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

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

theargumentmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 341 posts

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

#181

Post by port11 »

zdw wrote: post #21

For an example of where this already happened, look at the number of people who literally don't have a minor inkling of how to plan a route or navigate without a GPS and mapping software. Sure, having a real-time data source is nice for avoiding construction/traffic, and I'd use a real-time map, but going beyond that to be spoon fed your next action over and over leads to dependency.

I always thought I had a good sense of navigation, until I realised it was getting quite bad.

More or less at the same time I found “Human Being: Reclaim 12 Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology”, and the chapter on navigation hit me so hard I put the book down and refused to read any more until my navigation skills improved.

They're quite good now. I sit at the toilet staring at the map of my city, which I now know quite well. No longer navigate with my phone.

I'm scared about the chapter on communication, which I'm going through right now.

I do think we're losing those skills, and offloading more thinking to technology will further erode your own abilities. Perhaps you think you'll spend more time in high-cognition activities, but will you? Will all of us?

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

#182

Post by port11 »

daxfohl wrote: post #165

The education system is already a relic of the past. All the points mentioned in the article assumes that a classroom full of students writing five-paragraph essays on The Red Badge of Courage in 12-point TNR with one-inch margins, hastily graded by an overworked, underpaid public school teacher is still the best way to teach kids in 2025 about critical thinking. I picture going forward we'll have much more personali…

It's ironic we assume a technology that hallucinates random garbage will be any better than underpaid and overworked teachers. The solution, to me, would be better paid and better supported teachers.

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

#183

Post by catlifeonmars »

mcny wrote: post #83
jstanley wrote: post #60

Earlier 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…

I originally learned programming by answering questions on StackOverflow. It was (unsurprisingly) quite brutal, but forced me to dive deep into documentation and try everything out to make sure I understood the behavior.

I can’t speak to whether this is a good approach for anyone else (or even for myself ~15 years later) but it served to ingrain in me the habit of questioning everything and poking at things from multiple angles to make sure I had a good mental model.

All that is to say, there is something to be said for answering “stupid” questions yourself (your own or other people’s).

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

#184

Post by crazygringo »

jstanley wrote: post #60
password54321 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post was largely about young people who are growing up with these tools and are still at the stage of developing their habits and tendencies. Personally I am glad I learnt programming before LLMs even if it meant the tedious searches on stackoverflow because I didn't feel like I was coming up against a wave of new technology when it came to future job searches. Having done so I can understand and appreciate the i…

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.

Good lord, I'm not glad.

It was horrible. Because it wasn't about "figuring things out for yourself." I mean, if the answer was available in a programming language or library manual, then debugging was easy.

No, the problem was you spent 95% of your debugging time working around bugs and unspecified behavior in the libraries and API's. Bugs in Windows, bugs in DLL's, bugs in everything.

Very frequently something just wouldn't work even though it was supposed to, you'd waste an entire day trying to get the library call to work (what if you called it with less data? what if you used different flags?), and then another day rewriting your code to use a different library call, and praying that worked instead. The amount of time utterly wasted was just massive. You didn't learn anything. You just suffered.

In contrast, today you just search from the problem you're encountering and find StackOverflow answers and GitHub issues describing your exact problem, why it's happening, and what the solution is.

I'm so happy people today don't suffer the way we used to suffer. When I look back, it seems positively masochistic.

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

#185

Post by 1718627440 »

artur_makly wrote: post #145

One way schools, from middle and high schools to universities, can mitigate AI-driven cheating and cognitive decline is by radically rethinking how they conduct final exams. They should require in-person oral dissertations, presented before a panel of one to three teachers and lasting one to two hours. Ideally, the topic would be based on the student’s own original thesis. This approach restores creativity and critic…

How is this not what is currently the norm? How do dissertations work at your university, if they are not exactly this?

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

#186

Post by crazygringo »

zdw wrote: post #21

For an example of where this already happened, look at the number of people who literally don't have a minor inkling of how to plan a route or navigate without a GPS and mapping software. Sure, having a real-time data source is nice for avoiding construction/traffic, and I'd use a real-time map, but going beyond that to be spoon fed your next action over and over leads to dependency.

And so what? Why not be dependent?

I grew up with a glove box full of atlases in my car. On one job, I probably spent 30 minutes a day planning the ~4h of driving I'd do daily to different sites. Looking up roads in indexes, locating grid numbers, finding connecting roads spanning pages 22-23, 42-43, 62-63, and 64-65. Marking them and trying not to get confused with other markings I'd made over the past months. Getting to intersections and having no idea which way to turn because the angles were completely different from on the map (yes this is a thing with paper maps) and you couldn't see any road signs and the car behind you is honking.

What a waste of time. It didn't make me stronger or smarter or a better person. I don't miss it the same way I don't miss long division.

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

#187

Post by 1718627440 »

questionableans wrote: post #160
raincole wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Okay, that sounds like a reasonable plan, but this also means that we need to stop the decline at some point, and this is not currently a solved problems since that's what governments try to achieve right now. Also the decline happens in the regions were not much decline is needed and in regions were it would be needed the population is currently increasing. Also population growth was how we have dealt with technological shifts in the past, so we need a new way for that.

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

#188

Post by 1718627440 »

dagmx wrote: post #162
drdaeman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thi…

I don’t test rote algorithmic knowledge in our coding tests. Candidates can pick their language Candidates can ask for help, and can google/llm as well if they can’t recall methods. I just do not allow them to post the whole problem in an LLM and need to see them solve through the problem themselves to see how they think and approach issues. This therefore also requires they know the language that they picked to do s…

> including iterating iterables

I would've chosen a language without iterators, what would you do then??

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

#189

Post by PeterStuer »

Our survival, not hypotetical, but actual, on an individual basis is tied directly to how much value we personally can extract from others.

AI, even when it provides a net benefit, does threathen the value potentially offered by individuals.

It's complicated.

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

#190

Post by 1718627440 »

port11 wrote: post #181
zdw wrote: post #21

For an example of where this already happened, look at the number of people who literally don't have a minor inkling of how to plan a route or navigate without a GPS and mapping software. Sure, having a real-time data source is nice for avoiding construction/traffic, and I'd use a real-time map, but going beyond that to be spoon fed your next action over and over leads to dependency.

I always thought I had a good sense of navigation, until I realised it was getting quite bad. More or less at the same time I found “Human Being: Reclaim 12 Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology”, and the chapter on navigation hit me so hard I put the book down and refused to read any more until my navigation skills improved. They're quite good now. I sit at the toilet staring at the map of my city, which I now kno…

> and the chapter on navigation hit me so hard I

Don't leave as hanging, what were they saying?

Post reply on HN