[HN Gopher] The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
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The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
Author : greybox
Score : 157 points
Date : 2025-03-26 16:54 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.microsoft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.microsoft.com)
| greybox wrote:
| Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition "Atrophied and
| Unprepared"
|
| "[A] key irony of automation is that by mechanising routine tasks
| and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the
| user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement and
| strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied
| and unprepared when the exceptions do arise," the researchers
| wrote.
| nukem222 wrote:
| Certainly a common enough concern in people critiquing use of
| ChatGPT here. I'm more worried about "softer" problems, though
| --morality, values, persuasion, including _deciding which of
| two arguments is more convincing and why_.
|
| But these have always been issues that humans commonly struggle
| with so idk.
| jldugger wrote:
| Well, that's just a summary of a much, much older paper. Still
| a relevant paper, but somewhat disingenuous to attribute it to
| MS researchers.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
| Qem wrote:
| Paywalled, but full study available here:
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! We've changed the URL to that from
| https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-
| human....
|
| Submitters: please don't post paywalled articles unless there
| are workarounds (such as archived copies).
| lenerdenator wrote:
| So it does what Google searching did: it made retaining of
| information an optional cognitive burden, and optional cognitive
| burdens are usually jettisoned.
|
| Fortunately, my ADHD-addled brain doesn't need some fancy AI to
| make its cognition "Atrophied and Unprepared"; I can do that all
| on my own, thank you very much.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| It really doesn't though. Even when google was at its best, and
| showed you relevant non-spammy results, a degree of critical
| thinking was required when sifting through the results,
| evaluating the credibility of the author, website, etc. Do you
| fact check everything the AI spits out? The ability for people
| to critically think is basically gone. That's been trending
| since before AI, but it's really clear to me at this moment in
| time how bad it has gotten. It's a laziness of thinking that I
| don't think was the same with Google.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > It really doesn't though. Even when google was at its best,
| and showed you relevant non-spammy results, a degree of
| critical thinking was required when sifting through the
| results, evaluating the credibility of the author, website,
| etc. Do you fact check everything the AI spits out? That's
| been trending since before AI, but it's really clear to me at
| this moment in time how bad it has gotten. It's a laziness of
| thinking that I don't think was the same with Google.
|
| Nah, it was already at zero before ChatGPT came to public
| attention.
| risyachka wrote:
| No, not even close.
|
| Google helps you find things that you process later on with
| your brain.
|
| With AI your brain shuts off as you offload all thinking to
| asking questions. And asking questions is not thinking.
| Answering them is.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > Google helps you find things that you process later on with
| your brain.
|
| I'm willing to bet that there were a _lot_ of Google
| searches, pre-ChatGPT, that effectively were questions. Lots
| of "huh, I wonder" during conversations and the first result
| was taken as "the truth".
| risyachka wrote:
| Sure, and google gave you info that possibly contains your
| answer. You had to read it at least and analyze.
|
| Now you are being spoon-fed.
| moralestapia wrote:
| I believe this to be true, and it came to happen at the worst
| possible time, post-COVID and w/ education levels through the
| floor.
|
| I also believe, however, that humans who are able to reason
| properly would become much more valuable, because of this same
| thing.
| piltdownman wrote:
| >> Moreover, participants perceived it to be more effort to
| constantly steer AI responses (48/319), which incurs additional
| Synthetic thinking effort due to the cost of developing explicit
| steering prompts. For example, P110 tried to use Copilot to learn
| a subject more deeply, but realised: "its answers are prone to
| several [diversions] along the way. I need to constantly make
| sure the AI is following along the correct 'thought process', as
| inconsistencies evolve and amplify as I keep interacting with the
| AI.
|
| While much is made of the 'diminished skill for independent
| problem-solving' caused by over-reliance, is there a more salient
| KPI than some iteration of this 'Synthetic Thinking Effort' by
| which to baseline and optimise the cost/benefit of AI usage
| versus traditional cognition?
| sollewitt wrote:
| One thing I've tried using Gemini for, and been really impressed
| with, is practicing languages. I find Duolingo doesn't really
| translate to fluency, because it doesn't really get you to
| struggle to express yourself - the topics are constrained.
|
| Whereas, you can ask an LLM to speak to you in e.g. Spanish,
| about whatever topic you're interested in, and be able to stop
| and ask it to explain any idioms or vocabulary or grammar in
| English at any time.
