Interesting, I just replied to this post recommending the exact opposite: to focus on means vs ends.
The post laments how everything is useless when any conceivable "end state" a human can do will be inferior to what LLMs can do.
So an honest attention toward the means of how something comes about—the process of the thinking vs the polished great thought—is what life is made of.
Another comment talks about hand-made bread. People do it and enjoy it even though "making bread is a solved problem".
I saw that and thought it was an interesting dichotomy.
I think a way to square the circle is to recognize that people have different goals at different times. As a person with a family who is not independently wealthy, I care a lot about being economically productive. But I also separately care about the joy of creation.
If my goal in making a loaf of bread is economic productivity, I will be happy if I have a robot available that helps me do that quickly. But if my goal is to find joy in the act of creation, I will not use that robot because it would not achieve that goal.
I do still find joy in the act of creating software, but that was already dwindling long before chatgpt launched, and mostly what I'm doing with computers is with the goal of economic productivity.
But yeah I'll probably still create software just for the joy of it from time to time in the future, and I'm unlikely to use AIs for those projects!
But at work, I'm gonna be directing my efforts toward taking advantage of the tools available to create useful things efficiently.
ooh I like this take. We can change the framing. In the frame of one's livelihood we need to be concerned with economic productively, philosophy be damned.
The post laments how everything is useless when any conceivable "end state" a human can do will be inferior to what LLMs can do.
So an honest attention toward the means of how something comes about—the process of the thinking vs the polished great thought—is what life is made of.
Another comment talks about hand-made bread. People do it and enjoy it even though "making bread is a solved problem".