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Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

artfish.ai

361–370 of 512 posts

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

#361

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. 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 their children, to manage relationships, to design products. So what's your unique contribution to this world - is it the prompt you once wrote? You're standing in front of a token-generating machine, pulling a lever, sometimes receiving gifts. Is that your edge, your unique experience, your purpose in life?

Cognitive offloading seems to be a feature of humans, we do it with spouses and people we work with.

I dont see why offloading some other stuff to an LLM is going to dehumanise someone.

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

#362

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…

LLMs are bicycles for the mind, they do not think instead of you

Bicycles don't consume the energy of a small nation.

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

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It cracks me up that you bring up the exoskeleton metaphor, because I'm pretty sure it originated from a 100% AI-generated essay that made it to the top of HN a while back. So I guess, AI is whispering things into our ears whether we notice or not.

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 think the first usage of this metaphor in its modern meaning belongs to Norbert Wiener

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

#365

Consider the following scenario. You're a beginner or with very little experience go on a popular programming forum to ask a question, in the typical way someone with little experience asks, what do you get? An answer? No, you get bad manners, insults, "you don't know how to ask questions", "RTFM". At best you'll get some people challenging you to clarify and refine your question, which you can't do because you don't…

lol. you get answers, guidance and tutoring if you ask with respect (cf Godfather, 1972)

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

#367

Consider the following scenario. You're a beginner or with very little experience go on a popular programming forum to ask a question, in the typical way someone with little experience asks, what do you get? An answer? No, you get bad manners, insults, "you don't know how to ask questions", "RTFM". At best you'll get some people challenging you to clarify and refine your question, which you can't do because you don't…

I'm anti-AI as heck, but this is a really good point.

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

#368
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It'll be like playing chess against someone you know is using a specific version of Stockfish: even though it would beat you if you tried to fight the system unaided, you can win by asking your own copy of the AI to go one step further ahead, and it will be accurate precisely because it's playing against itself and reacting to its own moves. I don't believe this is how chess works, and I don't believe this is how S…

I didn't say "the next version of Stockfish". You have Stockfish version n, see board state s. I have Stockfish version n, see board state s. I want to know what you're about to do, so I put Stockfish into state s, ask it what the best move is, and I know you'll make that move because I know you'll ask Stockfish version n the same question of the same state. I now know board state s+1. The steps are not pre-programme…

Stockfish already does that. You run it as long as you want. When it's calculating evaluations for move k+1, it already knows what move k was, because it has that evaluation. It can explore that tree first, before exploring other trees to try to improve on move k.

Stockfish never settles down to an exact move, unless it sees a forced mate sequence. You could leave it running indefinitely, but the exponential blowup will soon grind you to a halt.

What new versions of Stockfish buy you are optimizations and better heuristics. An older version of Stockfish can still beat a new one, if given enough of a compute advantage.

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

#369

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…

It cracks me up that you bring up the exoskeleton metaphor, because I'm pretty sure it originated from a 100% AI-generated essay that made it to the top of HN a while back. So I guess, AI is whispering things into our ears whether we notice or not.

the exoskeleton metaphor is way older than the current wave of LLMs

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

#370

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.

asimov's "profession" is a very relevant SF short: https://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html
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