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

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

#151

Post by Herring »

dagmx wrote: post #115
Herring wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

edit: wasting my time

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

#152

Post by mnky9800n »

visarga wrote: post #140
mnky9800n wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that a couple papers counts for much of anything. A couple scientific articles form an opinion about a topic. The evidence shown in those papers are certainly something to think about, but there hasn't been enough time or effort put into the use of understanding how AI technologies aide technical work and the ability to solve more complex problems to make some sort of suggested claim that it is inherent…

Time goes forward, in the future when will you be in a situation you can't access a LLM? Better use LLM as much as possible to learn the skills of controlling agents, scaffolding constrains, docs, breaking problems in such a way that AI can solve them. These are the skills that matter now. We don't practice much using the assembler either, or the slide ruler. I also lost the skill to start an old Renault 12 which I o…

Exactly. Why should I not learn new things and how they work? What is the point of living if not learning new things?

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

#153

Post by arikrak »

I recently wrote a short post on something similar: while AI is able to solve increasingly longer tasks, people's attention spans are getting shorter. https://www.zappable.com/p/ai-vs-human-attention-spans

Hopefully people can learn to use AI to help them, while still thinking on their own. It's not like that many of the assignments in school were that useful anyways...

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

#154

Post by erichocean »

dagmx wrote: post #85

Atrophy 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…

> Firstly, we’re making new technologies and APIs that LLMs really struggle

LLMs absolutely excel at this task.

Source: Me, been doing it since early July with Gemini Pro 2.5 and Claude Opus.

So good, in fact, that I have no plans to hire software engineers in the future. (I have hired many over my 25 years developing software.)

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

#155

Post by dagmx »

ben_w wrote: post #148
0x696C6961 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Do you think a senior developer needs a basic understanding of the language they use 4 years ago, I'd have said "obviously". At this point? Only for specialist languages the LLMs suck at. (Last I tried, "suck at" included going all the way from yacc etc. upwards when trying to make a custom language). For most of us, what's now important is: Design patterns; architectures; knowing how to think of big-O consequences…

It’s not just the language but the domain within the language.

I see both the latest Claude and GPT models fall over on a lot of C++, Swift/ObjC and more complex Python code. They do better in codebases where there is maximal context with type hints in the local function. Rust does well, and it’s easier to know when it’s messed up since it won’t compile.

They also tend to clog up code bases with a cacophony of different coding paradigms.

A good developer would be able to see these right away, but someone who doesn’t understand the basics at the least will happily plug along not realizing the wake they’ve left.

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

#156

Post by dagmx »

Herring wrote: post #151
dagmx wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

edit: wasting my time

Please re-read the original comment. All your suggestions are addressed there and I explain why this is inadequate.

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

#157

Post by dagmx »

erichocean wrote: post #154
dagmx wrote: post #85

Atrophy 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…

> Firstly, we’re making new technologies and APIs that LLMs really struggle LLMs absolutely excel at this task. Source: Me, been doing it since early July with Gemini Pro 2.5 and Claude Opus. So good, in fact, that I have no plans to hire software engineers in the future. (I have hired many over my 25 years developing software.)

So you’ve made a decision based on three months of use.

I am legitimately interested in your experience though. What are you creating where you can see the results in that time frame to make entire business decisions like that?

I would really like to see those kinds of productivity gains myself.

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

#158

Post by wilsonnb3 »

jncfhnb wrote: post #80

Can’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…

> 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.

I don’t think this is true, people have been printing newspapers, pamphlets, and leaflets for hundreds of years.

It isn’t only long form content that the printing press was good for, It’s just that the long term content tends to be remembered longer. Probably because it isn’t just long for the sake of being long :p

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

#159

Post by drdaeman »

dagmx wrote: post #85

Atrophy 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…

> aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them

I’m assuming “unable” means not complete lack of knowledge how to approach it, but lack of detail knowledge. E.g. a junior likely remembers some $algorithm in detail (from all the recent grind), while a senior may no longer do so but only know that it exists, what properties it has (when to use, when to not use), and how to look it up.

If you don’t think of something regularly, memory of that fades away, becomes just a vague remembrance, and you eventually lose that knowledge - that’s just how we are.

However, consider that not doing junior-level tasks means it was unnecessary for the position and the position was about doing something else. It’s literally a matter of specialization and nomenclature mismatch: “junior” and “senior” are frequently not different levels of same skill set, but somewhat different skill sets. A simple test: if at your place you have juniors - check if they do the same tasks as seniors do, or if they’re doing something different.

Plus the title inflation - demand shifts and title-catching culture had messed up the nomenclature.

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

#160

Post by questionableans »

raincole wrote: post #100
foxglacier wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've been reading too much news. There are global societal risks but they're not just whatever the popular bogeymen of hour are supposed to be. Some of your concerns might even be backwards. I doubt you've critically thought about any of these and are just regurgitating what was fed to you. If you lived in an earlier time, you'd be worrying about the rise of homosexuality, communism, atheism, etc.

The exact same argument can be made for people who claiming AI would make us dumber: If they lived in an earlier time, they'd be worrying about the rise of google, the internet, tv, radio... were going to make people stop using their brains. Socrates believed writing was going to make people stop memorizing stuff. I'm not a doomsayer who thinks the world is on the edge of collapsing. But I do think the issues I liste…

At a global level, a more reasonably sized human population is exactly what we need, and a decline in birth rate is the most ethical way to achieve that. We have to find a way to make it work, because otherwise our trajectory takes us beyond the carrying capacity for our planet.

There are three things we need to deal with the temporary population imbalance:

Older people who remain healthy continuing to work to care for their peers—-not necessarily hard physical labor, but being out in their communities helping, which is rewarding and will help them stay healthy, too.

Easy immigration for regular people so they can move to where they’re needed.

General efficiency so we’re not wasting resources. This requires both technological and lifestyle changes, even for the rich. The more efficient we can get, the less we have to reduce our overall population.

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