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Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
431–440 of 512 posts
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#432[flagged]
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#433I 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…
> I'm not good at lifting weights or running, so my thinking is the only thing I have.
Even if you were, the best you could hope for is a career in entertainment ("sports"). The necessity for bodily strength was abolished in the industrial revolution of the 1800s and 1900s. Now the maximalists predictably say we have another "industrial revolution" that makes our intellect redundant. I don't believe that but if it were true, the question what defines the value of a human would become even more pressing, with less leeway as to what the answer might be. H. G. Wells needed The Time Machine to find a world like that.
Still, if enough people believe that LLMs do make our intellect redundant, it will trigger a cultural crisis similar to the one at the previous turn of the century when men struggled with their defining attribute (physical strength) being taken away by machines. The reverse centaur is over 100 years old, even if that name wasn't used then.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#434I use this little three liner regularly with people in regards to AI (applicable as much to coding as it is business work): - I don't care how you produce the words - I expect you to use tools to be as efficient and productive as possible - You are accountable for every word you produce
Those 3 statements only work if you have short-term thinking. For example, there's no taking into account the gradual atrophy in skills that come from excessive tool use.
To use an analogy, imagine you are fluent in reading/writing/speaking a foreign language. Over time, if you don't regularly use that foreign language, or you use a tool to translate to that foreign language, you gradually lose fluency in that language. It may be more efficient for a translator to use a tool like Google Translate or similar to translate between languages, but there are clearly downsides to doing so, and proofreading the produced contents is not enough to compensate for those downsides, as reading what someone/something else wrote is easier than writing it yourself.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eventually, that becomes interesting. Before we get to that stage, I think we pass through (almost) everyone following almost the exact same advice as each other. Such people are extremely predictable. You may have already noticed, before LLMs, cliché? Talking points that make a group identifiable? Words and phrases that act as applause lights or cognitive stop signs? (That last sentence itself being a pair of cliché…
This is already underway. My dog often gets misidentified as a restricted breed. This used to make apartment hunting difficult because, occasionally, the property manager would visually ID the dog breed as banned, I’d have to go to the vet and get paperwork, potentially gene testing, arguing she wasn't, it was a whole thing. But, recently, the apartment I moved into had an online portal where I had to upload a photo…
Or you could just submit a photo of someone else's poodle.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#436I 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…
This just sounds like the black and white fallacy ad nauseum. Like every sentence is constructed to frame the entire issue around a false binary. Like you assume that if "maximalists" use LLMs more than the average joe, they're not "thinking." Black and white. Either-or. Maximalists are hobbyists. They usually read up on the newest models, try out different ones, maybe even build pcs specifically to run local models. You honestly think they're not thinking as much as you? Also there is absolutely no reason to value "being unique" for its own sake. Unique people aren't walking around trying to avoid tech to max out their uniqueness potential. That's just neuroticism. It does seem to me as though a lot of people have this misplaced faith in humanism and it just feels like copium at this point. Worse yet, it honestly just seems like a way to dunk on those they perceive as conformists. So basically just a high school mall goth. You are not in a position to lecture other people about their purpose. Your brain is a pattern recognition machine just like everyone else. You've grown fond of some patterns you picked up on that emerged during the enlightenment and you seem to be just superficially regurgitating them, not unlike an LLM. Calculators made us dumber in the sense that we no longer have to perform mathematical operations on the fly. That gives us room to do something else. What other people do is up to them. That's what freedom is. You assume the maximalist is just sitting there prompting all day. If they are, whatever. That's their hobby. It’s not much different than playing video games all day. Either way, Im pretty sure their lives are filled with sadness and joy just like you and everyone else.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They were right, though. They were not. I'm not dead yet so I suppose there's still a chance, but so far in decades of living life I've always had calculators when I've needed them. > For one, you still need to now what kind of equation to put into the calculator. That's a very different construct. Math concepts don't care how the arithmetic is performed. > If you don't know the concepts, what are you going to calc…
I have a calculator (and many other tools, of course) in my pocket at all times, now... and yet I don't pull it out very often. Because I can add $1.99 + $3.49 faster in my head ($2 plus $3.50 minus two cents = $5.48) than I could get the result by pulling out the phone, swiping my access pattern, tapping the calculator app, and punching in the results. Heck, even if I had a dedicated calculator that only required pu…
I do simple math like that in my head all the time, despite having had special permission to use a calculator in school.
