Comment by ericmcer

Comment by ericmcer 3 days ago

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"in the 1920s and 1930s, to be able to drive a car you needed to understand things like spark advance, and you needed to know how to be able to refill the radiator halfway through your trip"

A car still feels weirdly grounded in reality though, and the abstractions needed to understand it aren't too removed from nature (metal gets mined from rocks, forged into engine, engine blows up gasoline, radiator cools engine).

The idea that as tech evolves humans just keep riding on top of more and more advanced abstractions starts to feel gross at a certain point. That point is some of this AI stuff for me. In the same way that driving and working on an old car feels kind of pure, but driving the newest auto pilot computer screen car where you have never even popped the hood feels gross.

michaelrpeskin 3 days ago

I was having almost this exact same discussion with a neighbor who's about my age and has kids about my kids' ages. I had recently sold my old truck, and now I only have one (very old and fragile) car left with a manual transmission. I need to keep it running a few more years for my kids to learn how to drive it since it's really hard to get a new car with a stick now...or do I?

Is learning to drive stick as out dated as learning how to do spark advance on a Model T? Do I just give in and accept that all of my future cars, and all the cars for my kids are just going to be automatic? When I was learning to drive, I had to understand how to prime the carburetor to start my dad's Jeep. But I only ever owned fuel injected cars, so that's a "skill" I never needed in real life.

It's the same angst I see in AI. Is typing code in the future going to be like owning a carbureted engine or manual transmission is now? Maybe? Likely? Do we want to hold on to the old way of doing things just because that's what we learned on and like?

Or is it just a new (and more abstracted) way of telling a computer what to do? I don't know.

Right now, I'm using AI like when I got my first automatic transmission. It does make things easier, but I still don't trust it and like to be in control because I'm better. But now automatics are better than even the best professional driver, so do I just accept it?

Technology progresses, at what point to we "accept it" and learn the new way? How much of holding on to the old way is just our "identity".

I don't have answers, but I have been thinking about this a lot lately (both in cars for my kids, and computers for my job).

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  • analog31 3 days ago

    The reasons I can think of for learning to drive stick shift are subtle. Renting a stick shift car in Europe is cheaper. You might have to drive a friend's car. My kids both learned to drive our last stick shift car, which is now close to being junked. Since our next car will probably be electric, it's safe bet that it won't be stick.

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    • direwolf20 3 days ago

      The reasons for learning to drive a manual transmission aren't really about the transmission, they're about the learning and the effects on the learner. The more you get hands on with the car and in touch with the car the more deeply you understand it. Once you have the deepish understanding, you can automate it for convenience after that. It's the same reason we should always teach long division before we give students calculators, not after.

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      • michaelrpeskin 3 days ago

        I agree with all of those statements - I always told my wife that I'd get our kids a underpowered manual so that they're always busy rowing gears and can't text and drive.

        But in the bigger picture, where does it stop?

        You had to do manual spark advance while driving in the 30's

        You had to set the weights in the distributor to adjust spark advance in the 70's

        Now the computer has a programed set of tables for spark advance

        I bet you never think of spark advance while you're driving now, does that take away from deeply understanding the car?

        I used to think about the accelerator pump in a the carburetor when I drove one, now I just know that the extra fuel richening comes from another lookup table in the ECU when I press the gas pedal down, am I less connected to the car now?

        My old Jeep would lean cut when I took my foot off the gas and the throttle would shut quickly. My early fuel injected car from the 80's had a damper to slow the throttle closing to prevent extreme leaning out when you take your foot off the gas. Now that's all tables in the ECU.

        I don't disagree with you that a manual transmission lets you really understand the car, but that's really just the latest thing were losing, we don't even remember all of the other "deep connections" to a car that were there 50-100 years ago. What makes this one different? Is it just the one that's salient now?

        To bring it back on topic. I used to hand-tune assembly for high performance stuff, now the compilers do better than me and I haven't looked at assembly in probably 10 years. Is moving to AI generated code any different? I still think about how I write my C so that the compiler gets the best hints to make good assembly, but I don't touch the assembly. In a few years will be be clever with how we prompt so that the AI generates the best code? Is that a fundamentally different thing, or does it just feel weird to us because of where we are now. How did the generation of programmers before me feel about giving up assembly and handing it over to the compilers?

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      • analog31 3 days ago

        Probably a vanishingly small number of people who drive stick, actually understand how and why it works. My kids do, of course, because I explained it to them. Most drivers just go through the motions.

        A growing number of cars have CVTs.

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bojan 3 days ago

> In the same way that driving and working on an old car feels kind of pure

I can understand working on it feeling pure, but driving it certainly isn't, considering how lower the emissions now, even for ICE cars. One of the worst driving experiences of my life was riding in my friends' Citroen 2CV. The restoration of that car was a labour of love that he did together with his dad. For me as a passenger, I was surprised just how loud it is, and how you can smell oil and gasoline in the cabin.

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