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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?

#391

Post by NichoPaolucci »

poolnoodle wrote: post #321

I believe the answer is a resounding "yes". Anyone using AI must have caught themselves typing a quick prompt before spending even a little time thinking about the problem.

Well - I think that’s a natural assumption but I’d say it’s probably not true. I’ve talked to who are fully enveloped in the AI buzz. Ask it everything. Claude can plan your day, strategize your roadmap, make your pitch deck, draft your email, read the reply, and it can tell you what to make for dinner when you get home!

I wish I was kidding but I work with people doing this. I think it’s going to be a real mess in the future, we’re going to completely disintegrate the critical thinking portions of our brains.

Fortunately, I’m seeing more articles about this, some of us are noticing and raising the flag asking “is this a good idea?”

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

#392

Post by LelouBil »

Izkata wrote: post #186
helterskelter wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OT, but if we made kids learning math use log tables and slide rules for all their calculations I expect that they would engage their brains more and actually think about what they were doing, ie: form a strategy to solve a problem before they started calculating. Also I think that they would get a better "feel" for working numbers in general. I have no evidence, but I suspect that by abstracting away a lot of the "g…

> Also I think that they would get a better "feel" for working numbers in general. This is called "number sense". I'm pretty sure we do have evidence under searches for that term, it was well-enough known as a concept when I was in school decades ago and is the reason we don't use calculators when first learning math.

Having done a bit of teaching/grading for computer science, I don't know how to do it reliably nowadays.

For math we ask the whole reasoning and not just the answer, but here what do you do ?

What I resorted to is a live code review with the student, and it becomes very quickly apparent if they know the code, know what the AI said about the code, or didn't bother to read the code at all.

But it's way more time and effort.

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

#394

Post by LelouBil »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #11
AnEro wrote: post #6

When I use a calculator, I atleast try to get with in a few digits of what I think the anwser is in my head. Mostly since when I was younger I had a very passionate teacher about how much slower everyone is now because of calculators on simple math. I just apply the same thing with LLMs, just try and think of how and what I would have said and see how close I was. Only thing I change is I don't trust the anwsers and…

We had Mental Math sessions in class. The goal was to teach you how to do math without pen/paper, calculators were not even an option. I try to teach some of this to my 6 y o.

It's great. Personally I am the worst at mental math and resort to a calculator for any stuff beyond 2 digits multiplications, but at least I know how to do it (very slowly) if I have to, and this means I could have an intuition of an erroneous answer a calculator could have given me (for simple stuff but you get my point).

Computer science teaching really needs to be prepared to do the same progression as math, but even harsher because LLMs are not even deterministic.

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

#396

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

zerobees wrote: post #235
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…

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.

>So I guess, AI is whispering things into our ears whether we notice or not.

Humanity is a weak hive mind species. You can, with effort, keep it from whispering it into your ears, if you really want that. But it's impossible to keep it from whispering in another ear attached to your hivemind. And the only difference in those ears is the propagation delay before it's rattling around in your own skull.

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

#397

Post by LelouBil »

techpression wrote: post #135
AnEro wrote: post #6

When I use a calculator, I atleast try to get with in a few digits of what I think the anwser is in my head. Mostly since when I was younger I had a very passionate teacher about how much slower everyone is now because of calculators on simple math. I just apply the same thing with LLMs, just try and think of how and what I would have said and see how close I was. Only thing I change is I don't trust the anwsers and…

The calculator comparisons are truly meaningless imo, a calculator does nothing if you don’t know how to use it and what to input, an LLM circumvents all that, but a lot of people seem to think it’s the same.

When I (and I assume others) use the calculator analogy, it's mainly about the teaching method.

You learn math without a calculator, then you learn how to do the boring parts with a calculator that you would still be able to do (slower) if needed.

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

#398

Post by protocolture »

backwardsponcho wrote: post #377
protocolture wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

When people interact with spouses and coworkers, it's still human-to-human interaction. There is a person on the other end. Not quite the same when your head doctor, DJ, gym coach, and nutritionist are the same sycophant machine who's eager to let you know how absolutely right you are.

>There is a person on the other end.

Not sure why that matters tbh.

Cognitive Offloading is a human ability. We built a tool that can be used with it in absence of another person.

The argument seemed to be that Cognitive Offloading dehumanised a person, but now things have shifted to "Its only good with another human".

If its worthwhile we will do it, if its not worthwhile we wont.

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

#400

Post by confidantlake »

SamPatt wrote: post #386
customguy wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe you should ask yourself why you believe that 1) access to resources and technology are "basically constantly rising" Because people have and share ideas, and I was using that as a shorthand. Even if they aren't, if you completely strike that part -- my point remains completely untouched. > why the relative difference in wealth today is more important than the (magical?) existence of a system were everyone has…

>There was no default "state", at least by the time you're talking about humans, we probably already learned from each other by observation. Sure, politics and wars and religion and feudal dynasties and whatever make bumps in the line, but generally it goes up. No, that's not the shape of the line. You can view it here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-ca... The hockey stick upturn in recent…

That is an entirely unserious graph.
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