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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

#231

Post by johnnyanmac »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #38
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.

But this is just proof that long ago we ceded The ballad of John Henry was written in the 1840s “Does the engine get rewarded for its steam?” That was the anti-automation line back then If you gave up anything that was previously called “AI” we would not have computers, cars, airplanes or any type of technology whatsoever anywhere

>Does the engine get rewarded for its steam?” That was the anti-automation line back then

Sure, and it was wrong because it turns out the conductor does get rewarded. Given train strikes that had to be denied as recently as a few years ago, it's clear that's an essential role 150 years later.

With how they want to frame AI as replacing labor, who's being rewarded long term for its thinking? Who's really being serviced?

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

#232

Post by logicchains »

obscurette wrote: post #204
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…

Are you a parent? Have you ever seen a kid growing up? 90%+ of kids wouldn't care at all about any work or learning without social pressure from parents, teachers and peers. That's the whole point of schools – to create a social pressure to put all this knowledge into heads of kids in hope that some of this would be useful for them. And to do it through all these awfully messy years we call childhood and adolescence.

I don't know where you grow up but in most of the developed world kids mock kids for putting effort into study; peers provide social pressure against learning, not towards it.

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

#233

Post by johnnyanmac »

wyre wrote: post #210
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…

Why not let them use LLMs? LLM's are a tool for the job so you wind the find the candidate that can most effectively use that tool in your role. If LLM's struggle with your technologies and API's then a developer that can use an LLM for development with good results should be a desirable thing, right? Can the senior developer understand and internalize your codebase? Can they solve complex problems? If you're paying…

You literally asked the question the GP pre-emptively answered. Read their last paragraph.

>Can the senior developer understand and internalize your codebase?

Would you trust someone who needs llms in the hiring phase to be able to do this higher order tasks if they can't nail down the fundamentals?

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

#234

Post by zelphirkalt »

IshKebab wrote: post #39
WillAdams wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for the societal cost of that see stories such as: https://www.npr.org/2011/07/26/137646147/the-gps-a-fatally-m... and for the way this mindset erodes values and skills: https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2018...

The "societal cost" you linked literally says this happens with paper maps too. The cause is incorrect maps, not GPS. (And of course, idiotic behaviour... but GPS doesn't cause that.) Overall GPS has been an absolutely enormous benefit for society with barely any downside other than nostalgia for map reading.

I think that is exactly the point, that leads people to act in idiotic ways: GPS has been too damn good, so people blindly trust it, even second guessing or ignoring their own perception. The more reliable and easy to access a tool is, the more we trust it and often blindly trust it.

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

#235

Post by johnnyanmac »

sktrdie wrote: post #163
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…

> then why am I paying for a senior ? Because they know how to talk to the AI. That's literally the skill that differentiates seniors from juniors at this point. And a skill that you gain only by knowing about the problem space and having banged your head at it multiple times.

>That's literally the skill that differentiates seniors from juniors at this point.

If your product has points where llms falter, this use a useless metric.

>and having banged your head at it multiple times.

And would someone who relied on an LLM be doing this?

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

#236

Post by questionableans »

1718627440 wrote: post #187
questionableans wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 technolog…

Immigration helps even out where populations are located. Immigrants built America.

I really don’t think we have anything to worry about not having any people left. There’s still plenty of innate drive to reproduce, both biologically and intellectually (as in, educating far more people than the number of kids you could ever have).

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

#237

Post by zelphirkalt »

1718627440 wrote: post #123
zdw wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my observation of others, it's not an easy skill unless you've done it before. Most people have little idea where they are and no idea what they would do next if the turn-by-turn tech failed on them. I'd argue it is useful the first time you want to take a scenic route, or optimize for things other than shortest travel time, like a loop bike route that avoids major streets. Not to say that apps aren't useful in re…

> In my observation of others, it's not an easy skill unless you've done it before. I always feel like they aren't even trying. Like you just make a point were you are, a point were you want to do, draw a straight line, take the nearest streets, and then you can optimize ad libitum.

Shockingly, many people don't dare doing that any longer.

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

#238

Post by crazygringo »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #226
crazygringo wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe me, it didn't. Planning routes isn't exactly rocket science. There's not much to learn. It just takes a lot of time. It's busywork.

>Planning routes isn't exactly rocket science. There's not much to learn. And people can't go that far to begin with. SThat's the scary part. These little things we think of as insignificant add up and give us our ability to think. Change how we perceive and navigate (no pun intended) the world. Letting one or two of these factors rust probably won't cost us, but how far off are we really from the WALL-E future of we…

Yeah but it's not like everyone could back then either. My mom had a masters degree but couldn't read a map to save her life. On the other hand, I never "learned", it was just obvious. I could rotate in my brain without trying.

I think we're nowhere close to WALL-E, nor are we headed in that direction. For everything that becomes easier, new harder skills become more important.

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

#239

Post by johnnyanmac »

crazygringo wrote: post #224
johnnyanmac wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My point is that I can frequently figure out how to work around them in 5 minutes rather than 2 days Guess I'm just dumb then. I'm still taking days to work around some esoteric, underdocumented API issues in my day-to-day work.

Guess you missed my use of the words "frequently" and "usually", which I intentionally used instead of "always".

I guess I should have used "frequently" and "usually" when describing that I constantly run into problems relating to API's that cause mini-rabbit holes.

The thing is these API's are probably just as massive as old school OS cosebases, so I'm always tripping into new landmines. I can be doing high level gameplay stuff one week. Then the next week I need to figure out how authoring assets works, and then the next week I'm performing physics queries to manage character state. All in the same API that must span 10s of millions of lines of code at this point.

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

#240

Post by zelphirkalt »

sktrdie wrote: post #163
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…

> then why am I paying for a senior ? Because they know how to talk to the AI. That's literally the skill that differentiates seniors from juniors at this point. And a skill that you gain only by knowing about the problem space and having banged your head at it multiple times.

The actual skill is having knowledge and knowing when to not trust the AI, because it is hallucinating or bullshitting you. Having worked on enough projects to have a good idea about how things should be structured and what is extensible and what not. What is maintainable and what not. The list goes on and on. A junior rarely has these skills and especially not, when they rely on AI to figure things out.
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