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The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

theargumentmag.com

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Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#11

Post by HPsquared »

echelon wrote: post #6

I feel like I these doom prognostications were also written during the industrial revolution, the invention of electricity, the invention of television, the invention of the internet, ... We've turned out okay.

Socrates on writing

"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#13

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

jacquesm wrote: post #9
rimeice wrote: post #5

I'm undecided on this, initially I was on the “this is bad, we’re outsourcing our thinking” bandwagon, now after using AI for lots of different types of tasks for a while now, I feel like generally I’ve learnt so much, so much more quickly. Would I recall it all without my new crutch? Maybe not, but I may not have learnt it in the first place without it.

You are not necessarily typical.

Right. It doesn't matter how smart you still are if the majority of society turns into Idiocracy. Second, we're all at risk of blind spots in estimating how disciplined we're being about using the shortcut machine the right way. Smart people like me, you, grandparent aren't immune to that.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#14

Post by zdragnar »

rimeice wrote: post #5

I'm undecided on this, initially I was on the “this is bad, we’re outsourcing our thinking” bandwagon, now after using AI for lots of different types of tasks for a while now, I feel like generally I’ve learnt so much, so much more quickly. Would I recall it all without my new crutch? Maybe not, but I may not have learnt it in the first place without it.

Think of it like alcohol.

Some people benefit from the relaxing effects of a little bit. It helped humanity get through ages of unsafe hygiene by acting as a sanitizer and preservative.

For some people, it is a crutch that inhibits developing safe coping mechanisms for anxiety.

For others it becomes an addiction so severe, they literally risk death if they don't get some due to withdrawal, and death by cirrhosis if they keep up with their consumption. They literally cannot live without it or with it, unless they gradually taper off over days.

My point isn't that AI addiction will kill you, but that what might be beneficial might also become a debilitating mental crutch.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#15

Post by pizza234 »

echelon wrote: post #6

I feel like I these doom prognostications were also written during the industrial revolution, the invention of electricity, the invention of television, the invention of the internet, ... We've turned out okay.

You haven't read the article, which actually says the opposite:

> A few weeks ago, The Argument Editor-in-Chief Jerusalem Demsas asked me to write an essay about the claim that AI systems would take all of our jobs within 18 months. My initial reaction was … no?

[...]

> The problem is whether we will degrade our own capabilities in the presence of new machines. We are so fixated on how technology will outskill us that we miss the many ways that we can deskill ourselves.

[..]

> Students, scientists, and anyone else who lets AI do the writing for them will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#16

Post by bamboozled »

It's happened to me recently, I've relied so much on LLMs for coding and after hours of spinning the wheel, I realized, it has no idea, when it fixes something it's mostly a guess, most I've the time we're just debugging by adding logging statements and the code we've created looks crap and is mostly wrong, full of fluff, or hard to understand.

I've been coding without my LLM for 2 hours and it's just more productive...yes it's good for getting things "working" but yeah, we still need to think and understand to solve harder problems.

My initial impressions blew me away because generating new things is a lot simpler than fixing old things, yes it's still useful, but only when you know what you're doing in the first place.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#18

Post by dcastonguay »

My current opinion is that AI is just a thing that is going to further amplify our existing tendencies (on a person-to-person basis). I've personally found it to be extremely beneficial in research, learning, and the category of "things that take time because of the stuff you have to mechanically go through and not because of the brainpower involved". I have been able to spend so much more time on things that I feel require more human thinking and on stuff I generally enjoy more. It has been wonderful and I feel like I've been on a rocket ship of personal growth.

I've seen many other people who have essentially become meatspace analogues for AI applications. It's sad to watch this happen while listening to many of the same people complain about how AI will take their jobs, without realizing that they've _given_ AI their jobs by ensuring that they add nothing to the process. I don't really understand yet why people don't see that they are doing this to themselves.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#19

Post by techjamie »

rimeice wrote: post #5

I'm undecided on this, initially I was on the “this is bad, we’re outsourcing our thinking” bandwagon, now after using AI for lots of different types of tasks for a while now, I feel like generally I’ve learnt so much, so much more quickly. Would I recall it all without my new crutch? Maybe not, but I may not have learnt it in the first place without it.

It comes down to how you use it, whether you're just getting an answer and moving on, or if you're getting an answer and then increasing your understanding on why that's the correct answer.

I was building a little roguelike-ish sort of game for myself to test my understanding of Raylib. I was using as few external resources as possible outside of the cheatsheet for functions, including avoiding AI initially.

I ran into my first issue when trying to determine line of sight. I was naively simply calculating a line along the grid and tagging cells for vision if they didn't hit a solid object, but this caused very inconsistent sight. I tried a number of things on my own and realized I had to research.

All of the search results I found used Raycasting, but I wanted to see if my original idea had merit, and didn't want to do Raycasting. Finally, I gave up my search and gave copilot a function to fill in, and it used Bresenham's Line Algorithm. It was exactly what I was looking for, and also, taught me why my approach didn't work consistently because there's a small margin of error when calculating a line across a grid that Bresenham accounts for.

Most people, however, won't take interest in why the AI answer might work. So while it can be a great learning tool, it can definitely be used in a brainless sort of way.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#20

Post by tkgally »

rimeice wrote: post #5

I'm undecided on this, initially I was on the “this is bad, we’re outsourcing our thinking” bandwagon, now after using AI for lots of different types of tasks for a while now, I feel like generally I’ve learnt so much, so much more quickly. Would I recall it all without my new crutch? Maybe not, but I may not have learnt it in the first place without it.

That’s the problem, I think: Using AI will make some people stupider overall, it will make other people smarter overall, and it will make many people stupider in some ways and smarter in other ways.

It would have been nice if the author had not overgeneralized so much:

https://claude.ai/share/27ff0bb4-a71e-483f-a59e-bf36aaa86918

I’ll let you decide whether my use of Claude to analyze that article made me smarter or stupider.

Addendum: In my prompt to Claude, I seem to have misgendered the author of the article. That may answer the question about the effect of AI use on me.

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