|
| I found this to be more like a "cognitive gym". Maybe we're just
| not using the tools beneficially.
| kokanee wrote:
| I remain perplexed that everyone is so focused on using LLMs to
| automate software engineering, when there are language-based
| professions (like Spanish tutor, in your example) that seem
| more directly threatened by language models. The only
| explanation I've heard is that the industry is so excited about
| reducing spend on software engineering salaries that they're
| trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and largely
| ignoring the square holes.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > The only explanation I've heard is that the industry is so
| excited about reducing spend on software engineering salaries
| that they're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole,
| and largely ignoring the square holes.
|
| I think that's really just it, and I agree with you. There
| are many other areas LLMs can, and should, be more useful and
| effort put toward both assisting and automating.
|
| Instead, the industry is focusing on creative arts and
| software development because human talent for that is both
| limited and expensive, with a third factor of humans
| generally being able to resist doing morally questionable
| things (e.g., what if hiring for weapons systems software
| becomes increasingly difficult due to a lack of willingness
| to work on those projects, likewise for increasingly invasive
| surveillance tech, etc.)
|
| We're rushing into basically the opposite of what AI should
| do for us. Automation should work to free us up to focus more
| on the arts and sciences, not take it away from us.
|
| Greed at its finest.
| zzbzq wrote:
| I think it's because software engineers are the only group
| that can unanimously operate LLMs effectively and build them
| into larger systems. They'll automate their own jobs first
| and move on to building the toolkits to automate the others.
| adelie wrote:
| language-based professions like translation have been dying
| for years and no one has cared; they're not about to start
| now that the final nail's been put in the coffin.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| the topics are constrained
|
| Is this true even if you have Duolingo Max and use the video
| calling feature?
| masfuerte wrote:
| This isn't a new thing. I noticed it in the 1990s in bank
| employees as their work became increasingly automated. As the
| software became better at handling exceptions, their skills
| atrophied further and they became even worse at handling the
| harder exceptions that remained.
| kokanee wrote:
| As our grade school teachers warned, my arithmetic skills are
| indeed brutally stunted thanks to calculators. The implications
| do seem even worse with folks using AI to do their technical
| debugging and decision making, though.
| sunjester wrote:
| Sounds like Microsoft is back at it again.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Article from February.
|
| Some discussion on the study:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43057907
| vunderba wrote:
| I've been calling this out since ChatGPT went mainstream.
|
| The seductive promise of solving all your problems is the issue.
| By reaching for it to solve any problem at an almost instinctual
| level you are completely failing to cultivate an intrinsically
| valuable skill - that of critical reasoning.
|
| That act of manipulating the problem in your head--critical
| thinking--is ultimately a craft. And the only way to become
| better at it is by practicing it in a deliberate, disciplined
| fashion.
|
| This is why it's pretty baffling to me when I see attempts at
| comparing LLMs to the invention of the calculator. A calculator
| is still used _IN SERVICE_ of a larger problem you are trying to
| solve.
| turnsout wrote:
| Yeah, but the calculator analogy is apt. In the past, anyone
| who went to grade school could answer 6 * 7 off the top of
| their head, and do basic mental math. We've pretty much lost
| that.
|
| With that said, I do worry that losing the ability to craft
| sentences (or code) is more problematic than losing the ability
| to do mental math.
| belter wrote:
| Would love to see eighth grade students of today, try this
| test from 1912...I sense disaster....
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/13jhckh/.
| ..
| fwip wrote:
| Why? I'm pretty sure my public school education prepared me
| for all of these questions by 8th grade, excepting some
| notation that we no longer use and some specific history
| questions that are now less relevant.
| BeetleB wrote:
| These would have been quite doable by my 8th grade
| education.
