvay_conference_1927.jp...

The era of scientists being celebrities is done for the simple reason that it's not possible for a single human to advance our knowledge. Breakthrough papers are published by large groups who build on knowledge created by even larger groups.

Also, science used to directly correlate with improvements in life standards. Nowadays we see advancements in science (AI, psychology) used to actively reduce the standard of life.

Let's start by using strength as an analogy. A human is strong when they develop their physical body to its potential. That means developing muscles, cardio, lung capacity, flexibility, etc. A human is weak when they fail to develop their physical body to its potential (we don't actually care how strong humans are compared to each other, only to themselves). We can then judge human populations based on, say, the strength of the median person.

Intelligence is the same but for mental faculties. A human is intelligent when they develop their critical thinking, memory, focus, logical reasoning, etc. A human is unintelligent when they fail to develop these things to their personal potential. And when I look around me I see a culture of inustrial-strength distraction that has robbed people of their ability to focus, I see encyclopedias in everyone's pockets that have robbed them of any incentive to remember, I see a society of comfortable complacency that has shielded them from any consequence of poor logical reasoning, and with LLMs I see a mass surrender of the need to exercise critical thinking in exchange for the warm embrace of thoughtlessness.

There's no reason that things need to be this way. The human hardware hasn't fundamentally changed in 100,000 years, and we have so many more resources today that it's easy to imagine that we could all be, collectively, more intelligent than ever if we could somehow inspire people to care. Sadly, we don't seem to be able to.

They know what pinnacle means, their point is intelligence is not knowledge. But I find that rather nitpicky as it's clear the top level comment just used one as a synonym for the other, not actually caring about the difference.

we have more intelligent people than ever, but this also means we have more stupid people than ever

Is a room with 300 morons and 1 genius more intelligent than a room with 10 morons and 1 genius? In my model, there is negative intelligence, so the 300 morons would actually be less intelligent. We do have more stupidity degrees of freedom, that’s for sure. That is, the domain of human stupidity is greatly expanded. Smart people can be stupid in an ever increasing number of ways. So a very bright person 100 years ago might appear very stupid if they were time machined into the now.

In a mathematical model of collective intelligence I think we need to also include a "productive use" factor. The total brain power of our species might be higher than in the past based on a summation, but how much per-capita intelligence is being utilized for productive/adaptive ends versus being being distracted from such ends? What's our distraction rate offset?

Did you perhaps miss this part:

> Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence?

of the post you responded to?

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I am no expert, just a guy reading the Internet. And it seems like there are two opposing factors. The increased access to nutritious food has dramatically increased health, shown in the increased average height. The exception to this is the first 50 years, 1830-1880 when widespread dietary deprivation and severe inequality caused a decrease in height (take this as a warning I guess).

The other factor is that we all get significantly less physical activity than before, and obesity is a increasing problem.

And while the first effect is a effect of the machines, it is the latter effect I think most easily maps onto today's situation.

Personally I am quite certain that if you could teleport 100 random 20-year old from 1820 they would be better than 100 random 20-year old today at most physical tests, especially if you gave them food first.

Considering developed societies with access to those specialized diets and medical science, the median person is definitely not stronger than the median person from a pre-industrial society, even taking malnutrition and injury into account. It seems you've never tried to arm-wrestle a farmer before.

But what about average person, not a professional athlete? In past people suffered from malnourishment, but today they suffer from obesity.

We also know that testosterone levels (which are connected with muscle mass, recovery etc.) are lower today than even few decades back.

I can prod at a model as much as I want to produce something I find more original than average, but there are plenty of people out there that will say it doesn't count because of the fact an AI made it. "Slop" doesn't just mean "it sucks because it's bad", it often means "it's sucks because it's AI". They'd argue that if you were creative enough to produce something so original you wouldn't rely on an AI to make it for you. It's tainted by association, all the way back to the multi-billion-dollar enterprises that originally trained the models for their own ends.

Also there have been dozens of HN submissions and comments where the poster didn't even bother to remove the em dashes. Most people just don't care. The people who continue to post like this wouldn't have been as visible had they not discovered AI and pounced on it, but they were always there. The idea of posting with an AI voice, em-dashes and all, would likely have still appealed to them if you'd asked 5-10 years ago. Nowadays it takes hardly any energy for them to have a persistent voice.

