The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive • Hacker News Board

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#31

Post by mickdarling » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

Maybe for you reading a paper deeply is the most constructive way that you have to absorb information.

For me, it is having a document and interrogating it. Maybe having many sets of documents about a whole category of information. Getting the bullet points. getting the high level and then interrogating and digging down and being able to get bubbled up information as I need it.

That is the learning style that matches how I learn.

I have never been able to skim, so reading a large document WILL teach me that topic, but getting through that doc is tough.

I can dump a very large set of docs in a reader that lets me interrogate the whole data set and I can fly through looking for what is interesting to me, and what I may need, and along the way I will likely dive into other parts too. Asking questions keeps my hyperfocus active.

I think it is just a different style. I have synesthesia and a hard time not working on three to five things at once. I am use to knowing I learn differently than others.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#32

Post by milesvp » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

acmerfight wrote: post #15

elgertam wrote: post #7

I have a nearly total opposite take. I can't tell you how many times I've read a book, a paper or something else and been confused by some ambiguity in the author's prose. Being able to drop the paper (or even the book!) into an LLM to dig into the precise meaning has been an unbelievable boost for me. Now I can actually get beyond conceptual misunderstanding or even ignorance and get to practice, which is how skills…

We actually don't disagree at all—you are perfectly illustrating my point. Applying strict epistemic discipline (Popper, Russell) to resolve ambiguity and accelerate actual practice is the very definition of deep work. You aren't using AI as a shortcut to skip thinking; you're using it as a Socratic sparring partner to deepen it. This is exactly the paradigm shift I'm advocating for.

I’m strongly reminded of early google every time I use AI for research. I used to be able to know little about a topic, try to search on it and get shit results. But, google would give me pages of results. So I could skim a lot and eventually on page 10, I stumble across some term of art, and that term would greatly improve my search. Rinse and repeat, and I’d have a good sense about the topic I was interested in.

You can’t really do that with google anymore, and I can’t remember the last time I bothered to actually learn something that wasn’t trivial from google. ChatGPT, however, has been a game changer. I can ask a really dumb question and get some basic info about the thing I’m asking about, and while it’s often not quite what I’m looking for, it gives me clues to follow, and I can quickly zero in on what I’m looking for, often in new contexts.

As an autodidact who’s main motivation to go to college was to get access to the stacks and direct internet access, I can’t even begin to tell you how game changing LLMs seem to be for learning.

To your point though, my concern is we don’t know how to teach how to learn, and LLMs will likely seduce many into bad behavior and poor research hygiene. I treat my research the same way I attack the stacks, but take someone who’s never been to a research library and ask them to create a report on some topic, and just why? That is the basic resistance, why?, why do what an LLM is almost literally built to do. Yet that is also highly related to individual learning, to take a bunch of disperate sources and synthesize output related to the input.

I suspect we’ll learn how to use LLMs in the same way we learned how to use calculators. But I have no doubt that on average (or maybe median or mode?) calculators have made us less capable to do basic arithmetic, and I suspect LLMs will also cause a great percentage of the population to be worse at sythesizing information. I’d hope that it’s only the same people who would have otherwise only gotten their information from TV, but I do have a slight fear it will creep past that subsection of the population.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#33

Post by atrettel » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:47 PM UTC

dsabanin wrote: post #5

I'm convinced that at some point looking like being productive and being productive becomes the same thing.

The issue, in my experience, is that there is a lot of productive work that does not look productive at first glance. Long term work may not look productive for years until it suddenly is tremendously productive. And there is a lot of quiet and often thankless maintenance work that goes on largely unnoticed that helps others do their jobs well. Both have value despite superficially looking unproductive at times. I'd argue that both look productive at long time scales but unproductive at short time scales.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#34

Post by nis0s » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:47 PM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #6

nis0s wrote: post #2

What’s important? That bridges get built and stay up, or that they’re built only after toiling X amounts of hours. AI will change the nature of work, it’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. But more importantly, it’s going to let people who understand things faster get the info they need to be productive.

AI does not currently build bridges that stay up

Not really, there’s a lot it does right. But any automated tool or calculator will be as good as its operator.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#35

Post by SoftTalker » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #29

SoftTalker wrote: post #23

Weird post given it looks like an LLM wrote it.

I'm sick of hearing about AI, but I'm significantly more sick of anyone who knows how to write English prose at a level higher than "typical rural American" being accused of using AI to write.

Well that's the world we live in now.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#36

Post by Arainach » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #35

Arainach wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sick of hearing about AI, but I'm significantly more sick of anyone who knows how to write English prose at a level higher than "typical rural American" being accused of using AI to write.

Well that's the world we live in now.

It doesn't have to be. Comments such as yours add nothing to the conversation. It's an ad hominem attack. In the absence of explaining why you believe it "looks like AI", it's a baseless accusation

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#37

Post by vivid242 » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

Thank you for this helpful differentiation. I agree - and if it‘s undermining our trust into ‚effort‘ (we start to be suspicious about how much some piece of work is really ‚worth‘), it undermines also our relationships.

A good example is ‚birthday wishes‘:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2IYqhdJuRfU&t=5m47s

(AutoCorrect, AutoComplete - generate? AutoCongratulate? How much is ‚okay‘?)

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#38

Post by SoftTalker » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #36

SoftTalker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's the world we live in now.

It doesn't have to be. Comments such as yours add nothing to the conversation. It's an ad hominem attack. In the absence of explaining why you believe it "looks like AI", it's a baseless accusation

It has the typical patterns: em dashes, "it's not A, it's B" constructions. Also relatively new, low karma account, and its other comments are similarly LLM-ish.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#39

Post by sagarm » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

peteforde wrote: post #21

Several weeks ago, I spent about a week fully reverse engineering a Stereomaker pedal. It accepts a mono signal and produces a stereo field using a 5-stage all-pass filter to mess with the phase without the use of delay (which sounds cheesy and creates a result that doesn't mix well back to mono). I've not really worked with audio circuits previously, and I'd been intimidated to approach the domain. My journey was ra…

LLMs absolutely let you explore ideas and areas you wouldn't have otherwise...but does your new design actually _work_?

I'm curious whether the "knowledge" you gained was real or hallucinatory. I've been using LLMs this way myself, but I worry I'm contaminating my memory with false information.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#40

Post by alok-g » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

dminik wrote: post #30

elgertam wrote: post #7

I have a nearly total opposite take. I can't tell you how many times I've read a book, a paper or something else and been confused by some ambiguity in the author's prose. Being able to drop the paper (or even the book!) into an LLM to dig into the precise meaning has been an unbelievable boost for me. Now I can actually get beyond conceptual misunderstanding or even ignorance and get to practice, which is how skills…

If you're not sure what something is saying, how can you be sure that the AI had picked the correct interpretation?

Right question to ask, however, good readers/professionals do have some sense for this and ability to dig further as needed. On the other hand, books and articles are often over-detailed, with the key stuff buried in the lede or even remaining tacit.

For me, LLMs have often pointed me to answers or given food for thought that even subject matter experts could not. I do not take those answers at face value, but the net result is still better than the search remaining open-ended.