I am not, I only pretend to, for the suits above on the org chart.
Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
461–470 of 512 posts
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about punch cards? Real programmers write the code and throw it away after compilation. All the fixes happen in the binary. You are not a real programmer unless you debug hex dumps and add changes directly to the compiled program. Text editor? No. You punch the program on cards and then wait 1 week to get your turn and get a compiler error.
https://xkcd.com/378/
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It'll be like playing chess against someone you know is using a specific version of Stockfish: even though it would beat you if you tried to fight the system unaided, you can win by asking your own copy of the AI to go one step further ahead, and it will be accurate precisely because it's playing against itself and reacting to its own moves. I don't believe this is how chess works, and I don't believe this is how S…
I didn't say "the next version of Stockfish". You have Stockfish version n, see board state s. I have Stockfish version n, see board state s. I want to know what you're about to do, so I put Stockfish into state s, ask it what the best move is, and I know you'll make that move because I know you'll ask Stockfish version n the same question of the same state. I now know board state s+1. The steps are not pre-programme…
Jacek Dukaj in his book "Perfect Imperfection" (Polish hard sci-fi about alternative physics, mind uploading and enclosed universes) wrote about entities vastly superior to human-level intelligence having an ability to simulate humans to such a degree of precision that they were able to determine what a given human would say or do based on his own internal experience and knowledge in real time. The superintelligent beings didn't scan his brain patterns, they just had multiple simulations of him and chose the one that would best match his actions based only on external cues like position of his hands, body language, speech patterns, etc.
A solution to avoid being read to such a degree that your free will effectively is destroyed was to introduce randomness as a program in your own mind processed in an equivalent of a "cloud VM" - random changes in your body posture, hand movements, weird phrases introduced while you spoke could confuse the internal models of you enough to avoid hyper-predictability.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#464I don't know if this is a good framing. "Too much" is subjective, and every heavy AI user will assert that they're just unlocking their potential, that calculators didn't make us dumber, etc. But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. On the flip side, if you use an LLM do most of your thinking, what's left? We have people here who use LLMs to raise t…
Having learned math in an accelerated program that banned calculators, my experience has been that they do substantially diminish mathematical learning. They are useful for things like building an intuition about the behavior of functions... but ask a student to manually graph and compare the behavior of some fairly trivial functions ( ln x, 1/x, sqrt x, x^3 ) over the interval [0, 1] and you'll pretty quickly see the difference between kids who are trained to think for themselves and kids who aren't.
The ability to engage with math "critically" is fundamental to being able to use it constructively/creatively.
I think we're seeing the impact of LLMs more broadly in the drastic decline in incoming freshman academic competency levels, and will continue to observe people becoming measurably, meaningfully stupider until we clamp down on / outright ban LLM usage in education.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#465AI has it's place. Think of it as a helper, not a replacer. A person who knows how to use it to enhance their ideas and bring things to the table and complete the low level 'mundane stuff', then it saves the person time, however if it is used to replace their thinking on all aspects of a task, then that's a concern. People who use AI to replace every task of a challenge isn't going to benefit from this technology as all they will do is replace their own skills by the technology.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re identity, relevant post from today in case you missed it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48907290
Thank you for the human algorithm. But I read the article at the link you sent, and there are points where our thoughts differ significantly. However, since the context of my criticism here on Hacker News would be high-cost criticism (I'm an East Asian man, not the mainstream white Western male here), I find it difficult to comment there. I'm basically filtering myself to some degree, even if others don't see it that…
That's fine. Kind of proves the point of the article tho, that the overwhelming mass room of everything is a scary place to be ourselves since what dominates in that room are base negative concepts that win precisely because base negatives are ubiquitous unlike niche community or personal positives. Anyway it resonated with me and makes me hold on to my pseudo anonymity
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't say "the next version of Stockfish". You have Stockfish version n, see board state s. I have Stockfish version n, see board state s. I want to know what you're about to do, so I put Stockfish into state s, ask it what the best move is, and I know you'll make that move because I know you'll ask Stockfish version n the same question of the same state. I now know board state s+1. The steps are not pre-programme…
Jacek Dukaj in his book "Perfect Imperfection" (Polish hard sci-fi about alternative physics, mind uploading and enclosed universes) wrote about entities vastly superior to human-level intelligence having an ability to simulate humans to such a degree of precision that they were able to determine what a given human would say or do based on his own internal experience and knowledge in real time. The superintelligent b…
That's really good, I'll have to read some of his work (Jacek Dukaj). It makes me think about the role of indeterminacy and unpredictability in physics. And reminds me of..who was it, Gurdjieff maybe, who taught that humans are like sleeping machines, and that constant conscious effort is necessary to "stay awake". Many of his exercises for students had the purpose of recognizing one's own habits, routine patterns of thinking and behaving, and breaking out of them.
