I know I have already written a (long!) piece on this, so I don't want to expand too much here -- but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM. More than anything, it reinforced something that I think many of us believe: the future is especially uncertain right now, and will contain many surprises!
Perhaps the uncertainty is more to do with the public being able to see this new tech; think what's happened in those 30 years, some of which you as a techie would have been well aware of but most people were clueless about. Those of us using PDAs at the time, most of the public didn't imagine constant wireless connectivity and powerful computers in their pockets. Networked games, neat tricks bunches of geeks ran at the time; today everywhere.
Is AI really that much of an outlier other than public knowledge?
> […] but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM.
While it just came out, are you planning on reading Pope Leo's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas?
Well, they are tools, aren't they? They aren't inherently good or bad, what people are doubtful of who will get to reap the benefits of the tools.
For the past few decades, slowly but surely, the recipients of the benefits of technologies have increasingly been corporations. Of course people are worried that this will move even more wealth out of their hand and into CEOs' coffers.
We really are living in technofeudalism, and we need to figure out how to stop it.
I have to admit I feel similarly conflicted after a few recent REAL WORLD experiences. The first is that Gemini and Claude taught me a whole bunch of things about beer that I feel like I should have known, or a friend should have told me in the last few decades :-) (I'm in my mid 40's)
As background, I am a simple man, and I basically like one type of beer (pale ale), and drink 1 beer a day. But it has to be fresh, crisp, bitter, and not make me want to fall asleep (lower alcohol)
So here is some color on what I learned:
- I worked in SF / the bay area for nearly 2 decades, and I'm now in Philly. I have been wondering for like FOUR YEARS why when I buy pale ale, it is somehow OFF. Well Claude told me that east coast pale ale is actually more like "English Ale" (e.g. Yards brewing), and west coast pale ale is its own thing (e.g. Lagunitas)
Apparently west coast is what I developed a taste for -- it is more bitter. And this totally tracks for me. So the same term is used for 2 slightly different things, and AI cleared that up for me
- I just walked into a beer store today in Philly, and there are 5 IPAs for every Pale Ale, which annoys me because I prefer the latter. And that happened in San Francisco too.
And Gemini taught me that "session IPA" is actually a marketing term for Pale Ale. I always choose things labeled Pale Ale, but many people want something labeled "IPA". So they come up with the term "session IPA" -- an IPA with lower alcohol aka Pale Ale.
I use Gemini anonymously, so it doesn't remember things about me. And after I described my beer preferences and the fact that I'm in NJ, it specifically brought up Tonewood Brewing in NJ, which is in fact the beer I've drank the most in the last 3 years!
So yeah I find it eerie that the LLMs are helping me with words versus reality.
- the same term "pale ale" referring to slightly different things on the east coast and west coast -- this was tripping me up for years
- the term "session IPA" being a marketing term for Pale Ale -- also something I didn't know for years
So yeah I've been drinking something slightly "wrong" quite often, because of a confusion over words. I guess I simply don't know anyone who I can ask dumb questions about beer to.
> I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids.
Bryan Cantrill is a tech CTO.
The last time I saw his name was talking with Simon W. about how LLM companies need an Obama figure. (Not necessarily saying it as in, I hope they get an Obama figure. But if they knew what was good for them.)
> Now, surely many generations have looked back at the three decades since their undergraduate years with a mix of nostalgia for the past and apprehension for the future, so it’s hard to know if 2026 is truly exceptional in this regard. And certainly, you can’t argue that today’s anxiety for the future is unrivaled: my mother graduated in 1968, and is quick to remind that many of her classmates faced a loss of their college deferments and (depending on their lottery number) being drafted to fight in an unpopular war.
Is Cantrill the Vietnam war hawk in this comparison?
> It is no exaggeration to say that this was brought to us
Wait for it.
> by Claude. Yes, we of course could have gotten BattleTris working without Claude’s help (but the preceding two decades tells us pretty clearly that we wouldn’t have!). The reasons that we wouldn’t have done it (didn’t do it!) on our own are myriad: yes, the work involved is tedious (and time-consuming), but also because it is so indeterminate as to be speculative: when porting something (which is what this amounted to, even if porting into modernity and with as light a touch as possible), it is very difficult to have forward visibility as to progress. That is, you can feel deceptively close to your goal (only to discover some major piece that needs to be rethought) — and you can also be deceptively far (what feels like smoldering wreckage is sometimes but a single fix away from functional software).
Why use Claude then?
So for regular programmers I would question being afraid of AI taking my job and then also using AI. Not for work. But for thrills. Why help train this thing? Well anyway.
Just one more thing. You might become unemployed. The craft you once knew might become destroyed. But! You did get to revive that zany game from fiften years ago. Okay I’m done.
> So paradoxically, this profoundly human, joyful moment was indisputably brought to us by the very thing that we are worried is going to strip us of our humanity.
> Where does that juxtaposition leave us? As I have outlined in Oxide RFD 576, I believe that LLMs are but a tool, albeit an exceedingly powerful one. When we cease to believe this — when we think of it not as a tool, but as dehumanizing mechanistic overlord — we subject ourselves unnecessarily to it. Yes, LLMs mean a lot of changes to domains that may be unaccustomed to technological change, and yes, some of those changes will leave us wistful for a bygone era — but I also believe that there will be many more BattleTris-like experiences in our collective future: delightfully human moments that remind us why we build stuff in the first place.
We have to have the right mindset. We must imagine Claude as happy...
No, it is clear that The Machine is not what is forcing anything down our throats; it’s just a tool, wielded by the powerful.