Depends on how good the slop fork machine is, the act of true original creation is a messy and long process if it can be replicated to death immediately basically for free its not viable anymore

I feel the same way as you. But was unfortunately not surprised to see the replies you are getting here.

There are a ton of opportunities available right now to make new things. And make them better, more customizable, and more sovereign.

To the replies: be the change you want to see in the world, guys. That may be trite but focusing only on the negative will just make your own life shitty.

Leisure projects for me at least are about the personal challenge and achievement. If the LLM does it, you achieved nothing.

*Make anything "new"

The issue is maintenance. If you want to use these projects for important things, you need to maintain them. If you don't want to maintain them, I can't see myself using them for anything important.

I actually want less software for myself. Less things to maintain. I've become a "digital minimalist" in that I use very few software, only ones maintained by others who can afford and are willing to keep them working.

And you're actually excited by the prospect of buying them from Anthropic instead of making them?

I support this take especially since you added the "I don't care if nobody else uses what I make", but you should at least acknowledge what you're talking about is pretty unrelated to the article, as the author's entire context seems to be making something for other people to use and building it together with other people.

Since you said you want to make those things that you list, I assume none of these things have been built yet. If so, I would encourage you to consider how excited you will be to constantly maintain those things you build. But even if the maintainence cycle won't be as exciting, since you are the sole user you have the advantage of being able to proceed at a leisurely pace even while doing maintainence work.

In a professional setting, the dopamine hit of being able to build something quickly that works in an area that you have little to no knowledge in makes you more dependent on the AI in the maintaince cycle as you want to chase that dopamine high by maintaining the same development speed. This in turn leads to a bigger burnout crash after that peak dopamine hit. Maintainence is a phase of diminishing returns even without AI, but when your coding agents are introducing new bugs at record pace with their bugfixes with no new features to write home about you are in a special place in Hell.

I'm all for using AI to build ambitious projects. I have yet to see a person/company/organization continuously release huge software endeavours in a stable professional manner day in and day out with a coding agent harem in tow.

If something like the Ladybird browser, or any browser that is "built by scratch", achieved Chrome parity in six months and consistently maintained the same level of stability with continuous releases then I would see that as proof that this approach has become professionaly sustainable.

The reason people are getting away with so much using AI is because of the open secret in most enterprise engineering practices: the customer cares more about the response time for fixes they report than they do about overall or longterm product quality.

Thank you for writing what I want to scream every time a comparison is made to some archaic technology change.

Its advertised as outsourcing thinking, but I doubt many serious people making serious things actually outsourced their thinking very much. I definitely outsource my typing, search, and LSP interaction!

>LLM/AI is about outsourcing thinking.

No it isn't. I still do the thinking on how to solve my problems, I only outsource the tedious part, which is typing the code and fixing the syntax errors till it all compiles and does what I want.

If you also outsource thinking to it, that's your choice though. Or the company's choice. But ultimately the free market will deiced with products made using LLMs outcompete those made without.

Moreover, historical events and processes are unique, even if there are some similarities. Nothing that happened in the past can give us certainty on what will happen now.

It’s worse— it’s seeking to replace every single aspect of what it means to be YOU in the world. Some people are literally trying to “fire themselves” and be replaced with digital twins. Perhaps those people are independently wealthy and also have no need of human connection? For the rest of us, it is a sickening prospect.

AI is automated irresponsibility, and it is nothing like any earlier transition.

When a technology trend means people literally won’t be able to tell if you are living or dead, and also stop caring about the difference— that’s unprecedented in the history of humans.

>while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.

How can people say false things like this with a straight face?

Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom, let alone poor people back then: abundant cheap food that poor people can now be fat instead of starve to death, cars, planes, MRI machines, helicopter ambulances, vaccines, personal heating and air conditioning, OZEMPIC, etc

Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.

Meanwhile the cool homeless guy outside my building has 3 hot meals a day and a daily shower in the homeless shelter nearby, warm clean sleeping bag for winter, shades for summer, a bicycle for moving around town, a smartphone which he uses to watch youtube all day in his sleeping bag, plus access to medical care that kings of kings never had. All this with no job, and no care in the world.

> No because you still need a skilled human operator in the loop for clearly defining the input and to check the output.

For now. Will that be true in 12 months? 4 years?

If you're a programmer, your skills have been devalued significantly in the last 12 months. What makes you think the remaining value you offer will be required 12 months from now?