|
| But I am older than many. :-)
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Losing the ability to do mental math is probably not actually
| a big deal
|
| Losing the ability to do calculations by hand on a piece of
| paper with a pencil probably actually is a big deal
|
| When I went to school we still had to do a lot of
| calculations by hand on paper. Thus, if I use a calculator to
| get an answer, I'm capable of reproducing the answer by hand
| if necessary
|
| With math, at least when I was learning it, we seemed to
| understand that the calculator is a useful tool that doesn't
| replace the need to develop underlying skills
|
| I'm seeing the exact opposite behavior and mentality from the
| AI crowd. "You don't need to learn how to do that correctly
| anymore, you can just have the AI do it"
|
| "Vibe Coding", literally the attitude that you don't need to
| understand your code anymore. You just have the AI generate
| it and go off vibes to decide if it's right or not
|
| Yeah, I don't know how my car engine works. But I trust that
| the people who engineered it do, and the mechanics that fix
| it when it breaks do. There's no room for "Vibe Bridge
| Building" in reality
|
| Anyone advocating for "Vibe coding" is an admission that it
| doesn't actually matter if the thing they build works or not
|
| Unfortunately that seems to be a growing portion of software
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Not to mention the absolute pile of "mathematics problems"
| that can't be solved except by pushing symbols around a
| page, which a calculator is absolutely useless at. So sure
| I can have a calculator "calculate" an approximation for
| 4/3 but it can't help me manipulate the symbols around the
| improper fraction that i need to manipulate to calculate
| the radius given the surface area of a sphere. And it's of
| zero help in understanding the relevance of that "pattern"
| to whatever phenomenon I'm using the mathematics to reason
| about. That all requires human intelligence.
|
| There are a lot of calculators and other tools that can
| push the symbols around and many that can even apply some
| special high-level mathematical rules to the symbols. But
| whether or not those rules are relevant to the task at hand
| is entirely a matter for a human to decide.
| turnsout wrote:
| My feeling is... just give it 6-12 months. All the low-
| quality apps that were "vibe-coded" will start to break
| down, have massive security breaches, or generally fall
| apart as new features are added.
|
| Brace yourself for a wave of think pieces a year from now,
| all wringing their hands about the death of vibe coding,
| and the return of artisanal handmade software.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I have a similar feeling, but there's also a little voice
| in the back of my head trying to convince me that I'm
| just trying to cope with the fact I'm going to be made
| obsolete by a software industry that actually doesn't
| care if software breaks down and has massive security
| breaches as long as the AI furnace keeps getting coal
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I think both are true. The vibe-coders will run into
| massive problems. But AI will also improve a lot and
| probably be better than humans at some point.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| " Losing the ability to do mental math is probably not
| actually a big deal"
|
| I think it's a huge deal. I see a lot of people do some
| financing stuff and they have no idea what a 20% interest
| rate really means. So they just go ahead and do it because
| taking out a calculator is too tedious. I find it pretty
| crazy how many can't figure how much a 20% or even 10% is.
| A lot of financial offerings take advantage of the fact
| that people can't do even basic math.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| If taking out a calculator is too much of a burden when
| we all have smartphones with built in calculator apps,
| then the problem is not the lack of mental math skill.
|
| Edit: At best, it shows that the person doesn't really
| know how to calculate that even with a calculator
|
| At worst, it shows that the person lacks of any kind of
| give a fuck at all
|
| Either way, they probably would not likely have learned
| the mental math required to do this regardless of if it
| were being taught at school or not
| pessimizer wrote:
| > At best, it shows that the person doesn't really know
| how to calculate that even with a calculator
|
| What it shows is that 10% means nothing to them. It's
| just another number that a calculator will spit out. It's
| not "one out of ten" or "shift everything to the right."
| They have no ability to evaluate what the number means on
| the fly. They just plug it into the calculator and check
| if they have that much. They can't have a reasonable
| discussion about the number without stopping and
| calculating every interest rate they can think of,
| writing them down on a piece of people, and writing the
| budget next to them.
|
| A calculator here, of course, leads to _more_ work, not
| less. I bet the vast majority of the time that somebody
| too lazy or anxiety-ridden to learn how to calculate 20%
| in their head is also going to be too lazy and bothered
| to take out a calculator every time they need to know,
| rather than just trying to bluff their way through
| conversations until they can get to a calculator.
|
| Calculators are of no benefit to students who have no
| clear concept of the calculation. Just learn your times
| tables, they're one of the first things we teach kids.
|
| The _pragmatic_ pro-calculator "nobody needs to
| calculate those numbers in _real_ life " school I think
| gets most of its support because constructivists often
| fail entirely to teach things that have been until now
| best learned by rote, hoping that an instinct for
| multiplication and division will naturally and precisely
| arise from children's mathematical souls. The fact that
| it doesn't is proof that _doing arithmetic is bad and a
| waste of time actually._ They love abstractions, but only
| vague ones that can 't be reliably tested.
