Seems like some people are looking at the AI chatbot and thinking "this thing is smarter than me."

AI's extremely flawed still, but it's improving. There might actually be a day when it can do many of the things they promise. Supposedly it's helping disease research. That seems undeniably good. Right now it's useful in a few ways, in the future it will be helpful in more ways.

My biggest concern is that AI chatbots will soon start giving alternate versions of history. Becoming a huge propaganda tool. Even more than currently. I am afraid for the day when 99% trust it blindly. And that day is already almost here.

I am reading this book https://thecon.ai/ that, among other things, explains the hype behind the set of tools we call AI. Check it, it might help you answering your question or at least having a different pov compared to the "if you don't use it you'll fall behind".

You'll fall behind in the race to the lowest IQ as they all turn their thinking over to AI and get lazier while you continue to exercise your brain.

Fuck 'em.

They mean that they have lost all ability to think for themselves.

I think a good alternative explanation is this: AI is here to stay, so knowing how to use it in whatever form it takes in your life as a tool is good knowledge to have.

Typewriters are close to extinction, but most everyone these days uses a computer to write documents. Those that refused to learn how to use a word processing application on a computer were "left behind" because now almost all documentation is written digitally.

It's from the same people who tell you to "GET IN EARLY" for whatever hot trend is about to take off, usually involving markets and trade.

I don't know what they mean, but,

In my experience, it's an accelerant towards burnout.

And it even entices you in deeper, with the continuing illusion of ease of productivity, deeper, into burnout.

Burnout is no fun. [Note: To be clear, that's "no fun", not merely "not fun". As in, it saps, eliminates and prevents all fun from your life while in burnout. And it takes twice as long to recover as it seems, ~ so the moment you think you've recovered, you're only half way there, and need to keep on having no fun for as long again, despite feeling like you can have fun, and every bit of energy expended on fun can still more readily send you back into burnout and extends the recovery time, tormenting you further. Seriously, burnout, is no fun. ~ Speaking as someone with (at last count) 65 ailments (some of which reduce some people to tears when they hear about), and I remain chipper, mocking the harrowing symptoms of it all, by calling it "fun" (e.g. "oh my flesh is rupturing again, what fun"), but burnout... that's no fun.]

So, I suspect we may see an increase in burnout among our developers. And that's speaking just from the enticing use on an individual level, before considering then also the added workload from everybody else churning through LLM accelerated workloads, having to deal with all the bug reports and pull requests (many of which will be hallucinated, or have insidious malicious injections, many of which will be vital critical issues), and then all the extra pressure to try harder to keep up your own skills against the accelerating spray, and those skills being moved to where your lower level skills atrophy, especially amidst the social pressure, perhaps even economic pressure and pressure from bosses and hierarchies and investors, to "keep up", and quantity over quality lines being blurred in the self reassurance that it's not being enshitified and our atrophying capacity to discern for ourselves.... the demands increasing and capacity decreasing, drives the race to the bottom even harder. So I suspect we may see an increase in burnout among our developers.

Rather than relaxing back towards a 4 hour working week, or to lives of leisure, the driving inertia of society's contemporary socio-economic model would instead have us see this promise of extra potential as something to maximally exploit, for the more that can be done. ... Which in turn drives that ambition even more. And do-addiction is a hard chariot to dismount from, or to slow down. Unlike food-addiction [the other difficult addiction (~ because you have to eat)], the dopamine from a do-addiction is largely celebrated and not shamed nor generally offered help to break the addiction.

All this a verbose way to get around to depicting that... we may see many of those who embrace "AI" more, despite an initial apparent "getting ahead", may be headed for a big long stall and crash, and instead it's they who "fall behind".

Depends how one uses it; How well one manages to titrate ones use. It could be a great pedagogical facilitator. But then, so could the internet... remember...? Remember when the internet was more like a library and science club, before it became more like TV and a bar fight? ... With the perverse incentives of big actors with the most grasp of the steering wheel, we may see LLMs/AI head the same degenerative direction, despite the early hopium promise that it wont be skynet, and will be a paradise generator that helps us sublimate past such societal structural corruption issues. Remember when electromagnetism was going to power the world for free, wirelessly in cymatic cromulence, making us all free and healthy (~ no, I guess not... a bit before our time), and now look and the technology born of electromagnetic discoveries and depictions, the prisons it gets shaped into, by those lacking the wisdom to see beyond their petty parasitic short-loop "well I have more than them", with all it's attention hijacking, with trillions invested in ensnaring our minds [(~ glad I got outta that biz, where that used to be my "just doing my job")]. Difficult to see, if pattern will hold, with all this hopium and urgent socio-economic pressure and terror gumming up our senses. It could save us, you have to or you'll fall behind, it could enslave and kill us all. Hope, pressure, terror. But if we take a step back... maybe we can get a more sober assessment.

