The question presumes that most of us are "thinking" in the first place, when in actuality, most of us are just acting according to the patterns that have emerged from our encounters with the thoughts of others. We generally adopt them and/or try to hallucinate coherence when they conflict. Very few people actually "think". It's hard work and takes time. We neither have (take) the time nor are we particularly motivat…
Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
61–70 of 512 posts
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#62I do feel like I'm offloading thinking to an AI, but I think that's a good thing. I envision a world where users and AI are aligned without corporate interference. AI lets me offload things that I don't need to know and frees up my brain to push farther than I could before. At least that's how it feels to me.
How can you push your brain go farther than ever, when you don't use it for the basic task?
Higher Math does not work without understanding "lower" Math, running long runs does not work without starting on shorter runs. Thinking about complicated staff will probly not work, if you can't think about the easy stuff.
One can not learn a language without vocabulary and skipping learning verbs in a foreign language, because dictionaries exists does not bring one closer to being able to speak.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#63The question presumes that most of us are "thinking" in the first place, when in actuality, most of us are just acting according to the patterns that have emerged from our encounters with the thoughts of others. We generally adopt them and/or try to hallucinate coherence when they conflict. Very few people actually "think". It's hard work and takes time. We neither have (take) the time nor are we particularly motivat…
Even on Hacker News, when you see debates like 'X technology is good' or 'X technology is bad,' most of it seems to be about identity. And that identity often originates from the community they belong to.
The first identity usually starts with a community or the person who created it. Once the community forms, people under it often forget the original reasons and just accept it as their identity.
This is especially true for technology related issues, because the market share of a technology is directly tied to one's career, which makes it even more prone to becoming an identity issue.
I also do some 'thinking' in certain areas, but most of the time I don't. As my field gets deeper, it becomes harder to allocate cognitive resources to other areas. So in general, most people follow the crowd's opinion, but only maintain deep, thoughtful thinking, including 'taste,' in a few specific technical domains.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#64The question presumes that most of us are "thinking" in the first place, when in actuality, most of us are just acting according to the patterns that have emerged from our encounters with the thoughts of others. We generally adopt them and/or try to hallucinate coherence when they conflict. Very few people actually "think". It's hard work and takes time. We neither have (take) the time nor are we particularly motivat…
everyone is just thinking about how to recall, remix and repeat.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#65Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#66The question presumes that most of us are "thinking" in the first place, when in actuality, most of us are just acting according to the patterns that have emerged from our encounters with the thoughts of others. We generally adopt them and/or try to hallucinate coherence when they conflict. Very few people actually "think". It's hard work and takes time. We neither have (take) the time nor are we particularly motivat…
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#67When I use a calculator, I atleast try to get with in a few digits of what I think the anwser is in my head. Mostly since when I was younger I had a very passionate teacher about how much slower everyone is now because of calculators on simple math. I just apply the same thing with LLMs, just try and think of how and what I would have said and see how close I was. Only thing I change is I don't trust the anwsers and…
We had Mental Math sessions in class. The goal was to teach you how to do math without pen/paper, calculators were not even an option. I try to teach some of this to my 6 y o.
It works quite well. I do the math lessons during bath-time daily with my 6 yo. He's up to the point were he can add multiply pretty much any number by 2, 3 or 4 as long as the product is under 3 digits.
Going from adding single digits to multiplication of random 2-digit numbers by 4 with lessons only during bath-time (no paper or whiteboard) gives a child a great deal of confidence with numbers.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#68I do feel like I'm offloading thinking to an AI, but I think that's a good thing. I envision a world where users and AI are aligned without corporate interference. AI lets me offload things that I don't need to know and frees up my brain to push farther than I could before. At least that's how it feels to me.
I don't think offloading things that you "think" you don't need to know is a realistic thing. Instead this seems like some slippery slope of intellectual degradation where slowly you'll replace more and more parts of the thought process with AI which ends in some rather sad existence.
The issue being, gratification is rarely a good guideline. It just means collapsing the gap between doing the thing and the idea of having done the thing. But that gap is where you actually learn things
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you build stuff with AI it's different. It's very tempting to defer many (too many?) decisions to AI.
I do daily. So far I am doing fine, not sure what exactly your point is, sorry.
If anything, I think most here outsource too little thinking to AI.
What am I supposed to be afraid of? Losing skills I no longer need to get the job done?
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#70Somebody asked an AI how to interpret it.