|
| > Either way, they probably would not likely have learned
| the mental math required to do this regardless of if it
| were being taught at school or not
|
| That's the law of averages. It is not a law.
| marinmania wrote:
| I wonder if people that were writing code in assembly
| complained that people learning more modern languages
| didn't really know how the 0s and 1s work.
|
| I'm not sure where the line is, but there is a point where
| the abstraction works so well you really don't need to know
| how it works underneath.
|
| I'm also not sure if a car mechanic needs to know how an
| engine works. I'm assuming almost none of them could design
| a car engine from scratch. They know just enough to know
| which parts needs to be replaced.
| jdlshore wrote:
| They did complain. But the key part is "the abstraction
| works so well." It doesn't, and I suspect it can't.
| balamatom wrote:
| It can abstract over human agency.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > there is a point where the abstraction works so well
| you really don't need to know how it works underneath
|
| There is a point where most people might not need to know
|
| There is _never_ a point where _no one_ needs to know
| rqtwteye wrote:
| "I'm also not sure if a car mechanic needs to know how an
| engine works. I'm assuming almost none of them could
| design a car engine from scratch. They know just enough
| to know which parts needs to be replaced."
|
| That's why, when your car has a problem, a lot of
| mechanics just blindly replace parts with the hope that
| something will fix it. You are much better off with a
| mechanic that understands how the car works. And you will
| save a lot of money.
| turnsout wrote:
| PS, if you're downvoting this, can you explain why?
| BeetleB wrote:
| > We've pretty much lost that.
|
| In the US :-)
|
| And those skills are entirely context dependent. You're
| likely saying this from a SW engineer's point of view.
| Whereas I've worked in teams with physicists and electrical
| engineers. When you're in a meeting, and there is a technical
| discussion, and everyone can calculate in their head the
| effects after integrating a well known function and how that
| will impact the physical system, while you have to pull out a
| calculator/computer, you'll be totally lost.
|
| You can argue that you could be as productive as the others
| if you were given the time (e.g. doing this on your own at
| your own cubicle), but no one will give you that time in
| meetings.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > In the past, anyone who went to grade school could answer 6
| * 7 off the top of their head, and do basic mental math.
| We've pretty much lost that.
|
| Source?
| turnsout wrote:
| Observing people around me
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| I love doing all aspects of building software. However, I've
| noticed when I am feeling lazy I'll just copy pasta a stack trace
| into an LLM and just trust what is says is wrong. I won't even
| read the stack trace.
|
| I only tend to do that when I am tired or annoyed, but when I do
| it I can feel myself getting dumber. And it's a weirdly
| satisfying feeling.
|
| I just need a chair that doubles as a toilet and I'll be all set.
| gatinsama wrote:
| You can't delegate understanding. I don't mean you shouldn't, you
| can't.
|
| If you don't understand what's happening, you have no way to know
| if the system is working as intended. And understanding (and
| deciding) exactly how the system works is the really hard part
| for any sufficiently complex project.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Then prompt the AI to provide its outputs in a way that keeps the
| human user engaged and aware of where they are in the thought
| process: maps, diagrams, repetition summaries.
|
| We have the cognition science to make it happen - or at least
| learn how to structure it.
| sitkack wrote:
| Thanks, the paper is very readable.
|
| > Abstract The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) in knowledge
| workflows raises questions about its impact on critical thinking
| skills and practices. We survey 319 knowledge workers to
| investigate 1) when and how they perceive the enaction of
| critical thinking when using GenAI, and 2) when and why GenAI
| affects their effort to do so. Participants shared 936 first-hand
| examples of using GenAI in work tasks. Quantitatively, when
| considering both task- and user-specific factors, a user's task-
| specific self-confidence and confidence in GenAI are predictive
| of whether critical thinking is enacted and the effort of doing
| so in GenAI-assisted tasks. Specifically, higher confidence in
| GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher
| self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking.
| Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking
| toward information verification, response integration, and task
| stewardship. Our insights reveal new design challenges and
| opportunities for developing GenAI tools for knowledge work.
|
| It is be presented at CHI Conference https://chi2025.acm.org/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conference_on_Human_Factors_in...
