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The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

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Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#21

Post by jacquesm »

djaro wrote: post #14
sd9 wrote: post #6

The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue. To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job…

> So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. The problem arrises when Bob encounters a problem too complex or unique for agents to solve. To me, it seems a bit like the difference between learning how to cook versus buying microwave dinners. Sure, a good microwave dinner can taste really good, and it will be a lot better than what a beginning cook will make. But imagine aspiring cooks just buying premade…

Precisely. The first 10 rungs of the ladder will be removed, but we still expect you to be able to get to the roof. The AI won't get you there and you won't have the knowledge you'd normally gain on those first 10 rungs to help you move past #10.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#23

Post by plato65 »

sd9 wrote: post #6

The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue. To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job…

> So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things.

I think the key issue is whether Bob develops the ability to choose valuable things to do with agents and to judge whether the output is actually right.

That’s the open question to me: how people develop the judgment needed to direct and evaluate that output.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#24

Post by mzhaase »

stavros wrote: post #3

I see this fallacy being committed a lot these days. "Because LLMs, you will no longer need a skill you don't need any more, but which you used to need, and handwaves that's bad". Academia doesn't want to produce astrophysics (or any field) scientists just so the people who became scientists can feel warm and fuzzy inside when looking at the stars, it wants to produce scientists who can produce useful results. Bob pr…

Why should we only do things that produce some sort of value? Do we really want to reduce all of human existence to increasing profits?

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#25

Post by jacquesm »

ghc wrote: post #20

As straw men go, this is an attractive one, but... When I was fresh out of undergrad, joining a new lab, I followed a similar arc. I made mistakes, I took the wrong lessons from grad student code that came before mine, I used the wrong plotting libraries, I hijacked python's module import logic to embed a new language in its bytecode. These were all avoidable mistakes and I didn't learn anything except that I should…

AI does not give you knowledge. It magnifies both intelligence and stupidity with zero bias towards either. If you were above average intelligent then you may be able to do a little bit more than before assuming you were trained before AI came along. And if you were not so smart then you will be able to make larger messes.

The problem, and I think the article indirectly points at that, is that the next generation to come along won't learn to think for themselves first. So they will on average end up on the 'B' track rather than that they will be able to develop their intelligence. I see this happening with the kids my kids hang out with. They don't want to understand anything because the AI can do that for them, or so they believe. They don't see that if you don't learn to think about smaller problems that the larger ones will be completely out of reach.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#27

Post by stavros »

hirako2000 wrote: post #15
stavros wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it was saying that what matters is the process of training people to be good scientists, so they can produce other, more useful, results. That's literally what training is, everywhere. This argument boils down to "don't use tools because you'll forget how to do things the hard way", which nobody would buy for any other tool, but with LLMs we seem to have forgotten that line of reasoning entirely.

There is an argument to make that tools that speed up a process whilst keeping acuity intact are legitimate. LLMs, the way they typically get used, are solely to save time by handing over nearly the entire process. In that sense acuity can't remain intact, even less so improving over time.

So?

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#28

Post by stavros »

mzhaase wrote: post #24
stavros wrote: post #3

I see this fallacy being committed a lot these days. "Because LLMs, you will no longer need a skill you don't need any more, but which you used to need, and handwaves that's bad". Academia doesn't want to produce astrophysics (or any field) scientists just so the people who became scientists can feel warm and fuzzy inside when looking at the stars, it wants to produce scientists who can produce useful results. Bob pr…

Why should we only do things that produce some sort of value? Do we really want to reduce all of human existence to increasing profits?

You said "value" and "profit". I said "useful".

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#29

Post by staindk »

sd9 wrote: post #6

The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue. To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job…

They aren't going away but for some they may become prohibitively expensive after all the subsidies end.

I do think coding with local agents will keep improving to a good level but if deep thinking cloud tokens become too expensive you'll reach the limits of what your local, limited agent can do much more quickly (i.e. be even less able to do more complex work as other replies mention).

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