[HN Gopher] Preparing for when the machine stops
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Preparing for when the machine stops
Author : foxfired
Score : 60 points
Date : 2025-05-06 20:09 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (idiallo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (idiallo.com)
| robin_reala wrote:
| You can read the Forster short story referenced at
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-m-forster/short-fiction/... .
| It's impressive speculative fiction by any measure, let alone for
| 1909.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I want to add that "Pump Six and Other Stories" by Paolo
| Bacigalupi is also a great read. "Pump Six" also paints a
| similar picture to Forster's "The Machine Stops", but with a
| different perspective.
|
| Both are great and horrifying at the same time.
| emorning3 wrote:
| I'm not convinced that I should worry about people that would let
| AI run their lives.
|
| They're gonna pay the price for their foolishness, and paying the
| price is the universe's mechanism for keeping itself in balance.
|
| Take what's going on the US for example...
| mikewarot wrote:
| Those people include all of your friends family and community.
| No man is an island, regardless of what Silicon Valley might
| have you believe.
|
| The price will be born by _all_ of us.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Some of us are raising families and finding friends who won't
| be part of this. We're trying to carve out little islands. I
| can't save you, and I don't even want to.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > I can't save you, and I don't even want to.
|
| "Love your neighbor as yourself" exists in some form in
| every major pre-modern religion and philosophy because it's
| a cornerstone of society.
|
| Not over-compassionate, truthless love or yet another
| government program, but caring about those we run into
| enough to--at minimum--personally help meet their basic
| needs and defend or rescue them from immediate threats to
| their safety.
|
| If we're going to let anything go, it shouldn't be that.
| rightbyte wrote:
| If you create a community with like minded individuals it
| will be very prone to infighting ...
| jt2190 wrote:
| I assume this is your last post on HN, since AI will surely
| be participating in the discussions here in the near
| future.
|
| Seriously, though... How _will_ you "carve out a little
| island"? Computers are the kingdom of AI.
| aaronax wrote:
| Very similar to Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, etc. I
| imagine. Draw the line of what you think makes life good
| and follow as close as is reasonable, and if others agree
| they will associate.
| pimlottc wrote:
| > The price will be born by all of us.
|
| You probably meant borne, but I do agree we're all somewhat
| responsible too...
| emorning3 wrote:
| >>The price will be born by all of us.<<
|
| No doubt that is true, but...
|
| Suppose an extortionist comes to my business and says "hey,
| that's a nice business you got there, it would be a shame if
| someone was to ruin it with a bunch of horseshit tariffs"
|
| I'd say 'yes sir no problem" and then do my goddamn best to
| murder those fucks in their sleep. Making them pay the price
| for extorting me will make sure that its not gonna happen
| again.
|
| So now suppose the business next door is being extorted. And
| I tell the owner that I'd be happy to murder the
| extortionists for them. But they say "nah dog, they're
| sending the bad guys to El Salvador, it'll be fine".
|
| How do expect me to care about that guy? Fuck that guy.
| gnatolf wrote:
| A lot of the comments on HN lately are rightfully focused on this
| formative brain exercise that leads to intuition and conceptual
| understanding that is chiselled away by the shortcuts that GenAI
| provides. I wonder where the gain of productivity from GenAI and
| the drop off in 'our brain'-quality intersects.
| emorning3 wrote:
| We should probably require AI to always be able to explain it's
| conclusions.
|
| That way we can quickly assimilate knowledge from the AI and
| theoretically always have at least as much knowledge as the AI.
|
| I suppose it also means that we can verify that the AI is not
| lying to us.
| ptx wrote:
| Unfortunately we don't have that kind of AI. We only have the
| useless kind.
| turtleyacht wrote:
| One comparison is with Stack Overflow (SO). Given a task, there
| are usually multiple answers. The question may not even be
| relevant; often, multiple question pages must be compared.
|
| The best answer is the one that fits the aesthetics of my
| approach--one that didn't exist before (there was only the
| problem before), but the answer is simple, straightforward, or
| adaptable.
|
| Having multiple answers is good because different _minds_
| evaluated the question. It is a _buffet_ of alternatives,
| starting from others ' first principles, mistakes, and
| experience. Some are rejected outright from some tacit taste
| organ. Others become long-lived browser tabs, a promise to read
| carefully someday (never).
|
| All this is void if it turns out using SO is similarly
| degenerative in the same way, though.
| AJ007 wrote:
| It's actually not that different than talking with employees,
| however, the LLMs still have very significant shortfalls (which
| you know about after using them a lot.)
|
| If a manager doesn't know anything about what their employees
| are working on, they are basically fucked. That much holds up
| with LLMs. The simple stuff mostly works, but the complex stuff
| isn't going to pan out for you, and it will take a while to
| figure out that's the direction you went in.
