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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

#411

Post by Wowfunhappy »

senordevnyc wrote: post #407
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the social paradigm needs to change. Is everyone just going to roll over and die while AI destroys academia (and possibly a lot more)? Last September, Tyler Austin Harper published a piece for The Atlantic on how he thinks colleges should respond to AI. What he proposes is radical —but, if you've concluded that AI really is going to destroy everything these institutions stand for, I think you have to at least co…

Article is paywalled, so perhaps you could just summarize his proposal?

> At the type of place where I taught until recently—a small, selective, private liberal-arts college—administrators can go quite far in limiting AI use, if they have the guts to do so. They should commit to a ruthless de-teching not just of classrooms but of their entire institution. Get rid of Wi-Fi and return to Ethernet, which would allow schools greater control over where and when students use digital technologies. To that end, smartphones and laptops should also be banned on campus. If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else. Work and research requiring students to use the internet or a computer can take place in designated labs. [...] Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this tech-free environment could require students to live on campus, so they can’t use AI tools at home undetected.

You can access the full article at https://archive.is/zSJ13 (I know archive.is is kind of shady, but it works).

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

#412

Post by bwfan123 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #315

This is not wrong, but the "Bob and Alice" conundrum is not simple, either. In academia, understanding is vital. The same for research. But in production , results are what matters. Alice would be a better researcher, but Bob would be a better producer. He knows how to wrangle the tools. Each has its value. Many researchers develop marvelous ideas, but struggle to commercialize them, while production-oriented enginee…

> You need both.

yea, there are multiple parts to education. 1) teach skills useful to the economy 2) teach the theories of the subject, and finally 3) tweak existing theories and create new ones. An electrician can fix problems without understanding theory of electromagnetism. These are the trades folks. A EE college graduate has presumably understood some theory, and can apply it in different useful ways. These are the engineers. Finally, there are folks who not only understand the theory of the craft, but can tweak it creatively for the future. These are the researchers.

Bob better fits as a trades-person or engineer whereas Alice fits better as a researcher.

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

#413

Post by thepasch »

Planktonne wrote: post #391
thepasch wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of nails people might want to rent a HammerAsAService for these days can already easily be put in by open source hammers you can run on consumer, uh… workbenches.

Not to stretch the metaphor too far, but those workbenches require understanding (and hammers) to set up. Will the paid tools always tell their users how to use the free versions, and if not, how will the users learn to do it independently?

> Will the paid tools always tell their users how to use the free versions, and if not, how will the users learn to do it independently?

The same way any open-source infrastructure finds widespread use, I’d say. If you’re willing to put in the elbow grease, you can probably set it up yourself (maybe even with the help of one of the frontier, uh, hammers, in its free tier). Or there might be services that act as middlemen to make it all more convenient and cheaper. But the difference is that if Service X pisses you off, then there will be Services Y, Z, A, and B who sell the same service using the same open-source infrastructure, so you always have a choice.

If you don’t like GitHub, try Gitlab, Codeberg, Gitea, and so forth. Or Bitbucket or Azure DevOps. (Don’t actually, though.)

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

#414

Post by nothinkjustai »

steveBK123 wrote: post #325
gedy wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely folks working on automatically marketing via LLMs, but I have my doubts that it wont just numb people further to marketing as we are close to saturation.

My thought/worry on a lot of the LLM agentic workflow personal assistant stuff is it is just ripe for fraud. The money is more on the adversarial side. People think they'll just have a personal bot out there buying airline tickets, hotel rooms, jeans, new phone, etc. Meanwhile as soon as you have agents like this out in the wild, the capital will flow to bad actors creating bots to game those bots. The world is PvP u…

Also, wtf are people doing with their lives where a significant amount of time is spent on stuff like this? It only takes a few minutes to book a flight or hotel/airbnb. Shopping for things can be fun, and if it isn’t, again, a few minutes. The amount of time that a “personal assistant” would save me is minuscule and probably actively harmful.

Are people just so addicted to doomscrolling or whatever that they just can’t spend a few minutes of their day doing some type of human activity?

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

#415

Post by cbushko »

This article makes the assumption that Bob was doing absolutely nothing, maybe at the Pub with this friends, while the AI did all his work.

How do we know that while the AI was writing python scripts that Bob wasn't reading more papers, getting more data and just overall doing more than Alice.

