I'm undecided on this, initially I was on the “this is bad, we’re outsourcing our thinking” bandwagon, now after using AI for lots of different types of tasks for a while now, I feel like generally I’ve learnt so much, so much more quickly. Would I recall it all without my new crutch? Maybe not, but I may not have learnt it in the first place without it.
I feel like I these doom prognostications were also written during the industrial revolution, the invention of electricity, the invention of television, the invention of the internet, ...
This is already happening. In spite of all of the disclaimers that the AI make mistakes the fact that it is given higher billing in for instance google search results (but also lots of other similar places) means people will interpret it as having a higher reputation because that's how we were conditioned to consume search results. This is doing massive damage already, for instance, essay writing, making summaries, reading comprehension and research skills are dwindling because the teachers in high school (and lower as well, but that's where it is most visible) are not able to keep up with the ease with which good looking slop can be produced. Schools will need to radically alter their programs if they want to continue to be able to educate but they don't exactly turn on a dime when it comes to technology and there are - unfortunately - lots of teachers who themselves lack skills and the ability to transfer those skills. If you graduated before AI became mainstream your diploma will be worth more than those that graduated after.
It's happened to me recently, I've relied so much on LLMs for coding and after hours of spinning the wheel, I realized, it has no idea, when it fixes something it's mostly a guess, most I've the time we're just debugging by adding logging statements and the code we've created looks crap and is mostly wrong, full of fluff, or hard to understand.
I've been coding without my LLM for 2 hours and it's just more productive...yes it's good for getting things "working" but yeah, we still need to think and understand to solve harder problems.
My initial impressions blew me away because generating new things is a lot simpler than fixing old things, yes it's still useful, but only when you know what you're doing in the first place.
My current opinion is that AI is just a thing that is going to further amplify our existing tendencies (on a person-to-person basis). I've personally found it to be extremely beneficial in research, learning, and the category of "things that take time because of the stuff you have to mechanically go through and not because of the brainpower involved". I have been able to spend so much more time on things that I feel require more human thinking and on stuff I generally enjoy more. It has been wonderful and I feel like I've been on a rocket ship of personal growth.
I've seen many other people who have essentially become meatspace analogues for AI applications. It's sad to watch this happen while listening to many of the same people complain about how AI will take their jobs, without realizing that they've _given_ AI their jobs by ensuring that they add nothing to the process. I don't really understand yet why people don't see that they are doing this to themselves.
For an example of where this already happened, look at the number of people who literally don't have a minor inkling of how to plan a route or navigate without a GPS and mapping software.
Sure, having a real-time data source is nice for avoiding construction/traffic, and I'd use a real-time map, but going beyond that to be spoon fed your next action over and over leads to dependency.
My mom can't get to our lake house anymore without GPS even though she's been driving there for forty years. To be fair, a wild amount of construction and development has occurred around it in the past 15 years, but the road signs still point you in the right direction.
I feel lucky now that I grew up and attended school before ChatGPT, before smartphones, before social media, before ubiquitious internet.
I can't say that I'm totally unaffected by contemporary technology, and my attention span seems to have suffered a little, but I think I'm mostly still intact. I read most days for pleasure and have started a book club. I deliberately take long walks without bringing my smartphone; it's a great feeling of freedom, almost like going back to a simpler time.
When it comes to "humans collectively..." kind of grand scheme issues, I just can't take the risk of AI making us stupider too seriously, compared to:
- Wars and violence to resolve geopolitical problems
- The biggest trading partner of most countries is waging tariff warfare
- Climate change
- Declining birth rate in almost every country
- Healthier foods are getting more expensive despite our technology and nutrition knowledge [0]
I'm not saying there is 0 chance that AI will make people dumb, but it just doesn't seem to be such an emergency humans should collectively be worried about.
Despite the magazine being named the Argument, this article falls into the typical pattern of claiming "the problem isn't X, it's Y", and then spending the rest of the article body building support for Y, but never once making any argument that refutes X.
Humans have a tendency to embed their cognition in the world, this is probably one of our greatest strengths as a species.
