I've noticed most of the fear mongering is coming from folks who are just enough skilled to be worried their life's worth is going to be replaced. A competant web-dev knows that they are going to be OK, and so are competent screenwriter/designer.
Imagine the world when blogging and self-publishing was starting out, if all the NYT journalists started saying "OMG, this internet thing is going to allow anyone to start a news site. Are you saying you write opinion pieces without studying and going to journalism schools?" It is the same energy here.
> just enough skilled to be worried their life's worth is going to be replaced
Everyone starts out that way. When you start work as a coder, or an artist, or writer, you are just enough skilled to make money. You can bypass some of this step by university or other forms of education, or you can be lucky enough to have spent your teenage years developing a skill that makes you money as an adult. But nobody starts out highly skilled.
It's a genuine source of worry that AI will subvert the process of people going from "just skilled enough to make money" to "highly skilled". I'm not fully convinced that it will - I think it's likely that in the long term society will adapt, just as it did to other tools.
But nonetheless it's a valid concern that shouldn't be dismissed. As with other new tools, it's going to disrupt a lot of people's livelihoods and we should approach that with empathy rather than telling people they simply weren't skilled enough to deserve to continue their career in this new reality.
It's certainly possible that the author believes their blog post is going to spark a movement or contribute in some way, as a sort of political act, to society's rejection of AI and therefore the ultimate salvation of their career as an AI-illiterate "creative". But giving them the benefit of the doubt for a moment, it might be more likely that they simply are aware that many such people exist already and are apt to click on a post such as this in order to have their opinions repeated back to them cathartically. The idea that a growing mass of social media posts can go critical and blast a hole in reality is, on the other hand, extremely popular these days.
I'm not saying I like all of this, or I dont worry about the future. But then again, WHO AM I to think that others are gonna "make things worse" or "not be given this power".
Democratizing tools, knowledge, access has always been messy. Think of the days when books were restricted to only elites. Explosion of ideas happened once it was opened up, but it was also messy.
We progress when everybody is empowered, and I see AI giving super powers to all of them. Will it be messy? 100% but we'll come out it better than what we have today.
IMHO actual worry has to be tempered by action. Blog posting is a short term relief from the pent up emotions. There are doomers that doompost and doomscroll, and doomers that prep and give themselves a buffer. The world’s wealthiest people build bunkers and buy real estate and agriculturally healthy land across the globe because they’re doomers at heart and can’t shake the feeling of needing to prep for any disaster at any moment. So it’s not just the tinfoilers that have this mentality.
Unfortunately HN predominantly caters to the doomposters and doomscrollers, and then somewhere the shitposters that thrive on performative acting of outrage, fright, drama, and so on to perpetuate the cycle and milk it to its full extent.
I’m not saying go out get some 25-year shelf life MREs and move to a very LCOL area and start growing vegetables in case you need to get through a particularly peckish winter, but humanity as a whole has lived through worse situations and no idea is off the table if its time has come.
I imagine a lot of people are very averse to losing what they have, being set back in their life in some way and seeing others unfairly benefit and perhaps unfairly benefit from their hard work. I don’t have an answer for this that actually solves the issue at heart. We won’t be holding hands and singing Kumbaya any time soon and weather events certainly don’t mind razing entire states. Starting resistance movements and communities is great but hard, unrewarding work with no guarantee of success.
I wouldn’t go that far but I do like the analogy. I just think if someone is this hung up on a tool or technology or a process taking over their job, or the jobs of the world, probably doom-ranting through a blog is a short term relief to the anxiety or denial or grief, but ideally I’d say they should see a psychiatrist so we don’t have to all collectively suffer the enmemefication.
