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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

#161

Post by jrflo »

zerobees wrote: post #112
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 /…

If you’re cognizant of the sycophancy and not a total narcissist then it’s not too hard to figure out with a little experience when the models are just trying to hype you up

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

#162

Post by tgv »

ilaksh wrote: post #98

No, AI isn't doing anything. When someone gets stabbed, do you say "are knives stabbing people?" No, just like you don't give credit to the knife for cutting up your vegetables. "Just being aware that this phenomenon exists hopefully provokes some self-reflection about which skills people want to maintain and which they’re willing to outsource” to AI tools. Right. Obviously. So we need to be teaching that core lesson…

Why are you comparing it to technologies with a positive outcome? Why not to opium, tobacco, or alcohol?

> So we need to be teaching that core lesson to children

Yeah, that has always worked out well.

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

#163

Post by hodder »

zerobees wrote: post #150
hodder wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really just need to augment with tight prompting and know how to extract information and links to peer reviewed literature and well sourced information. Once again, technology here is a lever. Separating wheat from chaff has been key in academic and information pursuits forever and it is becoming ever more important.

And you're gonna review that voluminous academic literature in a field you're not familiar with, right?... That is my point: an LLM can be great if you know the field and can spot errors. Or, to a lesser extent, if you have some automatic feedback loop that the model can't easily game ("does this code pass unit tests?"). It's a lot less great if there's a risk that you won't detect the early drift.

Sifting through information to separate truth from fiction is a modern, experience-based skill that I’ve developed YES.

However, your perspective on how LLMs are used might be too narrow. While no one is suggesting using an AI to find a one-shot cure for Alzheimer's, LLMs are incredibly effective tools when paired with textbooks to master subjects like undergraduate physics.

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

#164

Post by aix1 »

kristofferR wrote: post #55
bwhiting2356 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of people now involved in software development has now increased because of a lower barrier to entry. I know many people who would previously use a no-code tool or hire offshore devs, or simply not have their problem solved, who are now vibe coding. Many of these people couldn't write very much code manually if they had to, but they're closer to understanding software than they were previously.

Yeah, this describes me perfectly. I can't really program, but I'm now building a bunch of different projects and submitting PRs that people seem to appreciate. https://github.com/kristofferR One of them, a Home Assistant integration for controlling adjustable beds, would be borderline impossible to do well manually - I've vibe-reverse engineered the Bluetooth protocols of more than a 100 Android apps.

> I've vibe-reverse engineered the Bluetooth protocols of more than a 100 Android apps

Impressive coverage, but how do you verify that the reverse engineering matches what the hardware expects? Do you find people who own those beds and get them to test stuff for you?

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

#165

Post by larsfaye »

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 actually agree with you; I definitely feel I'm able to use LLMs to learn and explore concepts, but I've always been a self-taught and highly motivated person in the first place. Everything technical that I know, I know because I put in the work to learn it on my own. That's why I wish these tools were being advertised as models that help you do BETTER work, not MORE work. They're using them as excuses to lay off swaths of workers, instead of allowing them to uplift people's skillsets. And, of course, it invited a whole mass of individuals who use them to artificially elevate their perceived skills.

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

#166

Post by anjel »

MDs NPs and PAs currently are offered free access to a medical AI app called Open Evedidence. Was just discussing this with our chief medical officer and while he is quite enthusiastic about it, he could already see this same dumbing down effect emerging among his providers. The solution I think, is 5 or 10 ten year re-certification exams for MDs, currently reqd for "Physician Extenders" but not the Physicians who supervise them. Continuing compulsory education and re-certification works, I suspect, in all highly skilled fields that are both augmented by AI but also degraded by it.

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

#167

Post by mrmarket »

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…

intellectual work (or really any discipline with a 'skills tree' that you can progress up or down) degrades over time without practice. same way that, if you don't run for a while, you're not going to be able to hit your last PR when you pick it back up.

it's definitely easier to catch up after some time away than it would be if you'd never developed the skills in the first place or didn't have a natural talent, but you'll definitely atrophy without exercise. every leader i've ever worked for who graduated to a purely managerial/'strategic' position and didn't keep up their IC skills eventually got pretty slow on the uptake.

i appreciate that this study was done (AI and its inverse relationship to human wellbeing is one of the biggest challenges of our time IMO) but this also seems obvious

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

#168

Post by mediaman »

contingencies wrote: post #27
mediaman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tools aren't owned by a cabal of state-adjacent parties. Specific implementations are. But open-source models have saved the day here.

If they can keep up. Unfortunately, we learn from previous technology shifts that the masses will always favor ease of use (to the point of infinite scroll 5 second videos dopamine puddle, or echo chamber social networking in lieu of critical media consumption), which does not bode well for the market for alternative hardware: one which is already expensive. I fear on-prem AI is likely to become as popular as on-prem…

On-prem versus cloud inference doesn't matter for concentration of power.

Concentration of power exists when the model makers are the same as (or control) the inference providers. Making a model is capital intensive, so there aren't many of them. Providing inference is not: I don't even need to own GPUs; I can rent them from those who do and then sell by the token. B300s cost less than $4 an hour currently.

Cloud can even be more effective at lowering concentration of power than on premise. Asking people to individually buy $20,000 of compute equipment plus power and cooling equipment to run a frontier model is not something they're going to do if they can just pay four-tenths of a cent per output token. If the only cloud inference providers are the big proprietary US titans, that means you're going to get far more power concentration than if open source inference providers are an alternative, because then I can just switch my API endpoint.

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

#169

Post by themafia »

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…

> Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why?

Literally: the context window.

With the human you have a window that possibly extends up to _years_. With your language model you have maybe a few megabytes which is always preceded by instructions from the model maker.

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

#170

Post by ianbutler »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #80
ianbutler wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk man my system design game is better than its ever been because I put in the effort to use these tools and recognize they can't do software design better than I can and because I've increased the scope of what I'm building I often have to think more deeply about the problem up front. A typical speccing sessions lasts a few hours for me on big work before I have AI start writing that work where I'm just going back…

I strongly believe that you cannot evaluate how good a system design is if you don't implement it by hand. LLMs will implement what you ask them to, even if it is the wrong approach. They can be lazy and take shortcuts all the time, but they do not feel PAIN (obviously they don't feel anything and aren't lazy, I'm just personifying them but you get the point). Only when you implement by hand can you feel if the imple…

> I strongly believe that you cannot evaluate how good a system design is if you don't implement it by hand.

Fwiw we both agree that LLMs should not design systems. I do the design, but otherwise I don't get how this is true, the success of a design is indicated by long term success in the system it built. You can measure this against success in the task it was deployed for via performance metrics for one. And then from a developer standpoint how easy it was to maintain later on. Success of a system is a measurement over time, but it's not some quality that can only be measured by those who built it.

> Off-topic but having worked in other companies as well, I can guarantee you that this is not the case. The skill of engineers in FAANGs and other "top tier" companies is much higher than average.

I have first hand knowledge of this so I agree to disagree. Being surrounded by google, aws, and meta folks my understanding is the best people leave faang when they get the itch to do something better with their time.

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