We Still Use Paper

(humanpro.co)

25 points | by gx 2 days ago

8 comments

  • alecst 32 minutes ago
    Most feel-good pieces on AI make the same mistake, which is looking at where the ball is and not where it's going. If progress were to halt today, this article would be relevant and I'd upvote it.

    But since the richest and least trustworthy people on earth are on track to make an ultraintelligent thinking machine, the risks I'm worried about are: killing most jobs, concentrating most wealth, and putting ourselves at risk of literal extinction. All I could think when reading this was, "this person really did not think this all the way through." I'm sorry.

    • bix6 0 minutes ago
      Wealth is already concentrated. They’re just coming for the top 10% that affect the software devs now since they’ve taken everything else. You talked to anyone with an “unskilled” job in the last few years?
    • ptero 4 minutes ago
      > Most feel-good pieces on AI make the same mistake, which is looking at where the ball is and not where it's going.

      Humans have a bad track record predicting where a technology is going.

      I do not know where AI heads in the next 5-25 years (I have my hypotheses, but they are likely off, too), but I see a useful tool that allows many people to experiment with and try things that they could not before and I do not see why should I subscribe to the doomer view.

      As far as the moral character of the leaders: that's common, too. Many luminaries were, based on recollections, seen as pretty bad human beings and that didn't run off on their inventions. My 2c.

    • ben_w 22 minutes ago
      > are on track to make an ultraintelligent thinking machine, the risks I'm worried about are: killing most jobs, concentrating most wealth, and putting ourselves at risk of literal extinction. All I could think when reading this was, "this person really did not think this all the way through." I'm sorry.

      While two out of those three risks do not require anything "ultraintelligent", for killing most jobs it's worth remembering that their track is an appropriation of intelligence, and the speedups happen where it's easiest to measure more than where the tracks correspond to economic value.

      Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect for safety, and can still do a lot of wealth concentration even if it doesn't end all jobs.

    • sehw 14 minutes ago
      >But since the richest and least trustworthy people on earth are on track to

      They are on track to kill themselves with their decisions.

      • mrob 10 minutes ago
        That's no consolation to all the people they're going to kill with them.
    • singpolyma3 26 minutes ago
      They're going to do all those things with or without AI. We need to fight the end goals at a social level rather than the temporary means
  • ivanjermakov 32 minutes ago
    Stopped using paper the day I graduated uni. Digital tools are superior in all aspects for my way of thinking.
    • cowlevel 0 minutes ago
      you'd think so, but there's something you lose in terms of neural pathways, through some weird effect. I find that anything I physically write down sticks much better in my brain.
    • JKCalhoun 1 minute ago
      Except for sketching out ideas and designs for woodworking. Or jotting down any kind of quick idea I have when I am on the road (frequently). Or sketching an idea for a screen print or art design. Or making notes about what groceries to pick up the next time the wife and I head to the grocery store.

      Actually, I use paper every day.

    • cocoto 25 minutes ago
      Except for doing maths, which is painful to input on screens (but beautiful).
      • ivanjermakov 7 minutes ago
        For math I'm usually writing small programs or using spreadsheets, which again has benefits or search/edits/versions/undo.
  • Aozora7 22 minutes ago
    I haven't used paper for anything since I graduated college 10 years ago. Excluding education where I only used paper because I was forced to, closer to 20 years. I would much rather open a text editor or a spreadsheet on PC.
    • sehw 18 minutes ago
      And now you brain is damaged.Good job.
      • danielbln 13 minutes ago
        Care to elaborate on this take?
  • fschuett 29 minutes ago
    I did use to review the AI slop code on paper, it was extremely effective in quality, but extremely slow as a feedback loop: https://imgur.com/a/ZRg5x7t

    There is some science on this, how reading on paper activates different brain waves than a screen and how the physical layout of pages activates spatial memory recall: https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/Papercode-printing-code-on-... and https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L-TEaM0pn3IZjrvQMHUDDCtB...

    I am currently working on combining all of that into a code review tool to more effectively review slo.. AI pull requests. I am not sure if people here would be interested, but basically the idea is to not use the keyboard anymore to type your annotations, but only use a tablet / pen and voice (with transcription), so that code review is much more ergonomic. So you can "paint" on your code, make annotations, have a "physical" layout of your code, architecture overlays, etc. and then agents re-edit the code until it is what you want.

    • bobbyraduloff 7 minutes ago
      Sounds like an interesting take. Is it public?
  • yetihehe 27 minutes ago
    I was recently hired at a datacenter buildsite. The pen is the most important tool here.
  • IshKebab 27 minutes ago
    We still have horses. I wouldn't recommend a career as a farrier.
    • card_zero 7 minutes ago
      I think there might actually be a skills shortage in farriery. The job looks kind of satisfying.
  • nalekberov 53 minutes ago
    I don't understand the point of this blog post. Who said paper will be replaced by AI?
    • sshine 28 minutes ago
      AI won't replace old tech that works, is the point.

      Paper is one such.

      I'm less sure keyboards will stay to the same degree. My thinking was always the bottleneck while programming, so even though I can talk faster than I type, I couldn't solve problems faster than I type. But I can now.

      So I'm opting for speech-to-text when the office space allows it, and looking into steno (stenography) keyboards, or perhaps building a steno overlay on my custom split keyboard to go from 80-100WPM to 200+WPM.

    • iammjm 38 minutes ago
      Clearly the vibe du jour seems to be to just throw AI at any and all problems. And sometimes there are better, simpler and more straightforward solutions
  • nastygibbon 16 minutes ago
    [dead]