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The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

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Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#221

Post by johnnyanmac »

dagmx wrote: post #115
Herring wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ― Robert A. Heinlei…

Except I’m not hiring someone to do 20 things. I’m hiring them to do the one thing they say they can do. Would I hire a taxi driver who can’t drive to drive me somewhere? Why would I hire a software engineer who can’t demonstrate their abilities.

>I’m hiring them to do the one thing they say they can do.

If you hire an amazing programmer but then ask for a quick report on their implementation and it's gibberish. Is that satisfactory? Their job isn't to write reports.

If you ask them during lunch to grab your meal from the desk and they spill it everywhere, is that satisfactory? You didn't hire then for their ability to carry a plate.

EDIT: I should add here that I agree with your hiring approach. I just think you're critiquing this quote in the wrong way. The point of the quote is that humans have a capacity to learn and perform many tasks, even if they do some better than others. LLMs hinder this ability.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#222

Post by fragmede »

jstanley wrote: post #60
password54321 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post was largely about young people who are growing up with these tools and are still at the stage of developing their habits and tendencies. Personally I am glad I learnt programming before LLMs even if it meant the tedious searches on stackoverflow because I didn't feel like I was coming up against a wave of new technology when it came to future job searches. Having done so I can understand and appreciate the i…

Personally I am glad I learnt programming before StackOverflow! Precisely because it meant I had to learn to figure things out myself. I still use StackOverflow and LLMs, but if those things were available when I was learning I would probably not have learnt as much.

Not to out myself as old, but I learned to program before ChatGPT before stack overflow and before Google. There are some here that are even older. There were paper books with indexes. Indexes!

That way of life is gone for me. I've got a smartphone and I doomscroll to my detriment. What's new and fascinating to me is the models themselves. https://fi-le.net/oss/ currently trending here is the tip of a whole new area of study and work.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#223

Post by techjamie »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #208
bongodongobob wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine that he's interested in finishing his game, not the intricacies of raycasting algorithms.

Idk, depends on the situation. Is he a student trying to show stuff on a resume? Is he a professional trying to sell a product? Is he a researcher trying to report findings? A startup trying to land a pitch? The value isn't objective and very much depends on end goals.People seem to trounce out the "make games, not engines" without realizing that engine programmers still do exist.

It was just a small personal test of skill with no purpose or stakes. Not even really with intent to make a real game, just a slice of something that resembled a game to see how far I could get without help. Then, once I got as far as I could, research and see how I could do better.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#224

Post by crazygringo »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #215
crazygringo wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point wasn't that the bugs don't exist anymore. Obviously they still do. My point is that I can frequently figure out how to work around them in 5 minutes rather than 2 days, because someone else already did that work. I can find out that a different function call is the answer, or a weird flag that doesn't do what the documentation says, or whatever it is. And my problem of it taking two days to debug something i…

>My point is that I can frequently figure out how to work around them in 5 minutes rather than 2 days Guess I'm just dumb then. I'm still taking days to work around some esoteric, underdocumented API issues in my day-to-day work.

Guess you missed my use of the words "frequently" and "usually", which I intentionally used instead of "always".

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#225

Post by johnnyanmac »

port11 wrote: post #181
zdw wrote: post #21

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.

I always thought I had a good sense of navigation, until I realised it was getting quite bad. More or less at the same time I found “Human Being: Reclaim 12 Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology”, and the chapter on navigation hit me so hard I put the book down and refused to read any more until my navigation skills improved. They're quite good now. I sit at the toilet staring at the map of my city, which I now kno…

>Perhaps you think you'll spend more time in high-cognition activities, but will you? Will all of us?

When I can get a full time job again, I plan to. I was trying to learn how to 3d model before the tech scene exploded 3 years ago. I'm probably not trying to take back all 12 factors (I'm fine with where my writing is as of now, even if it is subpar), but I am trying to focus on what parts are important to me as a person and not take any shortcuts out of them.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#226

Post by johnnyanmac »

crazygringo wrote: post #209
tdrz wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It didn't make me stronger or smarter or a better person. Yes, it did.

Believe me, it didn't. Planning routes isn't exactly rocket science. There's not much to learn. It just takes a lot of time. It's busywork.

>Planning routes isn't exactly rocket science. There's not much to learn.

And people can't go that far to begin with. SThat's the scary part.

These little things we think of as insignificant add up and give us our ability to think. Change how we perceive and navigate (no pun intended) the world. Letting one or two of these factors rust probably won't cost us, but how far off are we really from the WALL-E future of we automate all our cognition, our spatial reasoning, and our curiosity?

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#227

Post by bloomca »

mcny wrote: post #83
jstanley wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I am glad I learnt programming before StackOverflow! Precisely because it meant I had to learn to figure things out myself. I still use StackOverflow and LLMs, but if those things were available when I was learning I would probably not have learnt as much.

I started programming before stack overflow, was never any good (still am not to this day), but I was always scared of asking questions on stack overflow. I felt like there was a certain amount of homework expected when you ask a question and usually by the time I did enough work to post a question, it was moot because I would have solved my problem usually by stringing together two or more stack overflow questions t…

Pretty much this. Even in topics I'm decently knowledgeable, I feel like the vibe from SO answers will be "just read the spec" or source code; so I usually was able to string other answers together.

With LLMs you can start with first principles, confirm basic knowledge (of course, it hallucinates but I find it's not that hard to verify things most of the time) or just get pointers where to dive deeper.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#228

Post by mschuster91 »

jasonthorsness wrote: post #119
alchemism wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now we are seeing junior hiring fall off a cliff, whether or not LLMs are responsible is hard to say. But if it does turn out that everyone performs to the level of the LLM, then a vast amount of business dollars can be saved by hiring starving English majors exclusively and dispensing with STEM majors altogether.

I keep hearing this however I was just at a career fair for University of Washington CSE new grads (representing my company) and it was packed with companies hiring. Obviously, this is just an anecdote, is there any good data showing the real situation?

It's anecdata from layoff reports and whatever people see from their own employer / industry.

To add my two cents of anecdotes from what I can tell in the creative agency world: shit sucks hard at the moment. Clients are cutting back budgets hard and a lot of them explicitly ask for AI strategies - obviously in terms of saving money. Blockchain craze was similarly bad when it comes to client requests for stuff that Just Did Not Make Sense, but at least there was money pouring in. And it's that way across the industry, everyone I know feels the same. There's no money from clients that would pay for juniors, so no juniors are getting hired even if it might blow up in five, six years when there are no fresh juniors/intermediates around.

Personally, I decided to part ways. There's many places I want to be, but the creative industry when the AI bubble and hiring anti-bubble finally pops? Oh hell no.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#229

Post by leptons »

fragmede wrote: post #222
jstanley wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I am glad I learnt programming before StackOverflow! Precisely because it meant I had to learn to figure things out myself. I still use StackOverflow and LLMs, but if those things were available when I was learning I would probably not have learnt as much.

Not to out myself as old, but I learned to program before ChatGPT before stack overflow and before Google. There are some here that are even older. There were paper books with indexes. Indexes! That way of life is gone for me. I've got a smartphone and I doomscroll to my detriment. What's new and fascinating to me is the models themselves. https://fi-le.net/oss/ currently trending here is the tip of a whole new area…

I've been programming for 46 years. The first program I wrote was on a piece of notebook paper, in anticipation of getting my first computer a few weeks later (Atari 400).

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#230

Post by bloodyplonker22 »

I have a friend who I suspect has resorted to answering me with AI when I ask him a question via text message that he may not know the answer to. Many people do not want to appear to not know things, so they resort to this tactic. I personally find it to be a terrible trend.
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