Anyways, long rambles aside, really just posing the counter-notion to the assumption in the statement being queried in the original post,

despite an initial apparent "getting ahead", with the demand, the churn, the lure, they may be headed for burnout, and instead it's they who "fall behind". Depends tho.

Just a common phrase used by people trying to scam you. Basic Marketing really. Create the sense of a time crunch and people are more likely to buy in. People don't like the concept of missing out on something. Same reason they have countdowns on when sales end on websites and even in certain stores.

If you're actually curious, same idea as not knowing how to use a search engine in the 2000s/2010s

It's widely ubiquitous technology that can be extremely useful if used properly and not knowing how will waste a lot of time and likely frustrate you to the point you just give up or ask you family tech person.

There is no there there. AI has yet to prove itself useful for more than support at the general public level. Right now AI's most compelling use for the public is as a mediocre assistant not good enough to be irreplaceable but not bad enough to fire. There are scientific applications where the technology is allowing researchers to do things that would have taken years in a few weeks, but general purpose use is still years away from being what people actually need or even want.

People who claim that if you don't use it you'll miss out are like beleaguered parents telling thier childless friends how great having kids is. It's the most basic human instinct, confirmation bias. I made this choice and therefor it must be the right choice so everyone else should make that choice too.

If like you can't drive a car, that makes it harder to find a good paying job.

Those people see AI as a transformational technology that is going to be central to how everything is done 10 years from now for better or for worse, and trying to ignore that is just putting your head in the sand.

What they mean is that the technology seems to be both moving fast, and spreading rapidly. So, likely looking back to the early days of the internet, people expect that anyone who gains a lot of day to day experience will be more successful at any career that will likely rely heavily on LLMs in the future.

This was similar to what a lot of anti-internet we're told in the early 2000s. People who knew even a trivial amount of HTML could create simple things like a GeoCities page and seem like a wizard to some normal folks.

How true is it? Meh. Not everyone that learned even a decent amount of html in the 90s did anything related to tech on their lives. Right now, that's more about if you're training custom LLMs, self-hosting models, etc. Simply using an LLM, all that "prompt engineer" shit from 2 years ago, is already stale and gone. That's likely what older people sarong "you'll get left behind" mean. They're already left behind.

Just tell people you already run your own 40B Ollama model on a Kawasaki jetski and let them figure it out. Good luck!

There are people in all kinds of industries claiming AI is helping them do their job 30% faster or whatever, so presumably you’ll be “left behind” if you don’t catch up to their pace. In reality, those “30% faster” people are often producing at least 50% worse quality work. So it may come down to whether you can persuade your potentially AI-obsessed boss that maintaining quality matters enough to not adopt a faster but far more problematic process. You might not actually be left behind in terms of producing valuable work, but your boss might decide your team is being “left behind” if you don’t use AI to generate workslop or meet increasingly unrealistic deadlines.

Blindly trusting google results when copy/pasting into the terminal is sketchy. Doing that with AI is even worse.

Go ahead and blindly follow the LLM, have fun.

It's very similar to learning how to use a computer in 1995. I'm just old enough to remember meeting these people.

There is this thing, which, supposedly, can help you do your job better, it's being pushed by management, and it is sometimes expensive, often confusing, and obsoletes the skills you spent years to acquire.

Fast-forward 30 years, and it's very, very, very difficult to find people to talk to who still argue computing doesn't belong in the workplace, and that using a computer isn't essential for virtually all work.

The reason it is difficult to find these people, is because they were left behind.

people who can afford to pay for LLM tokens are always going to be fine as tokens get more expensive. this is just a thinly veiled way to say an increasing amount of people are going to end up poor and completely fucked as AI pushes all of the resources upwards.

I hate AI, but still use it from time to time when 3+ searches would yield no result, or I am already quite adapt to a topic and just want some stupid research work done by a web scraper tool, or when searching on brave search and I just search for a command in bash or something like that on a topic where I don't currently want to learn (maybe because of a deadline). I am inpatient at the moment, pressed for time and still want to try new things. It's a faster search engine for me right now because search engines and wesites became infested with SEO, bots and AI slop, at least I get to control the answers a bit better

They're very very very few tasks in which AI is great. Everything else is just a waste of money and unnecessary at the cost of destroying the planet.

And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.

That still is extremely unspecific and doesn't say much about what the idea is to use it for

it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets.

Writing maybe? I can't tell what this is about

Anyone saying that unironically has a vested interest in AI succeeding and are trying to produce FOMO. They likely missed their chance to make big bucks during the .com boom and they see AI as a second chance thinking it will inevitably become as ubiquitous as the internet itself.

They can generally be ignored and nothing of value will be lost.