I know I have already written a (long!) piece on this, so I don't want to expand too much here -- but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM. More than anything, it reinforced something that I think many of us believe: the future is especially uncertain right now, and will contain many surprises!
Perhaps the uncertainty is more to do with the public being able to see this new tech; think what's happened in those 30 years, some of which you as a techie would have been well aware of but most people were clueless about. Those of us using PDAs at the time, most of the public didn't imagine constant wireless connectivity and powerful computers in their pockets. Networked games, neat tricks bunches of geeks ran at the time; today everywhere. Is AI really that much of an outlier other than public knowledge?
> […] but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM.
While it just came out, are you planning on reading Pope Leo's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas?
* https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnifica_Humanitas
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265206
It was great to see you, Adam, and others at the reunion.
Well, they are tools, aren't they? They aren't inherently good or bad, what people are doubtful of who will get to reap the benefits of the tools.
For the past few decades, slowly but surely, the recipients of the benefits of technologies have increasingly been corporations. Of course people are worried that this will move even more wealth out of their hand and into CEOs' coffers.
We really are living in technofeudalism, and we need to figure out how to stop it.
I liked this story, thanks for sharing
I have to admit I feel similarly conflicted after a few recent REAL WORLD experiences. The first is that Gemini and Claude taught me a whole bunch of things about beer that I feel like I should have known, or a friend should have told me in the last few decades :-) (I'm in my mid 40's)
As background, I am a simple man, and I basically like one type of beer (pale ale), and drink 1 beer a day. But it has to be fresh, crisp, bitter, and not make me want to fall asleep (lower alcohol)
So here is some color on what I learned:
- I worked in SF / the bay area for nearly 2 decades, and I'm now in Philly. I have been wondering for like FOUR YEARS why when I buy pale ale, it is somehow OFF. Well Claude told me that east coast pale ale is actually more like "English Ale" (e.g. Yards brewing), and west coast pale ale is its own thing (e.g. Lagunitas)
Apparently west coast is what I developed a taste for -- it is more bitter. And this totally tracks for me. So the same term is used for 2 slightly different things, and AI cleared that up for me
- I just walked into a beer store today in Philly, and there are 5 IPAs for every Pale Ale, which annoys me because I prefer the latter. And that happened in San Francisco too.
And Gemini taught me that "session IPA" is actually a marketing term for Pale Ale. I always choose things labeled Pale Ale, but many people want something labeled "IPA". So they come up with the term "session IPA" -- an IPA with lower alcohol aka Pale Ale.
I use Gemini anonymously, so it doesn't remember things about me. And after I described my beer preferences and the fact that I'm in NJ, it specifically brought up Tonewood Brewing in NJ, which is in fact the beer I've drank the most in the last 3 years!
So yeah I find it eerie that the LLMs are helping me with words versus reality.
- the same term "pale ale" referring to slightly different things on the east coast and west coast -- this was tripping me up for years
- the term "session IPA" being a marketing term for Pale Ale -- also something I didn't know for years
So yeah I've been drinking something slightly "wrong" quite often, because of a confusion over words. I guess I simply don't know anyone who I can ask dumb questions about beer to.
> I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids.
Bryan Cantrill is a tech CTO.
The last time I saw his name was talking with Simon W. about how LLM companies need an Obama figure. (Not necessarily saying it as in, I hope they get an Obama figure. But if they knew what was good for them.)
> Now, surely many generations have looked back at the three decades since their undergraduate years with a mix of nostalgia for the past and apprehension for the future, so it’s hard to know if 2026 is truly exceptional in this regard. And certainly, you can’t argue that today’s anxiety for the future is unrivaled: my mother graduated in 1968, and is quick to remind that many of her classmates faced a loss of their college deferments and (depending on their lottery number) being drafted to fight in an unpopular war.
Is Cantrill the Vietnam war hawk in this comparison?
> It is no exaggeration to say that this was brought to us
Wait for it.
> by Claude. Yes, we of course could have gotten BattleTris working without Claude’s help (but the preceding two decades tells us pretty clearly that we wouldn’t have!). The reasons that we wouldn’t have done it (didn’t do it!) on our own are myriad: yes, the work involved is tedious (and time-consuming), but also because it is so indeterminate as to be speculative: when porting something (which is what this amounted to, even if porting into modernity and with as light a touch as possible), it is very difficult to have forward visibility as to progress. That is, you can feel deceptively close to your goal (only to discover some major piece that needs to be rethought) — and you can also be deceptively far (what feels like smoldering wreckage is sometimes but a single fix away from functional software).
Why use Claude then?
So for regular programmers I would question being afraid of AI taking my job and then also using AI. Not for work. But for thrills. Why help train this thing? Well anyway.
Just one more thing. You might become unemployed. The craft you once knew might become destroyed. But! You did get to revive that zany game from fiften years ago. Okay I’m done.
> So paradoxically, this profoundly human, joyful moment was indisputably brought to us by the very thing that we are worried is going to strip us of our humanity.
> Where does that juxtaposition leave us? As I have outlined in Oxide RFD 576, I believe that LLMs are but a tool, albeit an exceedingly powerful one. When we cease to believe this — when we think of it not as a tool, but as dehumanizing mechanistic overlord — we subject ourselves unnecessarily to it. Yes, LLMs mean a lot of changes to domains that may be unaccustomed to technological change, and yes, some of those changes will leave us wistful for a bygone era — but I also believe that there will be many more BattleTris-like experiences in our collective future: delightfully human moments that remind us why we build stuff in the first place.
We have to have the right mindset. We must imagine Claude as happy...
No, it is clear that The Machine is not what is forcing anything down our throats; it’s just a tool, wielded by the powerful.