AI allows for you to offload a lot of cognitive effort, allowing you to free up your mind, but the only catch is that AI can be politicized and more confident than accurate.
If AI companies can focus on improving accuracy on facts and make their AI more philosophically grounded on the rest, it would allow people to free up their minds for their immediate real lives.
This feels in line with this same argument that has come along with virtually every other tech innovation to help humans work less, think less, travel less, basically do anything less than they did. So, "tools", in essence.
Is AI special here? Maybe, if it's truly an existential risk.
I always think for pieces like these which claim atrophy, well yes , but what about the things that you would have never even tried without it. The barrier to many things isn't becoming lazy when you're already halfway proficient, it's getting started in the first place. AI lowers the getting started cost of almost everything exponentially.
If the argument is that people shouldn't be able to get started on those things without having to slog though a lot of mindless drudgework - then people should be honest about that rather than dress it up in analogies.
> but what about the things that you would have never even tried without it
The problem with that is that there's a lot of cases where a total newbie engaging with some subject could lead to problems. They have a false confidence in their abilities, while not knowing what they don't know.
What if you want to try chemistry and ask the AI about what you need to know. Since you don't know anything about chemistry you don't know if the answers are complete or correct. Because you don't know about chemistry you also don't know about the dangers you need to ask about, what prevention to take, etc.
The same could be said about many different subjects: rock-climbing, home-improvement, electrical work, car maintenance, etc.
You might argue then that it would still be perfect for low-risk subjects, but how would a total newbie be able to validly determine risks of anything they don't know anything about?
Can’t say the author’s fixation on reading long texts resonates with me. I’m sure Newton’s Principia is interesting and all but… no I’m not going to read that.
Conciseness is a valuable thing. It wasn’t practical to convey knowledge in a short form previously because printing and distributing a blog post worth of info was too expensive.
On some level long form content just seems… poorly written. It’s long for the sake of being long.
There are things to be concerned about with students today. They are generally shockingly bad at literacy and numeracy. But I don’t buy that a lack of long form books are the culprit.
AI is essentially a puppet and will always be one. If you rely on it to educate yourself about anything non-objective (that cannot be measured), it will reflect the biases it’s tuned to, presenting a version of reality shaped by the perspectives and interests of its ultimate puppet masters—the board and major (non-futile) shareholders.
Atrophy has really been an issue in my recent hiring cycles for good senior engineers.
80% of senior candidates I interview now aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them.
We’ve had to start doing more coding tests to weed their skill set out as a result, and I try and make my coding tests as indicative of our real work as possible and the work they current do.
But these people are struggling to work with basic data structures without an LLM.
So then I put coding aside, because maybe their skills are directing other folks. But no, they’ve also become dependent on LLMs to ideate.
That 80% is no joke. It’s what I’m hitting actively.
And before anyone says: well then let them use LLMs, no. Firstly, we’re making new technologies and APIs that LLMs really struggle with even with purpose trained models.
But furthermore, If I’m doing that, then why am I paying for a senior ? How are they any different than someone more junior or cheaper if they have become so atrophied ?
This is a real concern. We use AI for a lot of our development work now and I've noticed people will be less likely to dig deep into problems before asking Claude.
The trick is using AI to handle the grunt work while still maintaining the critical thinking skills. But it's so easy to slip into autopilot mode.
AI is (or has the potential to be) a gigantic abstraction layer and software engineering is filled with abstraction layers. But one thing that has consistently held true is that the best engineers -- while taking advantage of abstractions -- also have the curiosity and intelligence to peel back and at least understand the gist of what's going on behind the scenes. So while most of us will never write a TCP/IP stack, it's helpful to know the protocol. While many will simply call into a hosted distributed database, strong engineers will know broadly how it is implemented and there are availability/consistency trade-offs, etc.
It's the same here: if you just shut off your brain and do what AI says, copy/pasting stuff from/to chat windows, that's going to be a bad time.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 53.2 ms ] threadWe've turned out okay.
I've been coding without my LLM for 2 hours and it's just more productive...yes it's good for getting things "working" but yeah, we still need to think and understand to solve harder problems.
