Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

a commodity is something of low value unless in a large aggregate.

I know people like that - the amount of inane, obsessive and just strange conversations they have with AI is concerning - there's never any actually useful result or information that they get out of these chats.

Furthermore, there are some clearly wrong questions where person asks AI to make some kind of numerical evaluation of some data. And evaluation is done entirely through inference - essentially a hallucination, instead of some one-off python script which can actually give deterministic calculated evaluation. Yet they accept the answer AI gives them.

Lol, wdym. I like to prompt it that I want evidence, so when there is any new topic where I currently don't know how to tackle it myself, I ask that it does a research and give me evidence. So i can check the sources myself. Like I said, I let it spoon feed me.

When I know upfront how to do anything, I just give all the instructions. But the OPs point was If we offload thinking too much, so that's why I was just thinking about this example when I need thinking - that's usually when I need to learn something new.

I’ve found that when I ask AI to do something for me that I know how to do myself - but would rather not spend the time doing - there is a not insignificant chance that the AI will return a subpar result, which I can usually tell rather quickly. Either by glancing at the code, or trying to compile it and getting an error.

This happens frequently enough that it creates a real disincentive for me to use AI for anything that I already know how to do - and use it exclusively for things I don’t know how to do.

It’s deeply frustrating to realize you just wasted 20 minutes posting error messages into Claude when you could’ve just locked in and written it yourself.

This is exactly the lens I use myself. I write AI software and I use it in my development process, but I try to use the AI to do things that don't remove my agency, but extend my capabilities: - Debug things. It knows way more than I do in many areas and it sees things I will miss. If I'm struggling to find the answer, maybe it will succeed. - Review things. It has a wealth of experience I couldn't possibly have. Ask it to critique my work and provide an alternative perspective that I can't provide myself - Implement a design. I have already gone through the thoughtful engineering to decide what to do and how to do it. The rest amounts to translating pseudocode to the programming language. Let it type what I would have typed anyway and save me the hassle of typos, looking up function and parameter names, and other such mechanical details. Let me use that time and mental effort to better consider my design, try more alternatives, or build more things, providing more value overall. - Suggest ideas. Even as a 20 year professional, there are things I don't know or haven't considered. Is there a newer, faster, or more maintainable way of doing this? Is what I wrote clear to anyone other than myself? Before AI, I would ask coworkers, search the web, or reference other sources. Now I can get an immediate suggestion from something with tremendous knowledge at almost no cost. It's full up to be to consider what it suggests, further explore the used and learn about them - I don't take the AI at its word and let it decide what is best for me. But I do use it to gain perspective and explore alternatives.

There are some common traits about the thighs I use AI for. They are this that I either couldn't possibly do myself (because I'm biased, or unfamiliar, or have no access to the expertise) or that I would spend a lot of time while having little agency (mechanical translation). I am not replacing learning, thinking, or deciding. I think this is the key difference.