Humans and AI Are Pretty Much the Same

I’m a sophomore, and lately I’ve been around a lot of interns.

Some of them look fine on the surface, but the moment they start working it’s a pile of shit. You have to tightly constrain their every step, or hand them a process doc from before, or pair them with someone who kinda knows what they’re doing.

I realized this is exactly what skills are. There’s a pile of so-called SOTA models that are completely useless in vertical domains, so people bolt on 10,000 skills to them to make them do things a human could do.

Why I say they’re alike

Both have pre-installed, mostly-useless knowledge. OK, to be fair, the AI’s pre-training beats the curriculum of most humans under 18 by a mile.

Both can’t actually function in a vertical domain.

Both are playing at semiotics.

Both get obsoleted. You all keep whining that the job market is brutal, but models are in the same rat race. Anthropomorphize them for a second and you’ll see GPT-4o is already unemployed as hell.

Both have knowledge with an expiration date. The more abstract you go, the faster you die.

A bricklayer’s craft lasts 100 years. The wall your grandpa built is still standing.

A programmer’s knowledge expires in 10 days. Code you wrote last week? Someone’s already had an AI rewrite it this week.

Physicists die faster than bricklayers. Programmers die faster than physicists. PMs die faster than programmers.

Wait, did PMs ever actually live.

Both get packaged as “irreplaceable.” Companies tell you you’re talent, AI companies tell you they’re core competitiveness. Both are selling something that can be swapped out any second.

You want me to say why humans and AI are alike?

I don’t want to say it, because I refuse to drag this into bullshit semiotics and argue with a bunch of people who think they understand semiotics — you know the type, 30-minute videos of “alienated subjectivity” cosplay that I can transcribe in 2 minutes. Hollow, structureless garbage.

But if you really want me to name the difference.

It’s just the substrate. That’s it. A bunch of idiots go “you’re a prediction machine.” Bro, you are too. Fuck off.

But since I’m writing this thing I have to give some other explanation.

I don’t want to explain, because explaining is itself playing semiotics.

But this article is the proof.