My initial impressions blew me away because generating new things is a lot simpler than fixing old things, yes it's still useful, but only when you know what you're doing in the first place.
I've seen many other people who have essentially become meatspace analogues for AI applications. It's sad to watch this happen while listening to many of the same people complain about how AI will take their jobs, without realizing that they've _given_ AI their jobs by ensuring that they add nothing to the process. I don't really understand yet why people don't see that they are doing this to themselves.
Maybe it has something to do with the purveyors of these products
- claiming they will take the jobs
- designing them to be habit-forming
- advertising them as digital mentats
- failing to advertise risks of using them
Sure, having a real-time data source is nice for avoiding construction/traffic, and I'd use a real-time map, but going beyond that to be spoon fed your next action over and over leads to dependency.
I can't say that I'm totally unaffected by contemporary technology, and my attention span seems to have suffered a little, but I think I'm mostly still intact. I read most days for pleasure and have started a book club. I deliberately take long walks without bringing my smartphone; it's a great feeling of freedom, almost like going back to a simpler time.
Ages ago someone surely cried that cars will cause our legs to disfunction.
The human/machine meld will continue until completed.
Call me when a machine can set goals.
- Wars and violence to resolve geopolitical problems
- The biggest trading partner of most countries is waging tariff warfare
- Climate change
- Declining birth rate in almost every country
- Healthier foods are getting more expensive despite our technology and nutrition knowledge [0]
I'm not saying there is 0 chance that AI will make people dumb, but it just doesn't seem to be such an emergency humans should collectively be worried about.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpql53p9w14o.amp
AI allows for you to offload a lot of cognitive effort, allowing you to free up your mind, but the only catch is that AI can be politicized and more confident than accurate.
If AI companies can focus on improving accuracy on facts and make their AI more philosophically grounded on the rest, it would allow people to free up their minds for their immediate real lives.
Don't mistake thinking for intelligence.
Is AI special here? Maybe, if it's truly an existential risk.
If the argument is that people shouldn't be able to get started on those things without having to slog though a lot of mindless drudgework - then people should be honest about that rather than dress it up in analogies.
The problem with that is that there's a lot of cases where a total newbie engaging with some subject could lead to problems. They have a false confidence in their abilities, while not knowing what they don't know.
What if you want to try chemistry and ask the AI about what you need to know. Since you don't know anything about chemistry you don't know if the answers are complete or correct. Because you don't know about chemistry you also don't know about the dangers you need to ask about, what prevention to take, etc.
The same could be said about many different subjects: rock-climbing, home-improvement, electrical work, car maintenance, etc.
You might argue then that it would still be perfect for low-risk subjects, but how would a total newbie be able to validly determine risks of anything they don't know anything about?
Conciseness is a valuable thing. It wasn’t practical to convey knowledge in a short form previously because printing and distributing a blog post worth of info was too expensive.
On some level long form content just seems… poorly written. It’s long for the sake of being long.
There are things to be concerned about with students today. They are generally shockingly bad at literacy and numeracy. But I don’t buy that a lack of long form books are the culprit.
80% of senior candidates I interview now aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them.
We’ve had to start doing more coding tests to weed their skill set out as a result, and I try and make my coding tests as indicative of our real work as possible and the work they current do.
But these people are struggling to work with basic data structures without an LLM.
So then I put coding aside, because maybe their skills are directing other folks. But no, they’ve also become dependent on LLMs to ideate.
That 80% is no joke. It’s what I’m hitting actively.
And before anyone says: well then let them use LLMs, no. Firstly, we’re making new technologies and APIs that LLMs really struggle with even with purpose trained models. But furthermore, If I’m doing that, then why am I paying for a senior ? How are they any different than someone more junior or cheaper if they have become so atrophied ?
The trick is using AI to handle the grunt work while still maintaining the critical thinking skills. But it's so easy to slip into autopilot mode.
It's the same here: if you just shut off your brain and do what AI says, copy/pasting stuff from/to chat windows, that's going to be a bad time.