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Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

artfish.ai

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Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#81

Post by ofjcihen »

demosthanos wrote: post #74
ofjcihen wrote: post #2

I know that the common refrain is “think of yourself as a manager now” but I’ve actually taken the opposite approach and have been telling anyone I train the same. Diving deeper into technical understanding makes more sense to me at this point both as a way to make yourself more useful in the age of AI and also to use AI more effectively. I regularly tell the kids to grab a text book on a subject that interests them…

I wonder if it'd be more effective to teach how to critically use AI than to try to forward people to textbooks. For myself, I have found that I am better able to learn new topics than ever before because being able to have a conversation with a moderately competent but sometimes catastrophically wrong AI about any new subject is actually the perfect mix of helpful and unhelpful for learning. I use a loop along these…

That’s the beauty, you can do both. In practice I usually just let the AI know what chapter I’m on and then ask questions or have it ask me questions based on the chapter.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#82

Post by jimkleiber »

Are CEOs outsourcing too much of their thinking to their employees?

I find I'm not thinking less per say, just thinking about different things. Maybe you could argue there are CEOs who get too far out of touch with the reality on the ground and should get more directly involved in the work. However, I don't know how well one could argue that the CEO should do all of the work.

I see at least the current iteration LLMs and harnesses as me managing and coordinating them and thinking differently, not less.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#84

Post by timacles »

nsxwolf wrote: post #37
voidfunc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously its easy to build prototypes with AI and benchmark...

It's not quite as easy to simulate weird behaviors that emerge across clouds and on prem data centers.

I don’t know where all these people work that think simulating production load is easy

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#86

Post by Wilsoniumite »

zerobees wrote: post #40

I don't know if this is a good framing. "Too much" is subjective, and every heavy AI user will assert that they're just unlocking their potential, that calculators didn't make us dumber, etc. But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. On the flip side, if you use an LLM do most of your thinking, what's left? We have people here who use LLMs to raise t…

"What's your unique contribution to the world" is a good question, and I've been thinking about it a lot. One framing I very much like is thinking about the priceable versus unpriceable contributions of a person. As an example, your software engineering ability is priceable (it's your labor). Your value to your parents isn't priceable. The problem is, right now the default assumed value of the latter is 0. Our society only tries to put a value on priceable facets of a person. There's reasons for that, wisdom of the crowds and whatnot, but of course it also means that if an AI can do that thing, economics drives society to adopt AI over employing people.

It's possible to set that latter value to be nonzero. You can't use free markets to set it because they necessarily cannot see what price to set, so you kinda have to guess, but IMO, it isn't zero, and I'd hazard to say it's positive.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#88

Post by MSkill1 »

PapstJL4U wrote: post #62
MSkill1 wrote: post #12

I 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.

>AI lets me offload things that I don't need to know and frees up my brain to push farther than I could before. 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…

I agree that when you're building mathematical understanding, you have to do it brick by brick. But the fact of the matter is it's been decades since I did a long division problem by hand. AI lets me jump into areas that I would previously have had to spend a month studying before I could begin building - That's what I mean by it lets me reach farther, faster.

Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

#90

Post by bilater »

This is actually a very hard question to answer. If you’re truly AGI-pilled and believe in this progress continuing, then you basically have to contend with a scenario where AI is better than you at doing anything by an order of magnitude. And doing things suboptimally just for the sake of some notion of human independence doesn’t feel right to me.

Perhaps the only way forward will be if we figure out how to merge with the AIs so we can keep up. Otherwise, a soma-filled world likely awaits. And unlike Brave New World, I think it might actually be a lot more pleasant, but still one with a different set of tradeoffs.

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