Robin Sloan on chatbots as “manic technology”:
I’m starting to think language models are a fundamentally manic technology, in part because they operate exclusively through logorrhea, the “yeah, yeah, YEAH!” of the all-nighter. […]
The “best” setting for a brain (and/or an economy) isn’t necessarily straight down the middle. A dip into the realm of mania can be useful, some times revelatory. I don’t know if many creative projects would ever get started if our brains didn’t some times relax the standards by which they light up.
Yet for a human mind and a human heart, one really good project is more nourishing than ten cruddy ones; that was true a hundred years ago, and it’s true today. The AI coding companions will never ever say: “Hey … whatever happened to that other thing you were working on?”
I suppose you still need friends for that, people who know you, who know when you’re talking too fast, and the gleam in your eye has taken on a hard edge.