| Krei-se wrote:
| our daily AI bad fear mongering story give us today
| somesortofthing wrote:
| On the other hand, maybe one day "thinking without AI" will
| become as absurd a notion as "thinking without a brain".
| cheschire wrote:
| If farmers had blogs during industrialization, I suspect there
| would've been a lot of this.
|
| Most people don't know how to grow a potato. So?
| jonnypotty wrote:
| The problem comes when no one knows how to grow a potato any
| more, not when most people don't.
| cheschire wrote:
| And yet people still do. So the problem being discussed is
| demonstrably unlikely compared to the more likely benefit of
| significant scaling potential for humanity
| NathanKP wrote:
| Back to AI: Would you agree that the problem comes when no
| knows how to think any more, not when most people don't?
|
| Personally, I'm pretty concerned about both. The fact that
| many people don't have basic survival skills like sourcing
| their own food, safe drinking water, and heat. And the fact
| that that many people lack basic thinking skills: ability to
| detect misinformation, or deal with the challenges and
| inaccuracies of flaky AI.
|
| In an ideal world society everyone who is capable has a
| higher level of training in both. But under modern oligarchic
| capitalism there are advantages to ensuring that people have
| neither skill: survival or thinking.
| theamk wrote:
| [delayed]
| korse wrote:
| Separation from supply leads people to take supply for granted.
| In general, taking things for granted is risky both mentally
| and physically. This applies to more than potatoes.
| strict9 wrote:
| > _No one remembers how to fix it._
|
| This thought exercise also gets interesting with software
| development. There are few prospects available for new grads and
| junior devs now. Relentless offshoring, headcount reductions, and
| AI promises from CEOs have hollowed out the tech landscape. There
| are very few opportunities for young people to professionally
| develop the knowledge to keep the systems running.
|
| And now most startups are focused on eliminating staff via AI.
| The people who would keep the systems running. I'm not sure where
| all of this leads to in a few years.
| kmoser wrote:
| "No one remembers how to fix it" sounds like the COBOL
| situation today. The reality is that the bar to learning COBOL
| is quite low: compilers and documentation are readily available
| for most platforms.
|
| What's lacking is incentive and drive: there are just too many
| other shiny tools to distract us, including jobs that sound
| more glamorous and/or pay just as well.
|
| A young person with the drive to learn just about anything has
| the means to do so, if they really want.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Maybe in our AI future we will stop referencing pop science
| (i.e., not replicated, but salable)
| lurk2 wrote:
| > In E.M. Forster's short story The Machine Stops, he paints a
| future where a vast machine handles every aspect of human life.
| People live isolated lives, fully dependent on the machine. They
| don't know how it works. They only know how to ask it for things.
| When the machine breaks down, society collapses. No one remembers
| how to fix it.
|
| I used to think about this in math class. I could figure out what
| to do with my calculator most of the time, but I didn't have any
| intuitive sense of how things worked. The sine, cosine, and
| tangent functions are still just black boxes to me, I have no
| idea what they actually do or how I would calculate their values.
| I often daydreamed about finding myself on a desert island,
| needing to make use of trigonometry to rebuild civilization, but
| not being able to find the angles that I needed.
|
| Lots of other skills are lost this way. I don't know how to join
| wood or sew a stitch, but I do know how to operate a nail gun and
| work a sewing machine. I couldn't fix either device, but if I
| couldn't find anyone to fix them and couldn't obtain new ones, I
| would likely have bigger problems to worry about. Most people
| will only ever need to view these devices as black boxes; the
| benefits of specialization generally offset the costs introduced
| by abstraction, absent major market disruptions (e.g. supply
| chain breakdowns, changing regulatory frameworks, etc.). Most
| people in human history have spent their lives as generalists on
| a farm. This hedges the individual against a lot of risk (the
| generalist can likely always find _some_ work to do), but the
| real strides in risk management are made by specialists living in
| urban settlements.
| XorNot wrote:
| The thing is YAGNI applies here. "What if society collapses?"
| is really just a LARP justification for doing whatever you
| already wanted to do.
|
| It's why "preppers" buy an armory of weapons, but don't make
| friends with their neighbors, become contributors to their
| local town or advocate for infrastructure improvements or
| sustainable farming policies.
| tmnvix wrote:
| > It's why "preppers" buy an armory of weapons, but don't
| make friends with their neighbors
|
| Interestingly, when I've seen interviews with deeply
| committed preppers, they almost always seem to come around to
| the conclusion that community is the most significant factor
| in their planning.