It was the same back then: Some quick mental math was often faster than using a calculator, so that's what I used first. The calculator came second.
I reject all notions that these are mutually-exclusive concepts.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
I need a bash script for example. I don’t like dealing with bash or debugging scripts written by others. I have that part covered by AI so I can get multiple servers up and running and then eventually fix some config or networking here and there which I like. Instead of bashing my head against the wall.
I love churning out crazy Bash scripts, though. The first scripts I wrote sucked, as it always goes with a new language, but Bash is an awesome swiss army knife now that I know how to really push it. It sucks that doing this by hand now is so heavily discouraged because so many people see this as drudge work (that they never cared to learn).
I do know how to write stuff in bash.
I dislike the tooling and debugging experience that is not existing compared to let’s say Python. With Python I have whole IDE which help me set breakpoints and inspect variable state. With bash I have to pipe output to text file and inspect that. Feels like working with Stone Age tooling.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a calculator (and many other tools, of course) in my pocket at all times, now... and yet I don't pull it out very often. Because I can add $1.99 + $3.49 faster in my head ($2 plus $3.50 minus two cents = $5.48) than I could get the result by pulling out the phone, swiping my access pattern, tapping the calculator app, and punching in the results. Heck, even if I had a dedicated calculator that only required pu…
I do simple math like that in my head all the time, despite having had special permission to use a calculator in school. It was the same back then: Some quick mental math was often faster than using a calculator, so that's what I used first. The calculator came second. I reject all notions that these are mutually-exclusive concepts.
> I reject all notions that these are mutually-exclusive concepts.
Agreed; just because I "rarely" pull out the calculator doesn't mean I never use it. Sometimes my wife asks me "If this cake recipe calls for filling a 9-inch pan with batter, and makes 3 layers, but I have an 8.5-inch pan and I'm making two layers, then how much should I reduce the recipe?" The π terms cancel each other out in that math, but I still can't do (4.25×4.25×2) / (4.5×4.5×3) in my head faster than I can punch it into the calculator. (It comes out to about 0.59, BTW, meaning she should use either half or two-thirds of the recipe depending on if she wants a slightly thinner or thicker cake).
Bringing this back to the broader LLM-related discussion, the lesson I took away from the Fable kerfluffle was "the model will usually, but not always, be available." You might have an Internet connection hiccup, you might have hit your subscription usage credits for the week and not be willing to pay API pricing, the model might even be taken away from you. (Most of which are problems you won't face if you run a local model, but that's a different discussion). So just as it's important to learn mental math even when you have a calculator as backup, it's important to retain the skill to solve many categories of problems without the LLM, even if you still reach for the LLM for the categories of problems that it can solve faster than you can.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#440> ...become slightly more enjoyable.
Yeah, life always becomes more enjoyable when someone else did the job for you. Especially enjoyable, when your problems become smb's else problems.
E.g. your mother as a teacher is now solving a quality-control problem : "When i give A mark to this student, do I characterize their actual level or it was ai-generated." If it turns out in the future that this evaluation was wrong, it is a responsibility of a teacher and the reputation of the school that suffers. I talk here as a teacher myself and this "delegatative thinking" is currently at a disasterous scale. Unfortunately, this effect works one-way : if you are a prodigy, only a few people will know your alma mater. People will think about your personal hardwork. In the opposite case, especially if someone suffered because your ai-consulting sessions, people do not tend to blame your work style, they tend to complaint about the institution that quallified your intelligence. And then other people with simillar evaluations start suffering,too