| Maro wrote:
| A good model for understanding what happens to people as they
| delegate tasks to AI is to think about what happens to managers
| who delegate tasks to their subordinates. Sure, there are some
| managers who can remain sharp, hands-on and relevant, but many
| gradually lose their connection to the area they're managing and
| become pure process/project/people managers and politicians.
|
| Ie. most managers can't help their team find a hard bug that is
| causing a massive outage.
|
| Note: I'm a manager, and I spend a lot of time pondering how to
| spend my time, how to be useful, how to remain relevant,
| especially in this age of AI.
| causal wrote:
| I think this is a really good analogy. Delegating problems to
| others is nothing novel or new to human experience.
|
| Perhaps the biggest difference is the lack of feedback AI gives
| that humans can give: a subordinate can communicate if they
| feel like their manager is being too hands off. AI never
| questions management style.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I think this is the primary reason I have difficulty with
| management: my brain simply doesn't really work out (in the
| fitness sense) in the cognitive way it is used to, but instead
| has to track all sorts of problems, many of which are
| emotional/political. Those problems are often
| emotional/political and thus not really something I can readily
| solve by thinking real hard about things.
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| That's what the money's for!
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| What if you use it to handle boring BS work you don't care
| about and focus on what you actually want to do? I offload my
| work tasks to GPT and do other stuff during work hours. Play
| with my dog. Stretch. Paint. Work on other creative projects. I
| don't give a fuck about work as long as they keep sending me a
| paycheck. Oh no! My brain is going to atrophy from not manually
| synthesizing info from this report that no one reads anyway.
| balamatom wrote:
| real
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Startup idea: Farts_Mckensyly
|
| Do all the work Farts_Mckensy does at half the price using
| AI.
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| I assure you, it wouldn't be very lucrative.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > Ie. most managers can't help their team find a hard bug that
| is causing a massive outage.
|
| Strategy vs tactics. Managers aren't there to teach their
| reports skills, they hire them because they already have them.
| They're there to set priorities and overall direction.
| BeetleB wrote:
| He's not disputing that. The difference, though, is that if
| you're using LLMs as code assistants, your skills will
| atrophy the way the manager's skills will, _but you are still
| a SW engineer_.
|
| While the manager doesn't need those skills, you still do.
| mullingitover wrote:
| LLMs and agents are going to make labels like 'sw
| engineer', 'qa tester', marketer, CFO, and CEO very
| squishy.
|
| I think in the coming decade if you put yourself in a box
| and do a specialized task, and nothing more, you'll have a
| bad time. This is going to be an era where strategy is far
| more important than tactics.
| Applejinx wrote:
| This assumes all specialized tasks are fungible.
|
| I can't disagree more strongly. If you're a specialized
| person with expertise and ability to perform outside the
| knowledge of all possible interns because you're
| developing something novel and not covered by standard
| materials, you'll be hard to compete with using AI
| because AI will direct people to standardized methods.
|
| Granted, if you do a specialized task that is taught in
| schools and that anyone can do, that's trouble. But
| that's not tactics either, that's clock-punching. That's
| replaceable. You can talk 'strategy' all you like but if
| you're only exploiting the AI's ability to do what people
| already know, that's another box to be stuck in.
| mullingitover wrote:
| I think we're in agreement then, I'm saying the
| specialists of this stripe:
|
| > if you do a specialized task that is taught in schools
|
| are in trouble, and so are you.
|
| > perform outside the knowledge of all possible interns
|
| This is the strategic level thinking I'm referring to.
| Frankly this role might not be safe either, but if that's
| the case then we're probably headed for fully automated
| luxury communism no matter what we do.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Indeed. I started using Sonnet for coding only about a month
| ago. It's been great in that I've finally written scripts I had
| floating around my brain for _years_ , and very rapidly.
|
| But the feeling of skill atrophy is very real. The other day I
| needed to write a function that recursively traverses a Python
| dictionary, making modifications along the way. It's the
| perfect task to give an LLM. I can easily see that if I always
| give this task to an LLM, a few years down the road I'll be
| really slow in writing it on my own, and will fail most coding
| interviews.
|
| Also, while there is a high in producing a lot in a short
| amount of time, there is no feeling of satisfaction that you
| get from programming. And debugging its bugs is as much fun as
| debugging your coworkers' bugs - except at least with the
| coworkers you can have a more intelligent conversation on what
| they were trying to do.
