On learning new skills
I'm really thinking about starting my own website, and so for the last couple of days I've been trying to learn how to code basic HTML and CSS.
It's been honestly really therapeutic in some way... spending hours just typing typing typing with nothing really in mind, while watching your project coming together. I've been taking the w3schools course along with the freecodecamp one for the practice, and it's been really fun.
I've thought about learning to code before, as it can be a really great skill to have in the current job market, but always put it off, now here I am learning it finally! I really don't plan on learning anything much too complex, just the basic simple stuff so I can have that in my back pocket if I need it at some point.
And yeah, I've thought about AI and how it can probably do what I'm spending hours trying to learn much better than I ever could, but I think that regardless of AI, we really should be out there learning new skills, even if it's just for the sake of it. For example, we shouldn't really invest much time learning languages, since there is now AI that can translate both text and speech in real time... but why not learn a new language? By learning a new language you can expand your understanding of other cultures, bring the world closer to you, expand your understanding of language and it's structure and, alas, free you. By learning a new skill, it's yet another way you can free yourself, from AI and from others.
Let's take my new coding endeavour as an example. If one day I decided to build a website and hadn't invested the time I'm investing now into learning it, I'd have to either pay someone to build the website for me or to have AI steal it from somewhere else, either way, I'm tied and limited by someone else's vision and skill, not my own, and why on Earth would I want that? Why would anyone want that?