Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 328 posts

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#111

Post by beej71 »

How many of you feel this, anecdotally? I had to come up with a class hierarchy for a roguelike game the other day. This should be something that's dead simple, off the top of my head, no problem.

And suddenly I was stuck! It was like thoughts weren't forming properly. My instinct was to use Claude to help brainstorm, but I resisted. 5 minutes later, I finally broke free and instantly came up with the plan.

What the hell?

I realized I'd offloaded my planning onto AI. I would ask it for plans and then choose the best one, but that's a different skill than coming up with the plans in the first place. My skills were rotting.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#112

Post by zerobees »

hodder wrote: post #61

Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.

I don't know this applies to you, but I've had several friends who convinced themselves they're exploring the frontiers of science, and it always turns out that their conversations spiraled into some sort of weird quantum-metaphysical gobbledygook.

LLMs are sycophants, and in long conversations, their sycophancy produces a positive feedback loop: the context window contains affirmations of incorrect interpretations / analogies, so the chatbot continues down that path because, well, that's the most likely completion of previous text. And before you know it, you're discovering the hidden fabric of the universe, which is always some Minkowski fractal spacetime tensor lattice manifold with subharmonic DNA nanotubes.

That is to say, unless you have a robust way to evaluate what you're learning, and to confirm that you're actually learning, I'd tread carefully.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#113

Post by _bypa »

For the people peddling LLMs this is actually good news:

1. Force AI down everyone's throats claiming it's going to boost productivity

2. See people lose valuable skills because they rely too much on AI

3. Peddle more AI to make up for the lack of skills in professionals

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#115

Post by lelanthran »

hodder wrote: post #61

Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.

> Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old.

You aren't learning anything. Learning involves doing.

We've known this for ages: simply reading a maths book without drilling on the problems will not get a student to pass.

Best case scenario, you're reading stuff. For users of coding agents, they're not even doing that.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#116

Post by Retric »

cortesoft wrote: post #77

I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks. Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pre…

AI needs a great deal of handholding which is different than just offloading tasks. You spend a lot of cognitive energy playing a slot machine hoping the RNG works out this time.

There’s definitely a skill to using AI but it just doesn’t generalize very well.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#118

Post by cortesoft »

_bypa wrote: post #104
cortesoft wrote: post #77

I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks. Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pre…

The main skill you need to reach that level is the one they always keep practicing: shmoozing. Thinking is not required as an executive, so you cannot lose what you never had. And being born wealthy requires zero skill or practice.

This seems to assume that a skill is only important if you need it for your job.

If that is the case, then wouldn't this whole thing be a non-issue? We lose all the skills we used to have, but we don't need them because our entire job now is interacting with AI, and that skill we will continue to develop because it is what we do all day.

I don't know if I fully agree with that. Some skills are important even if you don't need them for your day job.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#119

Post by Jensson »

digitallogic wrote: post #103
hodder wrote: post #61

Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.

I have the same experience, but there's another dimension I want to throw out: breadth versus depth. I've wildly increased my breadth of learning. If I'm ever curious about anything, even a passing thought, I can scratch that itch in a way I never could before. But am I going deep? Acquiring new skills? Eh... I usually go far enough to unblock myself and/or settle a curiosity. I don't think that's good or bad, but it…

Yeah, it is like going to a restaurant to taste a foreign meal rather than looking up how to cook that foreign meal yourself, cooking it and that way getting to experience it.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#120

Post by skydhash »

largbae wrote: post #14

My compiler writing skills atrophied with the advent of high-level languages, but in exchange I got more done. There is still a very well paid market for compiler writers, but the fact that not everyone needs to be one has made the world richer overall.

As jatins says: Why bother with source code? just deploy prompts and specs. It’s rare for C programmers to care about assembly, or python programmer to care about C. Why do you care that much about source code?
Post reply on HN