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Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
121–130 of 512 posts
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#122Almost definitely Id think - I think we have to treat it something like power tools / chairs and a gym.
AI makes me massively more productive as a quant, and more creative in the sense that it can often find calculations I don't know how to start, BUT the flip side of that is that I can also feel my skills atrophy and as such am trying to make sure I do maths exercises and so on. I don't worry about programming skills because programming isn't about code.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#123as a six-figure salary software engineer haver I find that a lot of colleagues take their cushy jobs for granted.
these are the people who are now first against the wall when the revolution comes.
why would I want to hire you to work the three hours you feel like working per day (per week?) when I can have AI with a deeper knowledge set available 24x7?
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#124I 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…
> deep understanding is going to become a commodity soon How does the text generated by LLM make “our” understanding deeper compared to text written in the books?
I think you have my argument backwards
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#125I 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…
Focusing just on AI wrt our work (let’s say software engineering for now) and letting go the other items. I see a like when this comes up the story is if the AI is doing the arch/impl then what are you even doing anymore? That is honestly not where my value add is, many people can do those two things plenty well, it’s basically commoditized at this point (at a certain experience level). What I bring is all the soft skills and intuition to glue it together and ship and maintain it.
Let the impl go.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#126I 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…
> In my mind, it's pretty simple: I'm a human, LLMs are not. If a human writes a novel, it's inherently worth more. While I appreciate you laying it out so plainly, I disagree. A novel is a bunch of words and I don't care if they were written by one person, five, an AI, or infinite monkeys on typewriters. What's valuable in a novel (or a poem) is in the words.
novel is a bunch of words
or even a bunch of characters, bunch of pixels and so on.
To me this is the wrong level of abstraction that is not sufficient to encode the meaning of literature.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#127I 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…
Just live your life and don't support the AI machine. Nobody is forcing you, your life quality might get much better and you live your life as an intelligent person.
On the other side, people pushing the intelligence is for losers narrative are already too stupid to create anything that benefits humanity or the planet, so might as well ignore them.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#128I 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…
> Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect? Are you going to apply that knowledge of physics or computer science yourself, or will you just prompt the LLM again?
We had some contractors at the house doing some work. The contractors had been doing this work for a long time. I could tell they were good at what they did because I had some experience with that type of work when I was younger and they were way better than me.
We ran into an unusual situation (old house, old building techniques, overlapping old renovations) that they had never seen before. The contractors pulled up ChatGPT and started chatting with it. Eventually they came up with a solution with some good materials and techniques to make it work without turning it into a bigger tear out and complete rebuild project, and they got quick links to confirm it matched code.
This worked because they had the experience to judge the accuracy of the answers. They still checked the claims against the description of the materials we needed to order. After they did the work they had the experience to do it again, and it didn’t take them any guessing, trial and error, or searching through forums or Facebook groups (which are very popular with contractors) to get advice.
This is the right way to benefit from LLMs in learning something: Get the information then put it into practice so you learn it.
I worry when I see someone claim to learn something from an LLM but then the next turn is having the LLM do the work. It’s like skimming a math textbook but then skipping the exercises and never doing any quizzes. Every student in school learns that you have to practice to really understand something because reading the words is not enough. You have to work through it to internalize it.
LLMs can be very powerful tools in this way. They can also trick people into thinking they’re learning when they’re not. I think everyone has to go through that learning process about how to learn all over again like we all did with calculators in elementary school. There will be a lot of people who get trapped into being LLM promoters, whose output ceiling is limited by what LLMs can do as limited by their ability to recognize what’s right and wrong.
By now, almost everyone can think of someone they know who is happy to turn their brain off and press enter in Claude until it says the task is complete. I worry how this is going to intersect with the Reddit generation who grew up consuming doomer content about how jobs are just “bullshit jobs” and how your goal should be to do as little as possible at work, because there will come a time where those who spent their careers offloading their thinking to LLMs without doing the hard work of learning will not have much compelling reason to be hired over any other intern who can prompt Claude.
On the long term view I can see a lot of the LLM prompters getting replaced by LLMs doing the prompting. On social media like Reddit you can already see a lot of people gloating about how they just copy from Jira into Claude, push a PR, and then have Claude handle code review from their peers while they do nothing. Not hard to see that someone like that isn’t doing much that couldn’t be done by going one level deeper with Claude and letting it automate that person away. You have to put in some work to stay valuable.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#129I 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…
"Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect? Are you going to apply that knowledge of physics or computer science yourself, or will you just prompt the LLM again?" Many of the LLM maximalists I know don't have the skills or knowledge to excel in technology and need to use LLMs to do their job. It's seen as a cheat code to get work done. As an example, A person I went to high sc…
>> "It's inherently worth more because it's hard-earned and anchored to experiences we share."
> At some point, it will be impossible to tell the difference. Many people already can't tell if something was generated by AI.
Nit: it won't be impossible, just so hard so most people won't bother or give up if they try, and society will settle into a mediocre, regressed state. Then wait a little while, and the next generation will justify their mediocrity as actually some kind of progress, and the people who knew better will be dead and unable to challenge that.
More technology != more progress. Just look what social media had done. At its best, it's like what came before, just more isolating.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#130Yes.