Maybe Bob is terrible at debugging python scripts while Alice is a pro at it?

Maybe Bob used his time to develop different skills that Alice couldn't dream of?

Maybe Bob will discover new techniques or ideas because he didn't follow the traditional research path that the established Researchers insist you follow?

Maybe Bob used the AI to learn even more because he had a customized tutor at his disposal?

Or maybe Bob just spent more time at the Pub with his friends.

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

#416

Post by thepasch »

Planktonne wrote: post #387
thepasch wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “People who prompt things” can only do the latter, and they routinely do it poorly. Right, but what I don’t agree with here is the idea that this category of people will never be able to improve into the first category of people. The value of an experienced anything is that they realize there is a big chasm between something that works now and something that will continue to work long into the future. I don’t agree…

> the idea that this category of people will never be able to improve into the first category of people The fundamental difference between the categories is that the first is filled with people who put the effort in to learning/understanding, and the second is filled with people who take the shortcut around learning/understanding. Changing from the second category to the first is something that would require already…

> The fundamental difference between the categories is that the first is filled with people who put the effort in to learning/understanding, and the second is filled with people who take the shortcut around learning/understanding.

Exactly! That’s my entire point. Because now you’re separating the categories by “is willing to put in effort” and “is not willing to put in effort” rather than by “has done the thing” and “hasn’t done the thing”.

I think the disagreement doesn’t lie in this concept, but rather in whether an LLM can be used by someone who’s willing to put in effort to assist them in doing so, rather than just having it do it for them. But as long as you understand what the thing you’re using it is for, you don’t have to understand how it works exactly. You can shift gears in a car without a physics degree.

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

#417

Post by II2II »

Ifkaluva wrote: post #356
wongarsu wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good calculator will however do this correctly (as in: the way anyone would expect). Small cheap calculators revert to confusing syntax, but if you pay $30 for a decent handheld calculator or use something decent like wolframalpha on your phone/laptop/desktop you won't run into precision issues for reasonable numbers.

He’s not talking about order of operations, he’s talking about floating point error, which will accumulate in different ways in each case, because floating point is an imperfect representation of real numbers

Yeap, the specific example wasn't important. I choose an example involving the order of operations and an integer overflow simply because it would be easy to discuss. (I have been out of the field for nearly 20 years now.) Your example of floating point errors is another. I also encountered artifacts from approximations for transcendental functions.

Choosing a "better" language was not always an option, at least at the time. I was working with grad students who were managing huge datasets, sometimes for large simulations and sometimes from large surveys. They were using C. Some of the faculty may have used Fortran. C exposes you the vulgarities of the hardware, and I'm fairly certain Fortran does as well. They weren't going to use a calculator for those tasks, nor an interpreted language. Even if they wanted to choose another language, the choice of languages was limited by the machines they used. I've long since forgotten what the high performance cluster was running, but it wasn't Linux and it wasn't on Intel. They may have been able to license something like Mathematica for it, but that wasn't the type of computation they were doing.

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

#418

Post by fomoz »

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…

It's the next level of abstraction. Bob is still learning, he's just learning a different set of skills than Alice.

Also, the premise that it took each of them a year to do the project means Bob was slacking because he probably could've done it in less than a month.

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

#419

Post by nothinkjustai »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #315

This is not wrong, but the "Bob and Alice" conundrum is not simple, either. In academia, understanding is vital. The same for research. But in production , results are what matters. Alice would be a better researcher, but Bob would be a better producer. He knows how to wrangle the tools. Each has its value. Many researchers develop marvelous ideas, but struggle to commercialize them, while production-oriented enginee…

If results are what matters, why is popular software so buggy and lacking in features?

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

#420

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

patapong wrote: post #127

I think this is a very important debate, and I think the author here adds a lot to this discussion! I mostly agree with it, but wanted to point out a few areas where I do not fully agree. > Take away the agent, and Bob is still a first-year student who hasn't started yet. This may be true, but I can see almost no conceivable word where the agent will be taken away. I think we should evaluate Bob's ability based on wh…

> "no conceivable word where the agent will be taken away"

LLM access is a paid service. HN concerns itself with inequality constantly and it's not inconceivable that some individuals get ahead because they can afford to pay for more tokens and better models than those who are poorer.

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