Software engineers use AI. Software engineers make software. Software runs all the shit. Generative AI has definitely lead to a revolution, regardless of how we feel about it. It’s not revolutionary like the internet was, nor like the steam press, nor like toast, but… maybe it’s revolutionary like … I don’t know … browsers in phones?

Not to mention AI is helping us understand how consciousness works better. Not because it actually resembles consciousness, but because it doesn’t while many people thought it would. This realization helps us develop our language and understanding better… now we distinguish between different kinds of intelligence more, and certainly understand better that you can have intelligence without consciousness. That’s a philosophical revolution.

Honestly, the technology is cool. The clout around it is ass. How the technology is being used is ass. What behaviors the technology is incentivizing is ass. But as a matter of fact, that it’s possible at all to exploit natural redundancy in language to the point of producing generative machines — that by itself is quite cool.

Yeah, I think this is normal. You can probably say the exact same sentence for any year to have occurred in the last several hundred years. Probably all the way back to whenever we transitioned to specialization for production scaling. You know, when someone figured out you can make more clocks per day if you have a nut producer, a spring producer, a frame producer, …

It’s tough… but you know it’s real progress too.