| hosh wrote:
| This is exactly why I still play Go, practice martial arts,
| archery and use the command line for my dev workflow. Those
| are all arguably less efficient and obsolete. The AlphaGo
| series can defeat the strongest human Go players and firearms
| are more effective than unarmed martial arts and archery. GUI
| is easier for most people than the command line. Yet, I
| practice all these to develop my mind and body. I don't have
| to be a world-class Go player to benefit from learning to
| play Go.
|
| This happens a lot in the natural world in ecosystems. For
| example, many people plant trees and add a drip system. The
| trees grow to depend on the drip system, and never stretch
| and develop their roots -- and the relationship they have
| with the soil microbiome. They make the trees prone to get
| knocked down when an unusually strong gust of wind come
| through.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| You might have my favorite profile page here, with the
| exception of DonHopkins.
|
| Just beautiful concepts, inspiring, and well-represented in
| this comment.
|
| Peace be with you, my friend.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > This is exactly why I still play Go, practice martial
| arts, archery and use the command line for my dev workflow.
|
| And this is what worries me. Pre-LLM, I'd get all my
| practice done during work hours. I fear that with LLMs,
| I'll need to do all this practice on my free time,
| effectively reducing my truly "free" time.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Pre-LLM, I'd get all my practice done during work
| hours. I fear that with LLMs, I'll need to do all this
| practice on my free time
|
| If you can attach a valid business reason/excuse then
| it's fairly easy to get time dedicated to experimentation
| and learning.
|
| I haven't been a coder for several years now, but I still
| try to justify a personal lab environment in order to
| understand the market and customer problems.
|
| If you're an Engineer or EM, I think it would be even
| easier (attach experimentation to some sort of critical
| engineering initiative).
|
| Even with Code Gen Copilots becoming a thing, between the
| lines most of us in engineering and business leadership
| recognize it cannot replace architecture or design. If it
| can, then you've solved the Turing or Chinese Room
| problem and that's a whole other story.
|
| That said, if your day job isn't only "write this
| terraform/python script" you shouldn't be at risk.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > If you can attach a valid business reason/excuse then
| it's fairly easy to get time dedicated to experimentation
| and learning.
|
| This has the same problem as "doing it in free time". I
| have a finite number of goodie points with management,
| and I'd be using some when I request this - which means I
| have fewer things I can request from them in the future.
|
| > That said, if your day job isn't only "write this
| terraform/python script" you shouldn't be at risk.
|
| I'm not worried about the present, or even the near
| future. The reason I have other valuable skills is
| because of the years I spent on writing code. Eventually,
| I'll stop growing if I rely too much on LLMs. I may have
| to rely on them if everyone else is and being more
| productive.
| hosh wrote:
| I had someone give me a good use-case for LLMs -- such
| as, doing the CRUD work that I really don't want to do,
| if you are short on funding.
|
| On the other hand, there is something I learned from
| permaculture design. You need to allow what you want to
| grow in the ecosystem if you want them present. If I
| wanted to develop the next generation of developers, then
| I'd be giving that CRUD stuff I've done many times to a
| junior developer instead. It obviously depends on
| funding, and whether your investors are on board with
| that.
|
| As far as keeping up and remaining competitive ... my
| suggestion is to learn these things in a way where you
| can broadly apply the underlying principles in other
| domains, especially that, as you age, your working memory
| will shrink. This isn't accumulating more of the same
| thing, but gaining deeper insights that can only be found
| when you've developed a sufficient level of skill. There
| are lots of ways this can be accomplished.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > You need to allow what you want to grow in the
| ecosystem if you want them present. If I wanted to
| develop the next generation of developers, then I'd be
| giving that CRUD stuff I've done many times to a junior
| developer instead.
|
| Indeed, one of my fears is that people won't develop
| those skills to begin with. In my team, the few senior
| people can pretty much be trusted with using LLMs and
| still producing quality code. But we decided against
| evangelizing it to the junior folks. They still have
| access via Copilot, but we won't gently suggest they try
| it out.
| MoonGhost wrote:
| Coding is actually a hard skill which requires practice.
| Regular litcoding for the sake of it should help. The problem
| with that is it takes the whole brain and breaks other
| thoughts chain. I'm thinking about to dedicate full days for
| small tasks like this.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Regular litcoding for the sake of it should help.
