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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

#191

Post by agentcoops »

password54321 wrote: post #49
dcastonguay wrote: post #18

My 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…

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…

I agree with you on the question of extrinsic values and do not envy people who are starting college right now, trying to make decisions about an extra-ordinarily unclear future. I recently became a father and I try to convince myself that in eighteen years we'll at least finally know whether it has all been hype or not.

However, on the intrinsic value of these new tools when developing habits and skills, I just think about the irreplaceable role that the (early) internet played in my own development and how incredible an LLM would have been. People are still always impressed whenever a precocious high schooler YouTubes his way to an MVP SaaS launch -- I hope and expect the first batch of LLM-accompanied youth to emerge will have set their sights higher.

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

#192

Post by tdrz »

crazygringo wrote: post #186
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. Getti…

> It didn't make me stronger or smarter or a better person.

Yes, it did.

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

#193

Post by 1718627440 »

jacquesm wrote: post #175
kannanvijayan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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.

This is quoted elsewhere in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45482479). Most of the things are stuff that you will be doing at some point in your life, that are socially expected from every human at part of human life or things you do daily. It also only says you should be able to do it, it does not need to be good; but should the case arise, that you are required to do it, you should be able to deal with it.

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

#194

Post by bongodongobob »

juped wrote: post #44
techjamie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes down to how you use it, whether you're just getting an answer and moving on, or if you're getting an answer and then increasing your understanding on why that's the correct answer. I was building a little roguelike-ish sort of game for myself to test my understanding of Raylib. I was using as few external resources as possible outside of the cheatsheet for functions, including avoiding AI initially. I ran in…

Now imagine how much better - the code - your improvement in knowledge would have been if you had skipped copilot and described your problem and asked for algorithmic help?

Now imagine that he's interested in finishing his game, not the intricacies of raycasting algorithms.

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

#195

Post by 1718627440 »

crazygringo wrote: post #184
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.

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 ju…

It's true that the time figuring out the buggy behaviour would now be less, but the buggy API doesn't go away only, because it exists on Github. If you would be able to change the source code now, you would've been able to fix it back then.

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

#196

Post by port11 »

1718627440 wrote: post #190
port11 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Hmm, it's very well written and I don't mean to butcher it. It touches on how the people of Polinesia would navigate and do it better than Western colonisers. It mentions tricks such as memorising reference points, understanding the cardinal directions, and whatnot. Print a map of your city and put it in the loo. I don't know, it's a great book and I won't do it any justice.

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

#197

Post by bongodongobob »

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…

That's what I said about compiled languages. No one knows how to optimize assembly anymore, they just let the compiler do it.

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

#198

Post by johnnyanmac »

agentcoops wrote: post #191
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…

I agree with you on the question of extrinsic values and do not envy people who are starting college right now, trying to make decisions about an extra-ordinarily unclear future. I recently became a father and I try to convince myself that in eighteen years we'll at least finally know whether it has all been hype or not. However, on the intrinsic value of these new tools when developing habits and skills, I just thin…

>However, on the intrinsic value of these new tools when developing habits and skills, I just think about the irreplaceable role that the (early) internet played in my own development and how incredible an LLM would have been.

I don't know about that. Early internet taught me I still need to put in work to to find answers. I still had to read human input (even though I lurked) and realize a lot of information was lies and trolls (if not outright scams). I couldn't just rely on a few sites to tell me everything and had to figure out how to refine my search queries. The early internet was like being thrown into a wilderness in many ways, you pick up survival skills as you go along even if no one teaches you.

I feel an LLM would temper all the curiosity I gained in those times. I wouldn't have the discipline to use an LLM the "right way". Clearly many adults today don't either.

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

#199

Post by bongodongobob »

port11 wrote: post #182
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.

This comment feels like it was written in 2023.

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

#200

Post by johnnyanmac »

crazygringo wrote: post #184
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.

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 ju…

>I'm so happy people today don't suffer the way we used to suffer.

TBF Ali bugs in some framework you're using still happens. The problem wasn't eliminated, just moved to the next layer.

Those debugging skills are the most important part of working with legacy software (which is what nearly all industry workers work in). It sucks but is necessary for success in this metric.

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