Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s always been the issue for me. It’s not the technology itself, it’s that virtually the entire initiative is being pushed by venture capital with a “we want to make more money than God” mission that means they call every person calling for caution a Luddite/anti-progress. That’s basically how every thing on the Internet has expanded over the last 20 years and the results have been, if I’m being insanely generous…
I also think that being a little more cautious would have yielded many, if not most of the benefits we've received while avoiding many of the downfalls. Most of these companies knew their products were negatively affecting their users-- e.g. instagram and teen girl self esteem-- but actively suppressed it because it would inhibit making dump trucks full of money off of it. People who stand to make that money will ALW…
The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
111–120 of 341 posts
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#112Atrophy has really been an issue in my recent hiring cycles for good senior engineers. 80% of senior candidates I interview now aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them. We’ve had to start doing more coding tests to weed their skill set out as a result, and I try and make my coding tests as indicative of our real work as possible and the work they current do. But these people are struggling to…
I was actually thinking about this the other day while vibe coding for a side project. I am a lead engineer, but I’ve been using AI in much of my code recently. If you were to ask me to code anything manually right now, I could do it, but it would take a bit to acclimate to writing code line by line. By “a while”, I mean maybe a few days. Which means that if we were to do a coding interview without LLMs, I would prob…
Isn’t the solution to tell the interviewee that they will have to write some code without llm support? In the case of someone like you I’d hope they’d take that as notice to spend a tiny bit of time getting back up to speed. If it really is just a day or two then it shouldn’t be an issue
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Truthfully, in my experience, they both end up performing near the level of the LLM. It’s an averaging factor not an uplifting one.
Right now we are seeing junior hiring fall off a cliff, whether or not LLMs are responsible is hard to say. But if it does turn out that everyone performs to the level of the LLM, then a vast amount of business dollars can be saved by hiring starving English majors exclusively and dispensing with STEM majors altogether.
I said it’s an averaging factor not an absolute match.
A senior with a LLM will likely still outperform a junior. A CS major with an LLM will out perform an English major.
But is the senior out performing the junior at a level that warrants the difference in salary?
Then people will point to the intangibles of experience, but will forget the intangibles of being fresh and new with regards to being malleable and gung-ho.
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#114This is already happening. In spite of all of the disclaimers that the AI make mistakes the fact that it is given higher billing in for instance google search results (but also lots of other similar places) means people will interpret it as having a higher reputation because that's how we were conditioned to consume search results. This is doing massive damage already, for instance, essay writing, making summaries, r…
School will have to rely on homework less. It ia nkt that deep or complicated. It does not require super radical reform. Ypu can still make the tests and exams checking what students know. There will be less "generate bs at home" tasks and more "come back with a knowledge" which will likely be an improvement.
Except for one thing ... Schools tend not to fail many people. When an entire cohort has a different level of ability, standards adjust. Possibly some proctored, standardized exams might be more comparable over time. I have read that, controlling for student demographics, SAT scores (frequently used for US college entrance) were increasing until the mid 2000s and then flat since then.
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone needs to continuously google how to use the basic data structures in a language they use every day, then I worry about their ability for knowledge retention as a whole.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ― Robert A. Heinlei…
Except I’m not hiring someone to do 20 things. I’m hiring them to do the one thing they say they can do.
Would I hire a taxi driver who can’t drive to drive me somewhere?
Why would I hire a software engineer who can’t demonstrate their abilities.
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#116Atrophy has really been an issue in my recent hiring cycles for good senior engineers. 80% of senior candidates I interview now aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them. We’ve had to start doing more coding tests to weed their skill set out as a result, and I try and make my coding tests as indicative of our real work as possible and the work they current do. But these people are struggling to…
I was actually thinking about this the other day while vibe coding for a side project. I am a lead engineer, but I’ve been using AI in much of my code recently. If you were to ask me to code anything manually right now, I could do it, but it would take a bit to acclimate to writing code line by line. By “a while”, I mean maybe a few days. Which means that if we were to do a coding interview without LLMs, I would prob…
The problem becomes distinguishing someone like you, who has the skill but hasn't recently used it vs someone who doesn't have the skill.
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#117The author may have hit on the answer without realizing it. He's in the gym doing pull-ups. Is his lat strength necessary for some important part of his survival? Highly unlikely. Pre-20th century, when most work was highly physical, would he have gone out after work to research and test out efficient lat exercises? Probably not either.
If we're not using our brains for work, then maybe it'll actually increase our deliberateness to strengthen them at home. In fact, I can't imagine that not to be the case. I mean, it's possible we turn into a society of mindless zombies, but fundamentally, at least among some reasonable percentage of the population, I have to believe there is an innate desire to learn and understand and build, and a relationship-building aspect to it as well.
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone needs to continuously google how to use the basic data structures in a language they use every day, then I worry about their ability for knowledge retention as a whole.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ― Robert A. Heinlei…
I'm not sure I understand the point you're trying to make. Do you think a senior developer needs a basic understanding of the language they use or not?
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Truthfully, in my experience, they both end up performing near the level of the LLM. It’s an averaging factor not an uplifting one.
Right now we are seeing junior hiring fall off a cliff, whether or not LLMs are responsible is hard to say. But if it does turn out that everyone performs to the level of the LLM, then a vast amount of business dollars can be saved by hiring starving English majors exclusively and dispensing with STEM majors altogether.
I keep hearing this however I was just at a career fair for University of Washington CSE new grads (representing my company) and it was packed with companies hiring. Obviously, this is just an anecdote, is there any good data showing the real situation?
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#120Can’t say the author’s fixation on reading long texts resonates with me. I’m sure Newton’s Principia is interesting and all but… no I’m not going to read that. Conciseness is a valuable thing. It wasn’t practical to convey knowledge in a short form previously because printing and distributing a blog post worth of info was too expensive. On some level long form content just seems… poorly written. It’s long for the sak…
“I don’t buy that a lack of long form books are the culprit”
I agree that they might not, in themselves, be a necessary requirement, however: the ability to engage with material, short or long, at a level of deep focus and intentionality is important. And one of the (extremely common, historically) stronger methods of doing this is with long form content, the less passive and more challenging the better.
It touches on the topic of generally transferable— or diffuse, neurologically speaking— skills. It’s what is frustrating when speaking with folks who insist on ideas like “I shouldn’t have to take all these non-STEM courses”. A truly myopic world view that lacks fundamental understanding of human cognition, especially for the subgroup with this sentiment that will readily affirm the inverse: Non-STEM folks should nonetheless have a strong grounding in maths and sciences for the modes of thinking they impart.
Why the difference? It’s a strange, highly mechanistic and modular view of how critical thinking faculties function. As though, even with plenty of exclusivity, there isn’t still enormous overlapping structures that light up in the brain with all tasks that require concentration. The salience network in particular is critical when reading challenging material as well as during stem-related thinking, eg Math. Which, ironically, means the challenging courses involving analytical literature are precisely the courses that, taken seriously, would lay down neural pathways in a persons salience network that would be extremely useful in thinking about challenging math problems with more tools at your disposal, more angles of attack.
It really shouldn’t require much of an intuitive leap to realize that reading and interpreting complex works of literary creativity or other areas of a GenHumanities topics will help impart the ability to think in creative ways. It’s in the task name. Spending 3x16 hours in a class for a semester, roughly the same for work outside the class, 6 or 7 times throughout a 4 year college stretch is a very small cost for value.
I think the foundational failing of education for the past decades falls into all of these gaps in understanding and the inability to engage with the learning process because too few people can even articulate the relevance of highly relevant material.