This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.

Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?

I understand the impulse behind posts like this, and it's important to remember to maintain human connections. (Arguably, once we learn how to do this because we think it's a good in its own right and not because we have to, we'll be better off.) But I just don't like being emotionally browbeaten like this because I have a question that I need an answer for that I don't have the time, money, or access to go get in a different way.

I really don't understand taking the author's silly hyperspecific examples of unique humans in his life as berating the reader for not knowing exactly those same people. I read it as "remember all the unique people you know and try reaching out to them instead of going to AI or the internet."

>If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?

I really don't understand the need to torture alternate meanings out of the writing of people we don't agree with. Nothing in the author's writing even comes close to implying what you're suggesting here.

> This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.

Didn't that guy start his channel because he didn't have a father growing up? Seems like important context.

Part of this is the changes wrought by the Internet already. At one point, almost nobody got into fly fishing out of an idiopathic urge to capture little trouts.

I got into fishing because my neighbor liked to take his kids out and I came with. Then I ran into an old man on a lake who could do all sorts of wild casting techniques (through fly fishing) and who explained to me his scientific approach to catching fish. It sounded very interesting when he spoke about it.

The way of sharing information has been upgraded, but the way of forming communities has not. The people who want to catch trout are very well served by modern tools, but the people who wanted an occasion to talk to others in a quiet outdoor space are not.

> If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?

So much to unpack here!

First, one of terrible contemporary social fallacies that AI's convenience reinforces is that your fly fishing questions are urgent. Web search first cultured this impulse, and smartphones first amplified it, going so far as to convince people to interrupt real social interactions to go look up some insignicant trivia on their phone, but AI threatens to cement it.

The occasions on which you need a quick answer, let alone an unreliable one from the internet or an AI chatbot, are vanishingly rare.

Truly. If you find that inconceible, you're living in some kind of frantic alarm state and may want to check in on yourself before the stress and anxiety takes its inevitable toll on your health.

Second, the answers to your fly gishing questions are still within reach without AI. AI -- in tgat role -- is just a shitty aggregator and paraphraser. What answers it has are better and more humanely available by calling/emailing an outfitter (they'd love to help!), reaching through your friend network to deeper nodes (people love to share their comnection!), or by finding one of the dozens of online communities for the topic and engaging with a human there (that's why they gather there! To discuss these things!)

And all of the above applies to pretty much every topic besides the most urgent medical emergency (for which you should call an emergency dispatcher or teledoc service!), not just fly fishing.

> If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?

Consider the ways this actually would happen but a mere 3-5 years ago.

You would Google search for information about fly-fishing and find:

* Enthusiast websites & blogs * Enthusiast forums * Enthusiast YouTube & other social media

The source might not literally be your dad or your friend, but you would still connect with real people.

You underestimate how easy it is to get someone who's into fly fishing to talk about fly fishing. You don't need to have known them for more than thirty seconds.

Even NYC has a fishing meetup group with over 1000 members.

Go to a store that sells fly fishing equipment and talk to a customer or a staff. You may as well end up with a new friend.

> If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?

I know, right? The author clearly wants you to starve to death for the lack of a friend to teach you to fish

> This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.

Mot everyone has a father to ask. His own family were abandoned by their father when he was 14 and his sister was 9. People die. Some people have abusive or neglectful parents.

Not every dad is good at everything.

Eh, the poem doesn't suggest technology isn't ever useful. It's highlighting that the inefficiency of human relationship is a feature, not a bug.

You might not have a friend who is into fly-fishing, but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about. Maybe that's less efficient, maybe it's less direct. But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other, and technology is getting dangerously close to replacing relationships altogether.

I don't think this is meant to guilt you for using tech, but it is totally a wake up call to remembering WHY we fly fish and go to weddings and write memoirs and so on.

Way to miss the point, there.

>they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.

Much of the anti-AI sentiment has this sort of false dichotomy as its foundation. An imagination that the alternative to AI is the purest form of manual labour in some sort of idealized, bucolic form, filled with heartfelt, purposeful, sincere human connection.

So every time I'm thinking about what to make with the ingredients I have, I should text someone who cooks (I cook, so this is a hypothetical)? What a ridiculous canard, and absolutely no one would appreciate that. I can enjoy human contact without inventing ridiculous justifications.

Further, to quote from Unlearning Economics, everything already was AI [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg], at least in the demonized way that people use that phrase.

Wedding speeches? Overwhelmingly cliche bullshit, and if you've been to a number of weddings it starts to get incredible how blatant this is. The whole manner of "genres" of music, art, and so on, is everyone copying each other and mimicking styles.

Even the recurring "I can spot AI websites!" nonsense, as if everyone wasn't already copy/pasting the trend du jour.

Even programming, this site is stuffed with "I lament the loss of the craft" pearl clutching articles daily, yet most of you are terrible programmers. I mean this as nicely as I can. It's astonishing seeing the actual state of the industry and hearing people imagining the world's most skillful, conscientious, thoughtful developer as the only alternative to AI assistance. It's rather amazing.

And long before AI people were largely just duct-taping together whatever libraries they found mentioned in a StackOverflow post.

Is it possible to hand craft better creations? Absolutely. Was that the norm pre-LLM? LOL, not even remotely. People were churning out enormous volumes of garbage, in every field.

AI isn't the reason people aren't making "human connections", and the foundation of the article is perverse.