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Really? You claim that praising an analogy would never happen in normal conversation before 2022? Seems fairly normal to potentially start with "that's a good way of putting it, but [...]" since forever...
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From the article [0] you linked: "However, the most unequivocal early archaeological evidence of equines put to working use was of horses being driven. Chariot burials about 2500 BC present the most direct hard evidence of horses used as working animals. In ancient times chariot warfare was followed by the use of war horses as light and heavy cavalry." Long discussion in History Exchange about dating the cave paintin…
Well exactly.. a millennium after being ridden (3500BC) they were used as beasts of burden (2500BC).. rather the opposite of your claim.
Unless you want to date the industrial revolution to 30 BCE when Vitruvius described the aeolipile, we can talk about the evidence of these technologies impact in society. For chariots that would be 1700 BCE and horseback riding well into iron age ~1000 BCE.
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“Bicycle for the mind” analogy is actually really good here. Since bicycles and other transportation technology has made us increasingly weak, which has a negative impact on physical health. At this point it has reached such a critical point that people are taking seriously the fact that we need physical exercise to be in good health. My company recently introduced 60 minutes a week of activity during work hours. It’…
> bicycles ... has made us increasingly weak This is pretty difficult for me to buy. Cycling has been shown time & again to be a great way to increase fitness.
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We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44287157 and marked it off topic.
I wouldn't call it "accumulation of cognitive debt"; just call it cognitive decline, or loss of cognitive skills. And also DUH. If you stop speaking a language you forget it. The brain does not retain information that it does not need. Anybody remember the couple studies on the use of google maps for navigation? One was "Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation"; another rep…
> The brain does not retain information that it does not need. Why do I still know how to optimize free conventional memory in DOS by configuring config.sys and autoexec.bat? I haven’t done this in 2 decades and I’m reasonably sure I never again will
AI is the anti-Zettelkasten. Rather than getting ever deeper insight into a subject matter by actively working on it, you iterate fast but shallow over a corpus of AI generated content. Example: I wanted to understand the situation in the Middle East better so I wrote an 10 page essay on the genesis if Hammas and Hizbulah using OpenAI as a cowriter. I remember nothing, worse of the things I remember I don’t know if i…
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Horse riding was invented much later than carriages, and it revolutionized warfare.
Can you point at some references? Horse riding started around 3500 BC[0], while horse carriages started around 100BC [1], oxen/buffalo drawn devices around 3000 BC[1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equestrianism [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carriage
Your [0] says "Chariot burials about 2500 BC present the most direct hard evidence of horses used as working animals. In ancient times chariot warfare was followed by the use of war horses as light and heavy cavalry.", just after "the most unequivocal early archaeological evidence of equines put to working use was of horses being driven."
That suggests the evidence is stronger for cart use before riding.
If you follow your [1] link to "bullock cart" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullock_cart you'll see: "The first indications of the use of a wagon (cart tracks, incisions, model wheels) are dated to around 4400 BC[citation needed]. The oldest wooden wheels usable for transport were found in southern Russia and dated to 3325 ± 125 BC.[1]"
That is older than 3000 BC.
I tried but failed to find something more definite. I did learn from "Wheeled Vehicles and Their Development in Ancient Egypt – Technical Innovations and Their (Non-) Acceptance in Pharaonic Times" (2021) that:
> The earliest depiction of a rider on horseback in Egypt belongs to the reign of Thutmose III.80 Therefore, in ancient Egypt the horse is attested for pulling chariots81 before it was used as a riding animal, which is only rarely shown throughout Pharaonic times.
I also found "The prehistoric origins of the domestic horse and horseback riding" (2023) referring to this as the "cart before the horse" vs. "horse before the cart" debate, with the position that there's "strong support for the “horse before the cart” view by finding diagnostic traits associated with habitual horseback riding in human skeletons that considerably pre-date the earliest wheeled vehicles pulled by horses." https://journals.openedition.org/bmsap/11881
On the other hand, "Tracing horseback riding and transport in the human skeleton" (2024) points out "the methodological hurdles and analytical risks of using this approach in the absence of valid comparative datasets", and also mentions how "the expansion of biomolecular tools over the past two decades has undercut many of the core assumptions of the kurgan hypothesis and has destabilized consensus belief in the Botai model." https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.ado9774
Quite a fascinating topic. It's no wonder that Wikipedia can't give a definite answer!
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“Bicycle for the mind” analogy is actually really good here. Since bicycles and other transportation technology has made us increasingly weak, which has a negative impact on physical health. At this point it has reached such a critical point that people are taking seriously the fact that we need physical exercise to be in good health. My company recently introduced 60 minutes a week of activity during work hours. It’…
> bicycles ... has made us increasingly weak This is pretty difficult for me to buy. Cycling has been shown time & again to be a great way to increase fitness.
Compared to sitting on your butt in a car or public transport.
Perhaps not compared to walking everywhere and chasing the antelope you want to cook for lunch.
I think what he meant is that both bicycles and LLMs are a force multiplier and you still provide the core of the work, but not all of the work any more.
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Or working as an engineering manager. It's the inevitable consequence of working at a different level of abstraction. It's not the end of the world. My assembly is rusty too...
I don't think not using assembly is going to affect my brain / my life quality in any significant way, but not speaking / chatting with someone is.
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i guess one of the questions is how quick cognitive decline sets it and how it influences system stability (we have big system with very high sla due to nature of system and it takes some serious cognitive abilities to reason about it operation). if todays productivity is traded for longer term stability, i am not sure that it's a risk they would like to take
Companies don't own employees: workers can leave at any time. Thus protecting employees productivity in the long run doesn't necessarily help the company. (Unless you explicitly set up contracts that help there, or there are strong social norms in your place around this.)