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Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

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

#241

Post by chowells »

paytonjjones wrote: post #180
jvanderbot wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read the "Whispering earring" essay? I love it for the LLM era.[1] You can treat AI as a whispering earring - "What should we do now? How do we fix this? What do you think?" Or you can treat it like an exoskelton - "Implement kd-tree with metric space xyz for this problem, mapping this to that blah blah". That's pre-thought execution automation that makes review much simpler - you already know the shape of t…

Something I never considered much is what happens when everyone else is using the Whispering Earring. You may be more free and independent, but you may also be unable to compete as everyone else easily gains wealth and success. Natural selection doesn't particularly care about freedom of consciousness. Bleak.

It is literally impossible for everyone to obtain wealth. Wealth isn't a number or physical circumstances. Wealth is having economic power over the people around you. Success is a little more nebulous, but when thought of as a relative of wealth it's similarly contextual.

The danger isn't everyone but you getting wealthy. The danger is that wealth tends towards concentration. And it tends to concentrate around people who are already wealthy. The danger is, bluntly, that things will get worse for all but a few and most people will be so caught up in a red queen's race that they can't see how to stop.

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

#244

Post by nomadpenguin »

boothby wrote: post #66
dentm42 wrote: post #31

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…

This is such a strange perspective to me. I wouldn't describe anybody I know in this way. Do you not engage in thoughtful conversation with the people you meet? Do you not know people who make art as a hobby? When techies propound such a dim view of humanity, I truly fear for our species. Nobody will shed a tear when your bodily resources are reallocated to paperclip production.

It's a genuinely fascist tendency. Only the elite few are "real people" who think. Everyone else is irrelevant, democracy is a failed experiment, wealth = worth, etc etc etc

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

#245

Post by kurthr »

Izkata wrote: post #168
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…

> But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. Except calculators have been a problem for decades, it's why they're not allowed in school when you're still learning. Without doing the math yourself and internalizing how it works, you won't develop the number sense to tell if the result makes sense (broken calculator, typo, wrong equation, etc). I still…

If you can't work in order of magnitude calculations and estimations you're not going to last long in physics. Many useful models give good answers only within a certain range of inputs, while at the same time you often can tell where in a dynamic space you are by external observations. For example, estimating Martian wind speed within a factor of 3x from the size of the sand dunes, can be done having only seen pictures and with only the knowledge of a few dimensionless parameters.

That's also how you can tell if your calculator is "lying" to you (or you typed wrong). I guess I have a few similar tools in spaces where I'm more experienced to see when "hallucinations" and gibberish are being generated by LLMs. Of course having it "check sources" and evaluate its own solutions sometimes also works, if those are reliable, but you're on the hairy edge at that point.

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

#246

Post by tumdum_ »

slibhb wrote: post #80
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…

> 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.

Reading a book is a way to peek into author's mind. There is nothing to peek into when the book is generated by llm.

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

#247

Post by SkyBelow »

Izkata wrote: post #168
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…

> But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. Except calculators have been a problem for decades, it's why they're not allowed in school when you're still learning. Without doing the math yourself and internalizing how it works, you won't develop the number sense to tell if the result makes sense (broken calculator, typo, wrong equation, etc). I still…

I see an AI as an advanced calculator, but I see even a simple calculator as a poison to education if not strongly controlled.

Number sense is such a nebulous concept, but it captures what I've seen people struggle with. A general sixth sense about where an equation should or shouldn't go, a feeling that random numbers don't appear quite random enough and might have a pattern, or even recognizing that having a pattern signifies some relationship that otherwise has no evidence.

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

#248

Post by overgard »

Yes.

It makes me sad, high-level thinking is the one thing that makes humans unique. That we're willing to let that atrophy while giving our power to mega corporations for the sake of convenience is a sad state of affairs. Like, Altman's idea that intelligence will be a "metered utility" should make people terrified! That's a dystopian future. "I can't climb out of poverty because I don't have money to pay the thinking machine"

I do think there's a potential irony in this though. The people screaming loudest about how if you're not using AI you're going to get "left behind"... are probably going to get left behind. Actual skills developed by real learning, I think, are going to become more rare and valuable, not less.

Personally, I'm hoping my side project turns into a business at some point. I can tell you there's a 0% chance I'd hire a vibe coder to work on it. I just don't need that skillset. I would hire professional fiction writers (it's a tool for them), people with technical expertise I lack, etc. The one skillset I do not care about is AI usage expertise, because it's just not valuable.

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

#249

Post by pibaker »

allthetime wrote: post #5
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…

It is easier than ever to learn difficult concepts. It is also easier than ever to produce things that used to require understanding of those concepts without them. Discipline and drive to use these powerful new tools patiently and with purpose is what is required.

Do we actually have any measurements of if AI helps you learn something better?

Because it is one thing to feel like you have learned something and another thing to have actually learned it well enough to put it in use. There are so many YouTube tutorials on all kinds of subject that will make you feel like an expert in the field after watching, and then you start doing the thing they have supposedly taught you and you can't remember a darn thing, because your "learning" was only ever skin deep and never meaningfully tested or reinforced.

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

#250

Post by kurthr »

nicbou wrote: post #240
Izkata wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. Except calculators have been a problem for decades, it's why they're not allowed in school when you're still learning. Without doing the math yourself and internalizing how it works, you won't develop the number sense to tell if the result makes sense (broken calculator, typo, wrong equation, etc). I still…

We had exams where the calculator was allowed, because we were tested on our ability to type in the right calculations. The calculator wouldn't save you.

Even in the 80s HPs would do derivatives (and simple integrals). But, open book tests are the worst, nothing could save you!

I still remember giving Mathematica a relational equation of the atomic radius expectation values for it to integrate by parts and collect terms... at the time it failed to find the right integrating factor and gave gibberish. Probably works now.

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