>For all the websites and apps I whip through on a given day, they’ve always been mysterious to me — pyramids erected by an unfathomable priesthood. Suddenly I was a pyramid builder.
I think this diffusion of knowledge, which represents the rising floor of progress, is the largest benefit of the AI phenomenon to date.
People learning how to do things is not gatekeeping. It seems that word has lost all meaning. This person still did not actually create anything.
If you have internet access, there was never any "gatekeeping". There have been free resources to learn web development for ages. Someone not wanting to put in the effort to learn to do something is not being "gatekept", they're just choosing not to learn to do something.
Lowering the amount of effort required to accomplish some task is a good thing. Giving more people the ability to meet their own needs is a significant form of technological advancement.
This was the whole point of Visual Basic, years ago: ordinary people could build their own software. I am glad to see the same sort of thing happening once again.
I get where your sentiment is coming from, but when surveying the internet and world can no longer agree. If we define gatekeeping as the requirement to extend time and effort to gain some level of competence and understanding I'm totally fine with it. "creating stuff on the Internet" has been available to pretty much everyone for a long time, and the value of their product when the creation is easy & free is also easy.
> Having needled her repeatedly over the past couple years about AI’s environmental, political, and economic implications, I brushed all that aside on a recent Sunday and drove to her house. After a little tibia talk, I opened her computer and began emitting vibes.
So the author had a moral, environmental, political and economic stance and then just threw them all in the bin.
This is sad to me because I have all of these stances and more. I just cannot bring myself to give in and use a technology wrought with so many systemic problems. And I cannot understand how anyone could feel so strongly about anything to the point of preaching it to others, only to just sort of … ignore them(?).
The author isn't literally discarding their stances, they're temporarily putting it aside to investigate a specific question. The paragraph is pretty clearly a throat-clearing that establishes the author's stance while saying upfront that this article isn't about those stances.
>For all the websites and apps I whip through on a given day, they’ve always been mysterious to me — pyramids erected by an unfathomable priesthood. Suddenly I was a pyramid builder.
I think this diffusion of knowledge, which represents the rising floor of progress, is the largest benefit of the AI phenomenon to date.
Yeah for all of the criticism (rightly so), that AI gets. Breaking down any gatekeeping behind creating stuff on the internet has to be a net good.
People learning how to do things is not gatekeeping. It seems that word has lost all meaning. This person still did not actually create anything.
If you have internet access, there was never any "gatekeeping". There have been free resources to learn web development for ages. Someone not wanting to put in the effort to learn to do something is not being "gatekept", they're just choosing not to learn to do something.
Lowering the amount of effort required to accomplish some task is a good thing. Giving more people the ability to meet their own needs is a significant form of technological advancement.
This was the whole point of Visual Basic, years ago: ordinary people could build their own software. I am glad to see the same sort of thing happening once again.
Exactly. I hope the job piloting the airliner I’m sitting in was gatekept such that only people trained as pilots are allowed to do it!
I get where your sentiment is coming from, but when surveying the internet and world can no longer agree. If we define gatekeeping as the requirement to extend time and effort to gain some level of competence and understanding I'm totally fine with it. "creating stuff on the Internet" has been available to pretty much everyone for a long time, and the value of their product when the creation is easy & free is also easy.
https://archive.ph/5cW7Y
> Having needled her repeatedly over the past couple years about AI’s environmental, political, and economic implications, I brushed all that aside on a recent Sunday and drove to her house. After a little tibia talk, I opened her computer and began emitting vibes.
So the author had a moral, environmental, political and economic stance and then just threw them all in the bin.
This is sad to me because I have all of these stances and more. I just cannot bring myself to give in and use a technology wrought with so many systemic problems. And I cannot understand how anyone could feel so strongly about anything to the point of preaching it to others, only to just sort of … ignore them(?).
The author isn't literally discarding their stances, they're temporarily putting it aside to investigate a specific question. The paragraph is pretty clearly a throat-clearing that establishes the author's stance while saying upfront that this article isn't about those stances.