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

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

#121

Post by hombre_fatal »

mellosouls wrote: post #54

This is new, the scope of it, its not just about individual "skills" because its all of them ; we are being challenged at the very fundamentals of our ability to think deeply and widely and persistently. That has never happened before like this. It is quite extraordinary and breath-taking at times to see the agents in action; the flipside is that very power renders us both vulnerable to its seduction and enfeeblement…

> we are being challenged at the very fundamentals of our ability to think deeply and widely and persistently. That has never happened before like this.

Social media and content algorithms come to mind as an early wave that changed the landscape here that defines the horrible status quo leading into the AI era.

These days it's trivial to slide into an echo chamber and very hard to break out of the silo.

There might be a double-edged sword here where AI, trusted by most people as an omniscient oracle, can offer the only pushback we encounter on positions we picked up passively by scrolling social media, Youtube, TikTok.

For example, ask Claude, ChatGPT, and even Grok about the "space lasers" that started wildfires in Hawaii in 2018, something people like Marjorie Taylor Greene floated on social media. It quickly debunks it as bullshit.

Now, maybe it will pan out such that everyone will have their own AI that tells them what they want to hear. But so far I've watched people abandon arguments on Twitter because Grok rejected their claim. So it feels like there's a glimmer of hope.

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

#122

Post by MangoCoffee »

ForHackernews wrote: post #69
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.

Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.

i'm using LLMs to do personal aspnet web project. i'm not skill in javascript. i let AI handle it and learn.

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

#124

Post by fzeroracer »

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.

Isn't this effectively the same argument an addict would put forward?

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

#125

Post by sdesol »

Retric wrote: post #116
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.

> playing a slot machine hoping

I still believe the slot machine analogy holds to some extent, but I can honestly say my winning percentage is at least 90% for one shot generated code now.

I think if you know it's limitations (inlcluding your own), I don't think about hoping anymore.

I should note that when I say AI, I mean the collective models from all the major providers. The most important lesson is, you need to ask around.

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

This I agree with. The only way working with AI can really be benefical outside of dealing with AI is, we are visited by extremely intelligent beings that will fuck up in the weirdest ways.

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

#126

Post by AlexandrB »

paul7986 wrote: post #26

AI/AR Glasses that show you every piece of knowledge about whatever your looking at might not help, especially if the AI is wrong. Otherwise everyones a know it all?

It's going to get a lot worse than AI being unintentionally wrong. We're only at the start of the curve for this, but it's obvious that controlling what LLMs show in response to politically-charged topics is huge lever of power for those in charge.

So now imagine you're using Chineses AI/AR glasses that you've come to rely on for "knowledge" and you look at the famous picture from Tianemen square: "Doesn't look like anything to me".

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

#127

Post by aerhardt »

beej71 wrote: post #111

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…

I don't know what to tell you bro. I type much less code but I haven't stopped thinking altogether. I still write to myself and to others. I read longform. I walk and introspect. I think about high level problems. Any general cognitive decline I ever notice, I attribute to having a bad day or getting old...

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

#128

Post by ai_slop_hater »

tossandthrow wrote: post #78
nilirl wrote: post #60

I haven't written a full function of code in over a year. That being said, I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties. So, yes, I do feel like I've lost some of that very low-level skill. But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context? N…

The question is what higher level skills there will be to focus on? I am not convinced that there are tasks, like project management or architecture, that the Ai is inherently worse at.

Managing AI context.

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

#129

Post by orphea »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #122
ForHackernews wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.

i'm using LLMs to do personal aspnet web project. i'm not skill in javascript. i let AI handle it and learn.

Sure. It doesn't mean that you're learning javascript though. This is where the OP, hodder, is wrong.

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

#130

Post by pelorat »

Personally? Yes (and I hate it).

Autocomplete of entire functions and methods. Nice, but also really boring. Takes the fun out it. It's all about fixing sup-par code now, a line here or there.

It's just boring. I tried writing some code by hand today after a few months hardly thinking about things and it was really hard to do even the simplest stuff.

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