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Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

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Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#101

Post by skydhash »

wetwater wrote: post #90
ForHackernews wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.

I agree with the sentiment of the parent comment. But I also sometimes question what you have posed exactly. Am I really learning or getting the curiosity itch scratched. The line is very thin sometimes. But I think I am more in the camp of learning. I can ask so dumb question that I never had the courage to ask nor were they entertained where I was educated. It has been a boon to finally ask. For example I am follow…

> For example I am following Dirac's book "The Principles of quantum mechanics" to study QM. Pre-AI wouldn't have been able to do so, I am just that dumb

Why exactly wouldn’t you be able to learn pre-AI?

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#102

Post by cpa »

ForHackernews wrote: post #69
hodder wrote: post #61

Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.

Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-...

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#103

Post by digitallogic »

hodder wrote: post #61

Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.

I have the same experience, but there's another dimension I want to throw out: breadth versus depth.

I've wildly increased my breadth of learning. If I'm ever curious about anything, even a passing thought, I can scratch that itch in a way I never could before.

But am I going deep? Acquiring new skills? Eh... I usually go far enough to unblock myself and/or settle a curiosity. I don't think that's good or bad, but it does present a certain set of tradeoffs that are different than going deep.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#104

Post by _bypa »

cortesoft wrote: post #77

I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks. Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pre…

The main skill you need to reach that level is the one they always keep practicing: shmoozing. Thinking is not required as an executive, so you cannot lose what you never had.

And being born wealthy requires zero skill or practice.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#105

Post by ilaksh »

cortesoft wrote: post #77

I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks. Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pre…

The ownership class does not really do work. What they delegate (high level plans) is generally easier to do for AI agents than things like software engineering because it does not need to be as precise or executable. However, there the work has very broad scope scope and the roles are very high risk, so it might need a Fable 5 or Fable 6 level vision language model to remove the jaggedness to make it 'safe' enough to drop the humans But what is going to blow up in 2027 are Automated AI Companies. Human CEOs and owners will not be able to compete with these AI-run companies.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#106

Post by beardedwizard »

cryo32 wrote: post #94
hodder wrote: post #61

Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.

You're not learning them. You're being told about them and given a hammer to leverage them with mediocre to low skill level. Learning requires a huge time investment. Using an LLM doesn't shorten that.

[dead]

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#107

Post by Jensson »

cortesoft wrote: post #77

I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks. Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pre…

The difference is what you delegate to. An executive delegates to people like himself. A computer user delegates to another kind of existence so those think don't think the same way the user does.

Programming normally highlights this difference. LLM programming makes it much less apparent but its still there, LLM are not thinking the way humans do and therefore struggle to solve many problems humans easily solve. So letting all human programming skills rot and just use LLM will halt our progress unless we reach AGI before our programmings skills are mostly gone.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#108

Post by orphea »

cortesoft wrote: post #77

I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks. Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pre…

  if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives?
Yes, I'm 100% sure. It's for the same reason: if you don't actively use a skill - it atrophies; there is no workaround.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#109

Post by ClarityJones »

cryo32 wrote: post #94
hodder wrote: post #61

Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.

You're not learning them. You're being told about them and given a hammer to leverage them with mediocre to low skill level. Learning requires a huge time investment. Using an LLM doesn't shorten that.

Time helps to some degree, but I've worked with professionals who've earned a living for 30+ years, enjoy strong reputations among their peers, and who absolutely do not know what they're doing.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#110

Post by aix1 »

jatins wrote: post #39
largbae wrote: post #14

My compiler writing skills atrophied with the advent of high-level languages, but in exchange I got more done. There is still a very well paid market for compiler writers, but the fact that not everyone needs to be one has made the world richer overall.

Comparison never made sense to me 1/ When dealing with High level language I am not seeing assembly or the language it compiles to. It's not a leaky abstraction 2/ It's deterministic The day my markdown file is the thing I deploy on AWS your analogy will stand

You also don't need to directly maintain or evolve the generated machine code to fix bug or add new features.
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