|
| I find it fascinating how that juxtaposes with the (possibly
| well earned) cliche of preppers as intensely individualist
| libertarians who reject society. I suspect there's some
| relationship here to the idea that if you go far enough to
| the left or right, you find that the spectrum is circular and
| not linear.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| >The sine, cosine, and tangent functions are still just black
| boxes to me, I have no idea what they actually do
|
| They are functions which tell you how to relate different
| parameters of a triangle. Concepts in mathematics are often
| interconnected, and trig functions appear in a lot of other
| (interesting) contexts as well, but fundamentally I don't see
| them as anything "more" than the SOHCAHTOA you were taught at
| school.
|
| > or how I would calculate their values.
|
| Without a lookup table? You would need some kind of a way to
| express the functions in terms of other mathematical functions
| which you know how to do, like multiplications and additions.
| Sometimes you can do this with a series expansion. Computers
| sometimes use a variant of the CORDIC algorithm. Both of those
| things are clever ideas in their own right, but you don't
| _need_ to understand them to know what trig functions do.
|
| > I often daydreamed about finding myself on a desert island,
| needing to make use of trigonometry to rebuild civilization,
| but not being able to find the angles that I needed.
|
| If you had a circle, a ruler, a pen and some paper then you'd
| get the idea to make yourself a lookup table pretty quickly!
|
| I think the point I'm making is that we get used to assuming
| that knowledge is so deep and complex a thing that we can never
| really _know_ anything. But often, knowledge isn 't as
| intricate as that. If everyone forgot about trig functions
| today, they'd be rediscovered tomorrow.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Having AI write the kind of software humans write is not even
| scratching the surface of what will probably happen. Just as
| generative CAD tools produce mechanical designs that would be
| prohibitively complex and time consuming for humans to design and
| verify, we're eventually going to see, and by eventually, I mean
| pretty soon, software no human could have written.
| holoduke wrote:
| Its already the case for a long time with assembly generated
| code. No human could recreate it. Ai code is just another
| abstraction on top of a layer that soon won't be touched
| anymore by common devs.
| metalrain wrote:
| If there would be massive EMP that fried all chips around me, I
| would be for short while somewhat useless.
|
| Most of what I've done is in software, I could not build computer
| from electronic parts, not even full adder from memory. Maybe I
| could read some schematics, but most measurement devices use
| chips as well, it would very difficult.
|
| I think preparation should be skills, useful in any environment.
| kmoser wrote:
| If all chips were fried, you'd have more pressing things to
| worry about than rebuilding a crude computer. I think the
| planning, documenting, and problem solving skills you learned
| as a software developer would still help you with whatever you
| were called upon to do.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| Just go back to books or other sources of knowledge and restart
| from scratch. It shouldn't take long to get your thinking back.
|
| W.R.T. any large industry crash, no one's going to care if you
| can do your Angular (or specific tech skill) stuff in 1 days vs.
| 5 days, so why the emphasis on speed in this scenario? Both
| System 1 or 2 thinking is fine here.
|
| We've enjoyed some pretty great technical advances for the past
| 40 years, even with a 10 year "dark age" we're still net ahead.
| We can rebuild and relearn a lot of stuff in 10 years.
| jjmarr wrote:
| If we had to colonize another planet I think we'd need 10,000 of
| the absolute best in just semiconductor fabrication/design if you
| wanted to create computers.
| craftkiller wrote:
| That may be if we wanted to create computers similar to what we
| use today, but wiring diagrams of an extremely basic CPU was
| part of everyone's CS undergrad at my school (and I assume most
| other schools too?) so if we just needed to make a turing
| machine with discrete components I'm sure a couple of us could
| dig up those memories and figure it out again in a pinch.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> it's easy to get by without deeply understanding the code
| you're deploying._
|
| I feel that's been an issue for a long time, with the heavy
| reliance on dependencies. AI tools are really just a furtherance
| of the model already in use.
|
| I have the luxury of developing software as a craft; not as a
| vocation. I deliberately do stuff "the hard way," because I feel
| more fulfilled, doing so.
| huphreem wrote:
| It's a fine enough journal entry, and I agree with the underlying
| sentiment of the piece, but can I crowdsource an explanation of
| the conclusive pith?
|
| > Learning to learn is a noble idea. But more important is
| learning to unlearn, and knowing when to resist the comfort of
| automation.
|
| I feel strongly about "teaching people to teach themselves" which
| seems a direct analog to "learning to learn", but I am at a
| complete loss for what "learning to unlearn" means, especially as
| it relates to resisting automation.
|
| Is the idea that you need to "unlearn" wanting to "learn"
| automation so you can keep "learning" more deeply about things
| you have already "learned"?
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