Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning

But at some point in your life you will have gone through the details so often you won't be getting them wrong, but you'll still be spending a lot of time on them. With a tool like cgpt you can save yourself a lot of time.

Of course it's up to you where you take the trade. If your thing is a medical device that will kill someone if it isn't checked, maybe you carefully write the code yourself. If you're building some POC website, why not let the AI fill in a few API calls for you?

And don't forget, plenty of details are already outsourced. Entire reference books are full of details that we prefer not to keep memorized.

Plato:

“If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/259062-if-men-learn-this-it...

I'm advocating cgpt as a tool that allows you to spend more time at the level of abstraction that is appropriate for the problem. If you're writing an essay about the fall of Rome, you don't want to be spending loads of time finding the details of a reference (year published, secondary author's names, exact title...). You want to be talking about economics of the time, incentives for different groups in Roman society, and so on.

There's discussion of this in the book The Shallows, which is a book that gives a good overview of the relationship between technology that augment our intellect and contemporary society.

The gist is that calculators where a boon to mathematical education, because they freed up students to spend more time working through the challenging abstract aspects of mathematics, and less time with the mechanics of arithmetic.

I don't see there being any analogy between using ChatGPT _as an essay writer_ and using a calculator. The essay writing itself is the substantive educational process, and so it cannot be outsourced. What is not the substantive part of the educational process is the actual production of the typed word, and so the use of a pen, typewriter, or computer keyboard is less material, though still absolutely relevant. The affect of the writing/typing tool on the essayist is also discussed in the book.

> People are innumerate and that is exploited by people selling products and services.

to here:

> good for society

Did I misunderstand your argument?

Australia, one of the richest countries in the world, is experiencing a multi-decade decline in mathematical standing[2]. Australia is fabulously rich, but is doing a worse and worse job of producing citizens that are numerate and understand mathematics. I haven't looked at literacy performance in the country, but I'd guess it's declining like it is in the USA, as Australia is subject to broadly the same pressures of political-economy and technology.

1. Cultural Literacy by E.D Hirsch Jr

2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220517094842.h...

McLuhan, a media analysis astronaut. Average is the message.

> Technologies are appendages for the human body or intellect

We previously had fleets of people calculating tables of numbers for hours per day. Simple calculators removed that need and increased the speed of results by orders of magnitude.

You seem to be arguing for handicap system, an intellectual conservatism. Is that correct?

What does ChatGPT remove from ones ability to write low level code or for a software architect to both architect a system AND produce a working model?