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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?

#351

Post by customguy »

SamPatt wrote: post #275
chowells wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No. The world has absolutely gotten wealthier over the last few centuries. Wealth is obviously not zero sum. Humanity is far wealthier today than before the industrial revolution, and the trend is still towards increasing wealth.

You are talking about access to resources and technologies, which is basically constantly rising, we couldn't stop that if we wanted to, so that's a given and more importantly orthogonal to the wealth that buys you goods and services.

The latter is absolutely zero sum, because of everybody has a billion, a billion isn't that much any more. E.g. human trafficking exists because some people are rich and others are poor, and the fact that even those poor people might have access to things an emperor 1000 years ago would have dreamed of doesn't change that, because the people who treat them like slaves have even more. It's all about the relative difference between people who are alive today, the absolute increase compared to people who lived N years ago is a red herring.

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

#352

Post by roncesvalles »

I fear more for the future where you're forced to offload your thinking to AI. Everything you say must be cited with LLM, everything you do must be signed off by The LLM. If you're in a meeting and have an idea, but Fable 9 says it's not a good idea, you cannot pursue it or you lose your job. The low-friction path will always be to do what the LLM tells you, and many people will shut off and surrender completely. (this is already how SWEs behave in companies where management forces them to tokenmaxx).

AI will be treated like a God that talks to us, and you can't disagree with it, you can only try to change its mind. The most horrific form of mental oppression. And it's just a few years away.

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

#353

Post by bsoles »

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…

> Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect?

I would also argue that they use LLMs to learn "about" new things, but not really the thing itself. I, myself, learned a lot about complex SQL queries just recently using LLMs. But I really don't know how to write complex queries myself.

People often confuse reading about a thing with knowing the thing.

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

#354

Post by chowells »

SamPatt wrote: post #275
chowells wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No. The world has absolutely gotten wealthier over the last few centuries. Wealth is obviously not zero sum. Humanity is far wealthier today than before the industrial revolution, and the trend is still towards increasing wealth.

As Led Zeppelin once said, "you know sometimes words have two meanings". That definition of wealth is all well and good for books about how markets are magical fix-everything pixie dust. But it's not the definition of wealth that applies when used to describe a person. A wealthy person is not someone with a lot of things. That's a hoarder. A wealthy person is someone who can use their economic power to shape the world around them.

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

#355

Post by dTal »

garciasn wrote: post #332
quietbritishjim wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exoskeleton is such an obvious metaphor for AI (at least, one potential ways of using it) that surely no one, human or AI, could possibly claim credit for it.

I had been explaining it to others as 'My Iron Man suit' before reading the exoskeleton essay, months later. So, you are definitely correct.

It feels more like a BMX bike to me. The quality of what I get out seems to be a direct function of what I put in. The threshold of what I can achieve is raised slightly, the speed with which I can achieve it is raised quite a lot - but it's not a magic rocket ship that whisks me to far off hostile environments and protects me while I'm there. I'm still "naked". The code is still mine, and I can get off the bike at any point and walk.

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

#356

Post by AngryData »

GenAI for everyday life is to me like the segway. Yeah technically you can be moving faster with less effort, but those were rarely ever a real bottleneck in most cases to begin with.

AI as a tool for specific tasks is great, using AI for everything is like strapping yourself to a robot/exosuit and being puppeted around throughout the day.

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

#357

Post by timmytokyo »

zloy88 wrote: post #318
user43928 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. 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?

Yea, kinda agree. I feel like my job just changed into a solution architect and quality assurance inspector.

"Solution architect" sounds like a fancy term for a glorified button-pusher. At this point you're making yourself interchangeable with a bunch of other low-skill button-pushers.

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

#358

Post by roncesvalles »

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.

>This is such a strange perspective to me. I wouldn't describe anybody I know in this way.

Only a minority of jobs require the person to wrack their brains very hard. Most jobs just involve learning a routine and performing it on repeat.

The fear is that AI is also turning the jobs that required thinking into routine-on-repeat jobs (where the routine becomes I/O-ing things to an LLM).

I can totally see the job of a doctor (or more likely, NPs and PAs) devolving into just interviewing and visually examining a patient, feeding everything into an LLM, and doing what the LLM tells them. The next step is they wouldn't even be allowed to do anything else, for liability reasons. A world like this is right around the corner.

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

#359

Post by brookst »

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…

Eh, not convinced. Certainly what works for you works for you.

But the idea that “outsourcing” to experts is somehow detrimental is one of the modern tropes I can’t stand. And I’m not sure I believe there’s a material difference between e.g. reading research about raising children versus asking an LLM that is grounded in (and cites) that research.

Maybe I’m a cynic, but I don’t think most of us have a unique contribution to the world. Emphasis on unique.

So why not leverage all resources in the effort to maximize happiness for ourselves and those around us?

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

#360

Post by gexla »

Do you even get "answers" though?

It's hard to explain, but AI mostly doesn't get the nuance of my thinking right. I'll read a response and right away know it's a non-answer for my purposes. If I get a "hit" then it's often by luck. And so, I use it mostly for anything other than direct answers, such as research, etc. Beyond that, it's not much different than old school Google result. So, no, I don't offload my thinking.

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