> And I think that’s the biggest danger of AI. You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not.

Building technology to overcome relatable hardships and frictions is a worthy challenge full of meaning.

Using someone else's technology to erase frictions and hardships from your life can erode meaning.

On my worst days I am convinced programming and technological optimism is a theft of meaning; personal satisfaction at solving a human problem awkwardly mapped to technology, at the expense of users dating, socializing, or consuming with discomfort and therefore the possibility of growth and meaning.

I agree with your overall sentiment, although maybe the article and this sentiment more generally are going a little bit overboard with the skepticism/negativity.

It is a little alarming the way people treat AI as another human relationship, yes.

But AI is also a pretty useful research partner and rubber duck for ideas so long as you know going into it that it’s going to have a bias toward agreeing with you.

This situation reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes comics that mock the idea of Calvin’s dad’s idea of building character.

For example, I was debating ECC memory and cheap used business workstation hardware for a homelab recently with an AI. It helped me pick a system out of some eBay listings and verified whether the model and Xeon processor SKU supported ECC.

When I went to buy the RAM, it actually caught a mistake where I thought a listing was for UDIMM when it was actually RDIMM.

It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store.