Expanded/revised version of this article:
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-end-of-thinking (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45372507)
The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
171–180 of 341 posts
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#172My current opinion is that AI is just a thing that is going to further amplify our existing tendencies (on a person-to-person basis). I've personally found it to be extremely beneficial in research, learning, and the category of "things that take time because of the stuff you have to mechanically go through and not because of the brainpower involved". I have been able to spend so much more time on things that I feel…
I think what you will find is that many people fundamentally don't care about their job for various reasons, chiefly of which is most likely that they don't feel fairly compensated, and thus outsourcing their labor to AI isn't the fundamental identify transplant you think it is.
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#173Atrophy 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…
Are you sure you're not just mostly seeing the candidates who are using LLMs to pass through the earlier screening phases with flying colors despite their lack of skills? (i.e., they haven't atrophied, they just weren't very good to begin with). There's always a lot of unqualified applicants to a job but LLMs can make them way more effort to filter out.
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#174Hug your pre-LLM era senior software engineers tightly, they aren’t making more of them. And some of them are already deteriorating after 2 years of LLM tech.
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Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are not necessarily typical.
Discussing this in terms of anecdotes of whether people will use these tools to learn, or as mental crutches.. seems to be the wrong framing. Stepping back - the way fundamental technology gets adopted by populations always has a distribution between those that leverage it as a tool, and those that enjoy it as a luxury. When the internet blew up, the population of people that consumed web services dwarfed the populat…
> The number of readers dwarfs the number of writers.
That's a great observation!
'Literacy' is defined as the ability to both read and write. People as a rule can write, even if it isn't a novel worth publishing they do have the ability to encode a text on a piece of paper. It's a matter of quality rather than ability (at least, in most developed countries, though even there there are still people who can not read or write).
So think that you could fine-tune that observation to 'there is a limited number of people that provide most of the writings'. Observing for instance Wikipedia or any bookstore would seem to confirm that. If you take HN as your sample base then there too it holds true. If this goes for one of our oldest technologies it should not be surprising that on a forum dedicated to creating businesses and writing the ability to both read and write are taken for granted. But they shouldn't be.
The same goes for any other tech: the number of people using electronics dwarfs the number of circuit designers, the number of people using buildings dwarfs architects and so on, all the way down to food consumption and farmers or fishers.
Effectively this says: 'we tend to specialize' because specialization allows each to do what they are best at. Heinlein's universal person ('specialization is for insects') is an outlier, not the norm, and probably sucks at most of the things they claim to have ability for.
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#176Despite the magazine being named the Argument , this article falls into the typical pattern of claiming "the problem isn't X, it's Y", and then spending the rest of the article body building support for Y, but never once making any argument that refutes X.
Typically, such articles can be charitably interpreted as saying "I worry more about Y than X", rather than as literally making two separate claims (that X isn't a problem, and that Y is). So as a reader if you're trying to get value out of the article, you can focus on evaluating Y, and ignore X that the article does not address.
In this particular case, the article is even explicit about this:
> While we have no idea how AI might make working people obsolete at some imaginary date, we can already see how technology is affecting our capacity to think deeply right now. And I am much more concerned about the decline of thinking people than I am about the rise of thinking machines.
So the author is already explicitly saying that he doesn't know about X (whether AI will take jobs), but prefers to focus in the article on Y (“the many ways that we can deskill ourselves”).
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I am glad I learnt programming before StackOverflow! Precisely because it meant I had to learn to figure things out myself. I still use StackOverflow and LLMs, but if those things were available when I was learning I would probably not have learnt as much.
I started programming before stack overflow, was never any good (still am not to this day), but I was always scared of asking questions on stack overflow. I felt like there was a certain amount of homework expected when you ask a question and usually by the time I did enough work to post a question, it was moot because I would have solved my problem usually by stringing together two or more stack overflow questions t…
Of course you’re supposed to put in work, that’s how you learn. You have to think through your problem, not just look at the back of the math book to copy the answer.
The problem with Stack Overflow is not that it makes you do the work—that’s a good thing—but that it’s too often too pedantic and too inattentive to the question to realise the asker did put in the work, explained the problem well, and the question is not a duplicate. The reason it became such a curmudgeonly place is precisely due to a constant torrent of people treating it like you described it, not putting in the effort.
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#178I'm undecided on this, initially I was on the “this is bad, we’re outsourcing our thinking” bandwagon, now after using AI for lots of different types of tasks for a while now, I feel like generally I’ve learnt so much, so much more quickly. Would I recall it all without my new crutch? Maybe not, but I may not have learnt it in the first place without it.
That’s the problem, I think: Using AI will make some people stupider overall, it will make other people smarter overall, and it will make many people stupider in some ways and smarter in other ways. It would have been nice if the author had not overgeneralized so much: https://claude.ai/share/27ff0bb4-a71e-483f-a59e-bf36aaa86918 I’ll let you decide whether my use of Claude to analyze that article made me smarter or s…
> That’s the problem, I think: Using AI will make some people stupider overall, it will make other people smarter overall, and it will make many people stupider in some ways and smarter in other ways.
And then:
> It would have been nice if the author had not overgeneralized so much
But you just fell into the exact same trap. The effect on any individual is a reflection of that person's ability in many ways and on an individual level it may be all of those things depending on context. That's what is so problematic: you don't know to a fine degree what level of competence you have relative to the AI you are interacting with so for any given level of competence there are things that you will miss when processing an AI's output. The more competent you are the better you are able to use it. But people turn to AI when they are not competent and that is the problem, not that when they are competent they can use it effectively. And despite all of the disclaimers that is exactly the dream that the AI peddlers are selling you. 'Your brain on steroids'. But with the caveat that they don't know anything about your brain other than what can be inferred from your prompts.
A good teacher will be able to spot their own errors, here the pupil is supposed to be continuously on the looking for utter nonsense the teacher utters with great confidence. And the closer it gets to being good at some stuff the more leeway it will get for the nonsense as well.
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#179Atrophy 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…
Are you sure you're not just mostly seeing the candidates who are using LLMs to pass through the earlier screening phases with flying colors despite their lack of skills? (i.e., they haven't atrophied, they just weren't very good to begin with). There's always a lot of unqualified applicants to a job but LLMs can make them way more effort to filter out.
We have the coding test as the second phase now for specifically that reason, and might have more once they’re doing the full interview set.
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#180This 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.
The burden on teachers is already crazy high. That would only work if we multiply the number of teachers by 3 or so with a corresponding reduction in class size. The education system would collapse due to funding and recruitment issues.