It is more like using skill saw in the age of IKEA.
When you use AI you are not programming, you are having a statistical machine deliver you inferred code which it got by stealing it from everybody else.
This is your carpenter going to IKEA and fitting a cheap furniture slop made by exploited workers in poorer countries, with cheap wood grown on stolen indigenous lands, into your kitchen, when you were expecting custom fit cabinets.
They are. And have been since the 1970s, and will continue to do so for another 50 years.
Particularly the fixing bugs parts. So often is one bug manifested across 200 lines in 50 different files, and to fix it you need the same 5 exact keystrokes across those 200 lines. vim (or in my case Emacs) macros will allow me to find the fix in the first of these lines where I also define the macro, and then apply in mere seconds across the other 200 lines.
As for writing test cases, copy-paste has worked fine since unit tests became popular in the 1990s, and will continue to work fine for the next 30 years. editor macros are not too dissimilar to copy-paste-edit.
In fact they were, and perhaps even still are, however regulators have simply stopped enforcing consumer protection laws in the past 20 years. Neo-liberalism reigns supreme and Ronald Regan became the king of Europe.
I don‘t disagree with you. This is basically Eric Turkheimer’s position and he has done an excellent job, and amazing science working within the field of Behavioral Genetics expelling and debunking all the racist pseudo-science of the likes of Plomin (see e.g. his review of Blueprint, 2019).
If you want to see where the tide is turning though, I do recommend e.g. Jay Jospeph. He recently reviewed Turkheimer’s latest book[1]. He is more attacking Behavioral Genetics as a whole (in particular heritability of schizophrenia) and debunking twin studies, and as such doesn’t write too much about doing away with IQ entirely. Despite the difference in opinion Joseph still cites Turkheimer extensively in good light in his own review of Plomin’s Blueprint[2].
I think these debates around the philosophy of science are important and worth following, at some point these meta-debates and book review somebody is going to declare the death of the IQ (or more likely of psychometrics), just like Jay Joseph is declaring the death of Behavioral Genetics today. But I think in the next 10-20 years we will be seeing more and more of neuroscientists who very casually (almost as if it is a non-importance) that the whole notion of IQ is a myth.
My post was tailored around the kinds of people who say stuff like “Cue the IQ deniers” and who very carefully insinuate not accepting fraudulent data from desecrated IQ scientist Richard Lynn is “denying facts”. And as such I used this on the nose speech.
If I was having this conversation with you (which we’ve had in the past) whom I believe is a Gloomy Prospector (a la Turkheimer) as opposed to my GPs Bell Curvers I would have been more careful with my wording.
Before I continue I do want to note that a lot has changed since the Gloomy Prospect‘s heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Back then people like Turkheimer were still pushing them selves to become the mainstream pshychology (although the writing was pretty much on the wall for the likes of Plomin, and before him Jensen, Lynn, et. al.). I want to make it absolutely clear that I respect (nay, love) the work Turkheimer et. al. have done in getting us here. He and people like him are true scientists. But now his Gloomy Prospect is being challenged from the left still, and I would not be surprised that in 20-30 years IQ will have gone the way of the Aether.
That said, I want to correct you, IQ tests are being used as one of many important clinical and diagnostic tools, in particular the subtests. IQ has not been used in diagnostic since DSM-III I believe (I may be wrong; I don‘t have a DSM-III handy). Many clinical and developmental psychologists still use subtests of IQ, but very few compute the actual IQ. Some social psychologists still compute IQ of and try to find some correlation to this and that, but when I read those research I get the vibes from studying the effect of weightlessness on tiny screws[1]. If I were to guess (and Turkheimer would disagree with me on this) this is purely because of momentum, and has nothing to do with the scientific value of IQ. IQ tests are extremely robust, have been thoroughly standardized, and whole generations of clinical psychologists have been extremely well trained in administering them.
Now, I don‘t think my GPs have read beyond the words Gloomy Prospect in my post, and I don‘t think bringing some critique on Eric Turkheimer from the left is gonna open the eyes of people who are still promoting the Bell Curve 30 years later.
IQ is a racist pseudo-science. It offers nothing of value to science nor philosophy. I will proudly claim to be an “IQ denier“ just like I am also a “phrenology denier“ as well as an “aether denier”.
I don’t think that is necessarily a bad preference if this was an actual dichotomy. Not all types of manipulation is equal, and when you at least try to hide it shows at least some respect for the user.
That said, I don‘t believe this dichotomy is real. Personally I don‘t use AI, political manipulation is however only a relatively tiny part of my reasoning for opting out.
It is customary to start a quoted paragraph (e. blockquote) with a greater then symbol (>) e.g.:
> This is a quoted paragraph
It is then expected that you share some insights or opinions on the paragraph you quoted. Just pasting a quote without any context nor markers makes it look you these are your own words.
Ones it became apparent that Eurovision was rigged in favor of Israel, the viewership stats plummeted. And worse, the entire sub-culture around Eurovision enthusiast died.
WWE is not an apples to apples comparison, as it is widely known among fans that the spectacle aspect of the sport weighs heavier then the competition aspect, as such both the fighters and referees play loosely with the rules to maximize the spectacle aspect. The same is not true of Eurovision, and it for sure is not true of the World Cup and the game of soccer in general.
You are ignoring the existence of consumer protection, which is not unusual as it seems like regulatory bodies around the world (but especially in Europe) have forgotten the existence of consumer protection as well.
You ask what is new about this, and the answer is, in 2026 context: nothing, but compared to the year 2000: plenty. Regulators used to issue fines for this behavior, and for worst offenders, regulators used to shut them down. Lying to customers is illegal in most jurisdiction, it used to have consequences, and it should do so again.
Maybe so, but if so then it should be integral that such decision needs to be taken by an independent panel, and not a single powerful individual of the organization, and that heads of state should not be allowed to influence such decision.
I‘m actually not sure this statement is true. “The goal is ultimately entertainment” is a thought terminating cliché. What about sportsmanship, competition, beauty, experiencing a common cultural phenomena with the entire world, etc?
But even if this statement is true, FIFA needs to learn from the failure of Eurovision and see that people are not entertained by watching a rigged game. For competition to be fun, it has to be fair.
This is true and is the reason I personally have always hated the term. This time around things are different. This time we also hate the technology.
Personally I used to love Markov Chains, Kalman filters, Supervised learning, etc. and resent the fact that people called it AI. But LLM has nothing but hate from my heart. Ironically, I love that people call it AI, and do so enthusiastically my self. A bad and hyped up technology deserves a bad and hyped up name.
c) Your speech (e.g. “protect our families”) mirrors those of war mongers, what about the families who’s your bombs are pointing at?
Nobody gets to tell me to throw away my dream of a better and more humane world, and settle for one with horrors and war crimes. Us humans have multiple times in the past significantly reduced our weapons of war, we can, and should, do so again. Lets start with the missiles, and I‘m sure the interceptors will follow.
[flagged] Probably by users, but it seems honestly a very weird post for users to flag. Unless HN users are now so frantically anti-anti AI that even a personal story is flagged to death unless it full-heartedly endorses AI.
You don’t know me, but I am in the tech industry and believe AGI will never happen.
Albeit that is because I did a BSc in psychology where I developed a deep distrust for intelligence research and concluded that intelligence is not a useful term in philosophy nor science (and especially not in engineering).