I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It’s what makes us human | Wendy Liu
The author reflects on learning to code the hard way in the mid-2000s without AI, arguing that the difficulty of thinking is essential to humanity. She warns against allowing big tech to privatize intelligence and letting our intellectual faculties wither in service of inane bots.
As intelligence itself becomes privatised by big tech, allowing your intellectual faculties to wither in service of inane bots seems a dangerous move
Long before the age of multi-billion-dollar AI companies promising to disrupt the field of software development, I was learning to code the hard way.
It was the mid-2000s, and I was a child with unmonitored access to the family computer. With the help of a basic text editor program, I learned how to make websites – first basic, then increasingly complex – from scratch. The results were never as beautiful or polished as in my imagination, but I could live with that, because I was learning a craft. The painstaking hours of debugging and poring over arcane documentation for projects that I eventually abandoned never felt wasted.
Wendy Liu is a writer based in San Francisco and the author of Abolish Silicon Valley
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