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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

#261

Post by jacquesm »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #212
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…

>those that leverage it as a tool, and those that enjoy it as a luxury. Well the current vision right now seems to be for the readers to scroll AI TikTok and for writers to produce AI memes. I'm not sure who really benefits here. That's my primary problem as of now. It's not necessary used as some luxury tool or some means of entertainment. It's effectively trying to outsource knowledge itself. Using ChatGPT as a Goo…

> I don't think we've had tech like this that can argued as dangerous on both sides of the aisle simultaneously.

On the contrary, all tech is like this. It is just the first time that the knowledge workers producing the tech are directly affected so they see first hand the effects of their labor. That really is the only thing that is different.

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

#262

Post by ben_w »

daxfohl wrote: post #124
jhbadger wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a "bicycle for the mind" is a fine thing for technology to be. The problem is just as with bicycles that's too much work for a lot of people and they would prefer "cars for the mind" in which they have to do nothing.

Even cars are too much. Give me a Waymo. Or better yet just let me stay home and doom scroll while my life gets delivered to my doorstep. Geesh, doorbell again. Last mile problem? C'mon. Whoever solves the last 30 feet problem is the real hero.

> Whoever solves the last 30 feet problem is the real hero.

Paintball gun, except with cream fillings instead of paint, and softer shells so they can be fired straight into people's mouths.

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

#263

Post by raincole »

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…

There is no sign that we're dealing the problem properly or the society and political environment is prepared for that. Similar to climate change, it might be a solvable problem but (relatively) very little effort has been made collectively.

- Older people help each other: it's obvious, but the oldest demographic is not going to be significant healthier than what we see now without a lot of medical breakthroughs. The number of new dementia cases in the US are expected to be one million in 2060 [0]. Ironically, the only way to make "older people taking care of older people" even remotely sustainable is automation of most of the caretaking, so I never get the AI doomsayer.

- Immigration: the decline of birthrate is a global phenomenon. Which means if immigration is the solution, instead of a diversified cohort, most of the newcomers will be from few countries where population grows because other countries need influx of immigration as well. In no world it won't cause alt-right rise. What we call alt-right now will look center-left the next decade.

- Future technology and lifestyle change: yes it solves everything including climate change. It's basically handwaving and saying fusion will come tomorrow so we don't need to worry about replacing petro with fission, solar and wind.

[0]: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/risk-fu...

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

#264

Post by crazygringo »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #241
crazygringo wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>. For everything that becomes easier, new harder skills become more important. I'll ask point blank, then: what new "hard skills" are becoming more important in the short and mid terms that you see on the horizon? My biggest fears are that the technocrats very much want to raise a generation of "sheep" dependent on them to think. They don't need thinkers, only consumers.

In software development specifically, as line-level coding and testing becomes more automated, CS skills are going to migrate more to architecture, rigorous design documents, scalability, design patterns, and managing fleets of AI agents. All that is conceptually hard.

And then communication, management, and people skills become more important each year. That's not stopping. It's only becoming more valuable, and a lot of people need to get a lot better at it.

Being an effective software developer is going to get much more challenging, skills-wise, over the next couple decades as productivity expectations rise exponentially.

And this is going to be the same in every knowledge work field. People will be using AI to orchestrate and supervise 20x the amount of work, and that's an incredibly demanding skill set.

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

#265

Post by johnnyanmac »

jacquesm wrote: post #261
johnnyanmac wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>those that leverage it as a tool, and those that enjoy it as a luxury. Well the current vision right now seems to be for the readers to scroll AI TikTok and for writers to produce AI memes. I'm not sure who really benefits here. That's my primary problem as of now. It's not necessary used as some luxury tool or some means of entertainment. It's effectively trying to outsource knowledge itself. Using ChatGPT as a Goo…

> I don't think we've had tech like this that can argued as dangerous on both sides of the aisle simultaneously. On the contrary, all tech is like this. It is just the first time that the knowledge workers producing the tech are directly affected so they see first hand the effects of their labor. That really is the only thing that is different.

I really hate this dismissal of "well it's affecting YOU now so now it's an issue". I'm not just "knowledge worker" and have grown up seeing the dangers of the internet, social media, invasion of privacy, and radicalization through seemingly benign channels. I've witnessed wars, unrest, and oppressions throughout all stages of my life.

So let's not just handwave it as "nothing special" and actually demonstrate why this isn't special. Most other forms of technological progress have shown obvious benefits to producers and consumers. Someone is always harmed in the short term, yes. But society's given them ways to either retire or seek new work if needed. I'm not seeing that here.

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

#266

Post by blooalien »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #183
mcny wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mult…

> ... "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."

Way back in "Ye olden days" (Apple ][ era) my first "computer teacher" was a teacher's assistant who had wrangled me (and a few other students) an hour a day each on the school's mostly otherwise un-used Apple ][e. He plopped us down in front of the thing with a stack of manuals, magazines, and floppy discs and let us have at it. "You wanna learn computer programming? You're gonna have to read..." :)

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

#267

Post by johnnyanmac »

crazygringo wrote: post #264
johnnyanmac wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>. For everything that becomes easier, new harder skills become more important. I'll ask point blank, then: what new "hard skills" are becoming more important in the short and mid terms that you see on the horizon? My biggest fears are that the technocrats very much want to raise a generation of "sheep" dependent on them to think. They don't need thinkers, only consumers.

In software development specifically, as line-level coding and testing becomes more automated, CS skills are going to migrate more to architecture, rigorous design documents, scalability, design patterns, and managing fleets of AI agents. All that is conceptually hard . And then communication, management, and people skills become more important each year. That's not stopping. It's only becoming more valuable, and a l…

>CS skills are going to migrate more to architecture, rigorous design documents, scalability, design patterns, and managing fleets of AI agents. All that is conceptually hard.

I've heard this a decade ago as well (replace Ai agents with distributed cloud clusters). Instead it seems like industry wants to kick out all the expertise and outsource as much grunt work as possible to maintain what is already there. So I not too optimistic that the industry will be looking for proper architects. We're pushing more CRUD than ever under the guisd of cutting edge tech.

We're not working smarter, we're trying to work cheaper. We'd need a huge cultural shift to really show me that this won't be even more true on 10 years. That's why I'm slowly trying to pivot to a role not reliant on such industry practices

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

#269

Post by blooalien »

leptons wrote: post #229
fragmede wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to out myself as old, but I learned to program before ChatGPT before stack overflow and before Google. There are some here that are even older. There were paper books with indexes. Indexes! That way of life is gone for me. I've got a smartphone and I doomscroll to my detriment. What's new and fascinating to me is the models themselves. https://fi-le.net/oss/ currently trending here is the tip of a whole new area…

I've been programming for 46 years. The first program I wrote was on a piece of notebook paper, in anticipation of getting my first computer a few weeks later (Atari 400).

> Wasn't that the boxy little thing that had "Cartridge BASIC" on a little brick thing that you plugged in just like Atari videogame cartridges on the Atari 5200 game console?
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