I am roughly the same age and I grapple with many of the same ideas, although I'm still pretty depressed at this point. I've been coding for 25 years, I'm quite good at it, it's a facet of my personality. Seeing this skillset commoditized within a year or so has been a brutal experience. Payback for all the jobs we replaced with software, I suppose.

I do feel like I should be thankful to be alive right now though. I witnessed the evolution from Kirby on the Game Boy to Half Life 2 to VR to LLMs. The tools we use today were science fiction only a few years ago.

I just wish society was in a better state to make this tech a greater good instead of a tool for advertisement, warfare and wealth concentration. I feel a deep sense of loss because of this. 20 years ago I had no doubt that technological progress was an obviously good thing, that it would improve the lives of everyone. Do I still believe this? I'd like to, at least.

I feel that as a field, we overfitted towards economic value maximization (which, to be fair, is the obvious thing to do) while leaving important problems behind.

Accessibility, sanitary infrastructure (in developing countries), generally improving health (including making it cheaper), and environment/wildlife preservation being some good examples of largely unsolved problems that technology still holds the key to dramatic improvement.

This might be the right time to start working on these things. Ironically, warfare, advertisement, and wealth concentration helped advance technology rapidly, making it easier to tackle other problems.

Yeah, I am also grateful to have been around to watch the twilight of humanity as we outsource our abilities.

Tech has certainly stopped being good for people.

I appreciate the comment because it resonates so closely to how I feel. Honestly, I could have written nearly the same thing. Thanks for sharing. I still do hang on the idea that there is still good we can bring into the world.

You (not responding to you directly simias) are truly delusional if you think what's happening isn't extremely concerning and dystopian in a lot of ways.

And there will be a lot of ego death, esp. with people deep in a lot of kowledge work.

But if you claim that AI is absolutely a waste and bad for humanity I feel sorry for you if you can't see how incredible it is that we have this new technology. -That it will most likely solve some very core issues humans are working on, and that it is a kind of evolutionary moment in human history, creating artificial intelligence. I feel sorry that you can't see past your own nose to see the bigger picture in that sense.

I tend to think big changes will always make things better and worse at the same time. If you look at the long horizon of history (100s of years) it appears that it makes things better on balance. But who really knows for sure what will happen.