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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?

#401

Post by dunWithIt »

We don't "think" in language. We think in the spatial relationships of stuff.

Note language on the page is visual spatial relationships and spoken language fosters triggers activity between structures in the brain.

We merely use language to communicate. And yeah but thanks, at my age having worked in EE, software dev and trained under various experts (friends and family who are chefs, doctors, aeronautics engineers) in their disciplines... at some point no one is saying anything interesting

Same old appeals to social conservatism of some form; not save the Constitution style but their job despite tech obsoleting jobs forever now. Their culture, despite history being littered with the detritus of dead cultures.

Just a bunch of parroting. Little thinking "oh shit every generation ever has had to deal with this."

Imo if we offloaded to much thinking to tech it was a long time ago; we started to stare at the web and stopped thinking not in language but about the evolving spatial relationships of the physical world

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-dont-need-wor...

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

#402

Post by confidantlake »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #329
beej71 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be that you don't appreciate the relationship between the author and the reader and the author and the text, which is fine, but is a bit tragic. Not that I doubt that one day people will simply gather around the AI infinite story creation bot. They just won't know what they're missing. :(

I once read Ben Franklin's autobiography. I have yet to experience any great blossoming of our relationship. More seriously, the novel is a unidirectional medium of communication. Not a relationship. That said, it is meant to convey a perspective. I don't care if it's a human, a robot, or a little green man's perspective. It just has to be an interesting, useful, or enlightening perspective that I didn't already shar…

Ah I always felt like novels were a partnership in a way. He is putting down words and I am using that to create a world in my mind. 2 people reading the same novel are creating 2 different worlds.

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

#403

Post by fragmede »

chongli wrote: post #371
chowells wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worl…

That definition of wealth is all well and good for books about how markets are magical fix-everything pixie dust No, it actually means something. We have access to refrigeration, climate control, near-limitless computation, entertainment, transportation, knowledge, communication, and medicine. All of this stuff would BLOW THE MINDS of medieval kings. Even if you're living in a 1BR apartment, working at Walmart and st…

If you're in that one bedroom, struggling at Walmart, you probably don't have a dishwasher or a washing machine and dryer, and possibly not air conditioning or heating, or at least, your electricity bill is enough that you have to think twice before setting climate control to a comfortable level. Your social life probably isn't anywhere near what Charlemagne had. You have a smartphone and that has brought you news from afar. But that news is terrible! Local politics, things are fucked, climate change is out of control, geopolitics is a whole other shit show. Charlemagne didn't have to deal with Israel and Donald Trump. His world was very different. Sure, I have a fridge and a microwave and can use that to sate my hunger in mere minutes, a luxury inconceivable to Charlemagne, but all the trappings of modern society, with TikTok and Reels hasn't made us globally happier. Seeing the emotional damage from whichever online platform surfaces drone videos out of Ukraine today for me as a form of wealth is one perspective. We've lost the plot, or at least I have. We're solving the problems in front of our faces without asking if that's the right problem to be solved.

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

#405

Post by hahajk »

pibaker wrote: post #249
allthetime wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

There is some evidence to support the idea. However, "learning" studies can be a little disappointing since they usually take place over a short period of time. This one had a week-long timescale:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-97652-6

I think there's a bigger question that would be hard to answer: what does a consistent long term diet of videos and quick answers do to a person's mind/understanding of the world?

Also, a lot of the published research is a year delayed - most I've read recently are using ChatGPT 4 or 4o. When it comes to giving high quality feedback, I think there was an inflection point around Opus 4.6.

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

#406

Post by pmarreck »

snapetom wrote: post #251
jeromechoo wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow what a read! Thanks for sharing. Really helped me unpack why I’m so bothered by people who c/p AI answers verbatim.

I did a code review for a really, let's just say "challenging", co-worker a few years ago. There was one block of code that was really obtuse and I couldn't figure out why it was there and what it did. So I asked him. He sighed like he was taking responsibility for a grave sin and I should admire him for it, and said, "I don't know. I copied that from StackOverflow." I've felt that AI is just an amplification of what…

I have learned the hard way that "corpo code" is ephemeral. I spent at least 2 man-years on Ruby/Rails code for Desk.com, once spending an entire month to solve a really bad and intermittent session-logout issue that stumped 8 developers before me (I could tell because they left a bunch of commented-out debug code and I had the git-blame lines), and after I left, that whole stack got retired and its clients moved to some garbage Salesforce offering as part of their crufty Java monolith. (Sorry, SFDC.)

So if we move from "bespoke handcrafted code" to "roughly-engineered, unstylish but still quite working LLM-generated code" in that space, there is LITERALLY no love lost.

Spend your handcrafted love-energy on open-source or library code that will stick around. Leave the corpo code to the LLMs, I say, especially if you don't own it.

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

#407

Post by quadrifoliate »

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.

If you think the AI generated that metaphor, you haven't been paying attention.

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

#408

Post by redwood »

jdw64 wrote: post #63
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…

I agree with many points. Even on Hacker News, when you see debates like 'X technology is good' or 'X technology is bad,' most of it seems to be about identity. And that identity often originates from the community they belong to. The first identity usually starts with a community or the person who created it. Once the community forms, people under it often forget the original reasons and just accept it as their iden…

Re identity, relevant post from today in case you missed it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48907290

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

#409

Post by SamPatt »

confidantlake wrote: post #400
SamPatt wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

In a sense I agree, since GDP is a bit of a silly metric.

But it's a decent enough proxy for the parts of human progress that I think are meaningful that it illustrates the point well.

That website is an excellent resource and you can find other more compelling charts there.

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