|
| I got where I am without regular leetcoding. For me,
| regular leetcoding will only marginally improve my skills.
| And I definitely don't want to do regular leetcoding just
| to maintain my skills.
|
| You know how many people love jogging outdoors but hate
| treadmills? Leetcoding is like treadmills. You may have to
| do it, but it sucks. Yes, some people love treadmills, but
| they're in the minority.
| balamatom wrote:
| Fellow manager, it will do you good to realize that we are not
| in an "age of AI". Out there it's the age of disinformation.
| w10-1 wrote:
| This is a good analogy, and not just because of skills atrophy.
|
| Managers grow the skills needed for their organization. Their
| team affects them.
|
| A process-oriented team with quality/validation mindset has
| replaceable roles; the action is in the process. An expert team
| has people with tremendous skills and discretion doing what
| needs doing; the action is in selection and incentives.
| Managers adapt to their team requirements, in ways positive and
| negative: becoming rule-bound, privileging favorites, etc.
|
| With AI this might be a positive insofar as it forces people to
| state the issues clearly, identifying relevant context,
| constraints, objectives, etc.
|
| Agile benefitted software development by changing the
| granularity of delivery and planning -- essentially, helping
| people avoid getting lost in planning fantasies.
|
| Similarly, I believe that the winner of the AI-for-development
| race (copilot et al) will not just produce good code, but build
| good developers by driving them to state requirements clearly
| and simply. A good measure here is the number of iterations to
| complete code.
|
| An anti-pattern here, as with agile, is where planning devolves
| into exploring and exploring into incremental changes for no
| real benefit - polishing turds. Again, a good measure is the
| number of sessions to completion; too many and you know you
| don't know what you're doing, or the AI cannot grasp the trees
| for the forest.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I'm often surprised that a study like this is even needed, the
| result seems obvious.
|
| Critical thinking is a skill that requires practice to improve at
| and maintain it. Using LLMs pushes the task that would require
| critical thinking off to something/someone else. Of course the
| user will get worse at critical thinking when they try to do it
| less often.
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| It seems like something like medical/legal professionals'
| annual/otherwise periodic credential exams might make sense in
| fields where AI is very usable.
|
| Basically, we might need to standardize 10-20% of work time being
| used to "keep up" automatable skills that once took up 80+% of
| work time in fields where AI-based automation is making things
| more efficient.
|
| This could even be done within automation platforms themselves,
| and sold to their customers as an additional feature. I
| suspect/hope that most employers do not want to see these
| automatable skills atrophy in their employees, for the sake of
| long-term efficiency, even if that means a small reduction in
| short-term efficiency gains from automation.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > suspect/hope that most employers do not want to see these
| automatable skills atrophy in their employees, for the sake of
| long-term efficiency, even if that means a small reduction in
| short-term efficiency gains from automation.
|
| I wish you were right, but I don't think any industry is
| realistically trending towards thinking about long term
| efficiency or sustainability.
|
| Maybe it's just me, but I see the opposite, constantly.
| Everything is focused on the next quarter, always. Companies
| want massive short term gains and will trade almost anything
| for that.
|
| And the whole system is set up to support this behavior,
| because if you can squeeze enough money to retire out of a
| company in as short a time as possible, you can be long gone
| before it implodes
| rraghur wrote:
| Sort of like once you get used to GPS to get anywhere, you stop
| developing any further directional sense but even existing
| capabilities start withering away
| causal wrote:
| This is interesting because I don't feel like my directional
| sense has withered at all because of GPS, but I do think it was
| important that I develop a sense of how to navigate and use
| maps before I introduced GPS.
|
| I find this is similar in my experience with AI: I pick up
| tidbits and tricks from AI when it's doing something I'm
| familiar with, but if I have it working with a completely novel
| framework or language it quickly races ahead and I'm
| essentially steering it blind, which inevitably fails.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Usain Bolt didn't walk around on crutches all day.
|
| Comedians' ability diminishes as they take time off.
|
| Ahnold wasn't lounging around all day.
|
| We should understand that fixing crap, unsensible code is not a
| productive skillset. As Leslie Lamport said the other day,
| logically developing and coding out proper abstractions is _the_
| core skillset, and not one to be delegated to just anything or
| anyone.
|
| It's ok; the bright side for folks like me is that you're just
| happily hamstringing yourselves. I've been trying to tell y'all,
| but I can only show y'all the water, not make you drink.
