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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#91

Post by Areena_28 »

Finally someone said this! I feel it's not that people are doing less, it's that the feedback loop that used to tell you whether you actually understood something is now gone. you ship, it works, you move on, and three months later you can't explain why you made half the decisions you did.

The bit about taste is what actually stuck with me, though. taste comes from having opinions formed through struggle, not summaries and that's the part AI quietly erodes without you noticing it's happening. Does anyone here agree with me?

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

#95

Post by yo103jg »

Sometimes it feels like vibe coding lowers the cost of creating new skills so much that we end up with skills for making skills, and then more skills for evaluating those skills.

At some point the question stops being “how do we evaluate all this?” and becomes “did all of this need to exist in the first place?

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

#96

Post by carlosjobim »

BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote: post #72
joquarky wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critical thinking.

In good faith, how do you tell yourself have good critical thinking?

Well how do you know anything in that case? You could be dreaming right now sound asleep, or you could be locked inside a mental institution but living in a complete delusion. You might have been in a coma for the past 7 years and AI was just something you dreamed up.

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

#97

Post by peteforde »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #85
peteforde wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I don't understand what about any aspect of what I explained gave you the impression that I might not have put what I learned into practice. This is going to sound like I'm fucking with you, but I'm deadly serious: if someone taught you how to do something and you later learned that that person was actually an LLM masquerading as a human, would you forget what you had learned? It's actually not impossible tha…

Of course it's traumatic. It is undermining the value of my knowledge and skills in a time when the economy is extremely rocky and I'm afraid for my future

I sincerely do have a ton of compassion for you in how this is affecting your life, and I can empathize with existential anxiety to a degree that most folks won't understand. It sucks to be stressed out when it seems like everything should be possible.

Here's what I can say from the other side: you can only control what you can control, but you will be surprised to realize that you can control a lot if you put in the hours and just doggedly refuse to let problems stop your progress.

I don't think that the answer is a one-man fight against the zeitgeist, though. I promise you that blaming LLMs will quickly go from reasonable position to crutch to weakness. Like bankruptcy, it tends to happen very slowly and then very quickly.

If you treat good LLMs as a tireless mentor that needs to be reigned in and verified, you too can learn stackable skills quickly.

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

#98

Post by peteforde »

Gtex555 wrote: post #87
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…

Its not as simple as just being lazy, our brains are hardwired to take the path of least resistance. I believe someone industrious like you is the exception and not the rule which is why industrious people do well in life and a priased.

I don't believe that you'll find much if any evidence or compelling research to suggest that our species is "hardwired to take the path of least resistance".

I think that you are confusing passive complacency and conflict avoidance with a default state of how we are as a species and society, so far as such a thing exists.

Honestly, I don't think we'd even be here if people defaulted to lazy. The choice to be lazy is a remarkably recent symptom of the late capitalism era. Nobody could be lazy even 100 years ago. It just wasn't a thing.

Your perspective frustrates me because it implicitly abdicates taking responsibility for making good choices, explaining it away as "everyone does it". That is a mythology that you simply do not have to buy into.

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

#99

Post by bluefirebrand »

peteforde wrote: post #97
bluefirebrand wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's traumatic. It is undermining the value of my knowledge and skills in a time when the economy is extremely rocky and I'm afraid for my future

I sincerely do have a ton of compassion for you in how this is affecting your life, and I can empathize with existential anxiety to a degree that most folks won't understand. It sucks to be stressed out when it seems like everything should be possible. Here's what I can say from the other side: you can only control what you can control, but you will be surprised to realize that you can control a lot if you put in the…

> I don't think that the answer is a one-man fight against the zeitgeist, though. I promise you that blaming LLMs will quickly go from reasonable position to crutch to weakness

That's ok. When it happens I will simply go live in a cabin in the woods somewhere, raging against the dying of the light

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