The sci-fi story also reminds me of, I think it was related to Karl Popper's book about "objective knowledge". There was a thought experiment about Mozart, if a scientist could quantify everything external about the composer, like the brain, the body, the room he's in, his life experiences - is it possible to deterministically compose new works exactly as the real Mozart would. And if not, what is the difference between the perfectly simulated Mozart and the real one?
This "randomness" is related to the ancient Greek concept of clinamen.
> Clinamen, derived from clinare, to incline: the unpredictable swerve of atoms in the atomistic doctrine of Epicurus. This swerving, according to Lucretius, provides the "free will which living things throughout the world have".
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for the human algorithm. But I read the article at the link you sent, and there are points where our thoughts differ significantly. However, since the context of my criticism here on Hacker News would be high-cost criticism (I'm an East Asian man, not the mainstream white Western male here), I find it difficult to comment there. I'm basically filtering myself to some degree, even if others don't see it that…
That's fine. Kind of proves the point of the article tho, that the overwhelming mass room of everything is a scary place to be ourselves since what dominates in that room are base negative concepts that win precisely because base negatives are ubiquitous unlike niche community or personal positives. Anyway it resonated with me and makes me hold on to my pseudo anonymity
It's because we see things from different perspectives. Redwood, you seem to find your current reality quite satisfactory, and I imagine you have a career strong enough that you don't need to expose yourself to negative concepts. I've observed your previous comments, and you strike me as highly logical and composed in tone. In my experience, people like that tend to be socially successful men.
But I'm in a position that nobody wants as a programmer. Porting code from failed companies to run on different equipment, or building datasets for professors' papers. These things are necessary, but nobody wants to do them.
So even if it means putting myself out there in negative spaces, for me, the exposure itself is beneficial.
That's why this is always a difficult issue. It's a problem where the boundary keeps shifting depending on the situation. You, being a rational person, would understand that problems are always fluid and dynamic.
We tend to simplify problems to conserve cognitive resources, and that's what we call bias. The reason I assume you're a successful man is because of the ease and gentleness in your tone. That's a kind of bias. But in reality, you probably have your own struggles, and there are certainly points where your perspective differs from mine. In some situations, what's right in one context may not be in another. What was correct in the past may no longer be, and vice versa. Yet we always anchor ourselves to a fixed point when we 'think.' That's what makes it so difficult.
I've read your previous comments too, and I find our conversations quite enjoyable. Have a good day.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#469I've tried using Claude for non coding problems twice in the last twenty four hours.
First, to try and diagnose or find a work around for an apparent bug in Ableton Live 12 that means, despite being able to set a drum rack preset with 12 macros, only 6 are restored if it is used as a slicing preset.
And today, asking for help having landed in Windows log in hell, bit locker keys required, pin needs resetting but cannot do so as I have MWB Windows Firewall Control blocking all connections by default until I manually change the profile.
In both examples, Sonnet seemingly knew less than I did, going off snips on the internet regarding Ableton that are probably contradictory and lacking the required level of detail. No answer, no workaround.
For Windows, it keeps offering me impossible steps mostly requiring me already to be signed in, albeit it did highlight one potential winner to delete dead PIN info via CMD. But the reality is I can do what I need via a parallel install or bootable USB toolkit.
I chose Claude because I was tired... If the option hadn't been there, I would just have got on with fixing Windows myself. And I knew I would likely need to report a bug with Abletons forum.
Instead I wasted my intelligence and time instead communicating with the LLM. It leads me to believe there is an inevitably high risk of "acquired" dependence.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#470Hey GPT summarize that please.