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AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

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Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#71

Post by SirMaster »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #32
jbethune wrote: post #19

This was a bit word-salad-y but I share the same basic concern. I think more I worry about the tendency toward greater and greater cognitive off-loading to LLMs. My sister told me a story the other day about how she caught her plumber using chatgpt on his phone to fix an issue with her bathroom. I just think it's good for humans to know how to do stuff.

Sure, but.. I've been coding for 40 years and I don't know everything. To me, a LOT depends on what the plumber asked chatgpt about. For example: building codes in that city, to figure out what his options are - like, is he allowed to just put in any old toilet, or is there a gpf restriction? What's the replacement part number for faucet XYZ's gasket? Those seem reasonable. "how do I fix a clogged toilet?" would be b…

>like, is he allowed to just put in any old toilet, or is there a gpf restriction?

And if the LLM gets that wrong? It's his job to know the codes or how to go to a reliable resource to find out the correct codes.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#72

Post by jareklupinski »

palmotea wrote: post #25
zozbot234 wrote: post #12

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of…

Oh no, not that tired thing again. I suppose your point is: people once were critical of the technology of writing, so all criticism of the technology-at-hand is illegitimate. You don't actually make a point, so one has to assume. Some points: 1. Technological inventions are not repetitions of the same phenomenon. Each invention is its own unique event, you cannot generalize the experience with previous inventions to…

> What would you think about your life? Would you think "this is horrible" or "this is fine"? Or maybe "I enjoy smell of shit and we're so much better off because we don't have to worry about sunburn"?

id probably start with "who locked us in this sewer?"

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#73

Post by enraged_camel »

daveguy wrote: post #50
danielbln wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im a software engineer and know how to be a software engineer, yet I find LLMs quite helpful. Why should a plumber be any different.

Because if a plumber moves fast and breaks things, I've got shit all over the place.

That, and also the plumber loses their license. So perhaps the solution is professional licensing for software engineers.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#74

Post by b2ccb2 »

pixl97 wrote: post #61
jessetemp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plumber obviously. Not everyone needs to know how to be a plumber, but a plumber should know how to be a plumber

Which part of being a plumber? Was the house installed with something non-typical? Would you rather have them take an additional 30 minutes looking up their technical manual? Without further knowledge of what was going on it's hard to say why they used ChatGPT.

> Would you rather have them take an additional 30 minutes looking up their technical manual?

Yes

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#75

Post by cortesoft »

thwarted wrote: post #52
dfee wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your sister offloaded to her plumber. her plumber offloaded to chatgpt. "i just think it's good for humans to know how to do stuff." are we talking about your sister or her plumber?

The issue here is that the sister could have used ChatGPT herself, so why bother hiring the plumber. The plumber has provided less value than was expected. But make no mistake: the value the sister was looking for was to have someone else deal with it, and there's a price that the sister was willing to pay for the service of having someone else deal with it. In the comments of this HN post, there is a dead comment fr…

This is assuming that ChatGPT had everything needed to do the work. If the plumber was asking specific questions, based on their previous experience and knowledge about what needed to be done, the sister might not have been able to get the same result from her use of ChatGPT that the plumber received.

Experts look things up all the time, because no one can hold all the knowledge of a field in their head. Being an expert means being able to know what to look up and how to use the information retrieved from looking something up.

In the plumber example, ChatGPT is going to tell them to do things using the terminology that plumbers know, and tell them to do tasks that plumbers know how to do. The sister would have to continually look up more and more things about how to do basic plumbing tasks, rather than just looking up particular novelties.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#76

Post by gobdovan »

By the logic that today's news is fundamental to know as true, there really is no point in reading books older than 6 months old. If Einstein woke up from a coma, he'd be useless, as he doesn't even know who won the World Cup. For real now, if an AI can help you solve a problem using 2,000 years of human logic, does it really matter if it's "skewed" away from a political shift that happened three weeks ago?

I also don't believe that everybody I know is idiosyncratic in the way they view the world. And even if they were, I'd probably just pay attention to the things that are directly relevant to me. So probably I'll misunderstand most of what they say anyway.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#77

Post by alfalfasprout »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #70

One thing that's always been true with human communication that is becoming increasingly obvious to me through my interactions with LLMs is the art of asking a good question. The framing of questions massively affects the results you get from discussion with humans, and I'd argue it's even more pronounced with LLMs.

Yep. And this is why as hard as AI companies are pushing that these tools can be a replacement for expertise, it's ironic that the experts are the ones that often get the highest ROI because they know how to converse about the relevant subjects with a high degree of precision (and know what to look for, what to challenge, etc.).

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#79

Post by layer8 »

asdfman123 wrote: post #31
bomewish wrote: post #2

Doh. I went in expecting a really cool thesis — because the idea seems somehow intuitive, or at least really intriguing. But I have no clue what I read. Just totally odd and unconvincing. Greenland? Dialectal substrate? The idea is still super intriguing to me though!

While I understand what the paper is saying I'm not sure if what I read was written by someone who is smarter than me and naturally goes higher up the abstraction tree, or just wants to write really smart things. Either way though I think there's a much simpler way to express what she's trying to say. Offloading thinking to AI is bad because it's less flexible and doesn't easily update its reasoning with new informat…

It’s a blog post, not a paper.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#80

Post by sidrag22 »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #32
jbethune wrote: post #19

This was a bit word-salad-y but I share the same basic concern. I think more I worry about the tendency toward greater and greater cognitive off-loading to LLMs. My sister told me a story the other day about how she caught her plumber using chatgpt on his phone to fix an issue with her bathroom. I just think it's good for humans to know how to do stuff.

Sure, but.. I've been coding for 40 years and I don't know everything. To me, a LOT depends on what the plumber asked chatgpt about. For example: building codes in that city, to figure out what his options are - like, is he allowed to just put in any old toilet, or is there a gpf restriction? What's the replacement part number for faucet XYZ's gasket? Those seem reasonable. "how do I fix a clogged toilet?" would be b…

I cling a bit to a prompt i sent a while ago about just tossing a chopped pepper into a recipe for baked ziti. I had a recipe that i followed fairly tightly with slight changes to see how they would work out each time. Instead of prompting "when should i add chopped bell pepper?" the small change of just, "what are my options for when to add chopped bell pepper?" opened up a variety of different methods i could try when returning to that recipe, and decide what i like best based on the outcome.

The first prompt style is I think a way society towards drifts incidentally towards a less interesting one, with less variety in solutions. The second one i think allows people to still exercise their potential to try a variety of things and keep that variety.

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