| bentt wrote:
| Is this any different than saying that nowadays most people in
| the USA are physically weaker and less able to work on a farm
| than their predecessors? Sure, it's not optimal through certain
| lenses, but through other lenses it is an improvement. We are by
| any rights dependent on new systems to procure food, which is
| even more fundamental than other types of human cognition being
| preserved.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| > Is this any different than saying that nowadays most people
| in the USA are physically weaker and less able to work on a
| farm than their predecessors?
|
| Yes, far different, because we can still go to the gym and
| throw medicine balls around or swing kettle bells and do dead
| lifts and squats if we want to stay fit.
|
| There is no substitute for exercising our ability to logically
| construct deterministic, hardened, efficient data flow networks
| that process specific inputs in specific environments to
| produce specific changes and outputs.
|
| Maybe I'm the only one who understood the most important factor
| the eminent Leslie Lamport explained in grisly detail the other
| day, that, namely, logical thinking is both irreplaceable and
| essential. I'll add that that nerdiest of skillsets is also
| withering on the vine.
|
| "Enjoy." --Daniel Tosh
| orangecat wrote:
| _There is no substitute for exercising our ability to
| logically construct deterministic, hardened, efficient data
| flow networks that process specific inputs in specific
| environments to produce specific changes and outputs._
|
| Factorio?
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| This would be a valid POV if there was any solid evidence that
| LLMs truly increased worker productivity or reliability - at
| best it is a mixed bag. To stretch the food analogy, it seems
| like LLMs could be pure corn syrup, without any disease-
| resistant fruits and unnaturally plump chickens that actually
| make modern agriculture worthwhile.
|
| Or, since LLMs seem to be _addictive_ , it's like getting rid
| of the spinach farms and replacing them with opium poppies. (I
| really hate this tech.)
| rraghur wrote:
| Just today had Gemini write a shell spot for me that had to
| generate a relative symlink.. Getting it to work xplat on linux &
| mac took more than ten tries and I stopped reading after the
| second
|
| At the end, I spent probably more time and learnt nothing.. My
| initial take was that this is the kind of thing I don't care much
| for so giving it to a llm is OK... However, by the end of it I
| ended up more frustrated and lost it in the simulation of working
| things out aa well
| nopelynopington wrote:
| I feel like my critical thinking has taken a nosedive recently, I
| changed jobs and the work in the new job is monotonous and relies
| on automation like copilot. Most of my day is figuring out why
| the ai code didn't work this time rather than solving actually
| problems. It feels like we're a year away from the me part being
| obsolete.
|
| I've also turned to AI in side projects, and it's allowed me to
| create some very fast MVPs, but the code is worse than spaghetti
| - it's spaghetti mixed with the hair from the shower drain.
|
| None of the things I've built are beyond my understanding, but
| I'm lazy and it doesn't seem worth the effort to use my brain to
| code.
|
| Probably the most use my brain gets every day is wordle
| fbn79 wrote:
| People growing up using AI risks to become like France nobility
| during luigi IVI reign.
| tsumnia wrote:
| I won't disagree with their findings; however I do think there is
| some need to counter the narrative that "LLM AI worse for
| humans". Specifically I think back to an example I use when I
| would describe why I had such motivation toward study students
| completing typing practice while learning CS. In short, I use the
| analogy that when I am browsing the web for code snippets (like
| extracting files from a tar file), I will explicitly retype out
| the command rather than rely on copy+paste. My logic is that
| typing out the command helps build the muscle memory so that
| someday I'll just REMEMBER the command.
|
| That said, the counter to my own counter is "do I really need to
| memorize that?" Yes yes no internet and I'm screwed... but that's
| such a rare edge case. I am able to quickly find the command and
| knowing that it is stored somewhere else may be enough knowledge
| for me rather than memorization. I can see Gen AI falling into a
| similar design, I don't need to know explicitly how to do
| something, just that that task can be resolved through an LLM
| prompt.
|
| Granted, we're still trying to figure out how to communicate with
| LLMs and we only really have 3 years of experience. Most of our
| insights have come from blog posts and a handful of research
| articles. I agree that Gen AI laziness is a growing issue, but I
| don't think it needs to go full Idiocracy sensationalist
| headline.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| > we're still trying to figure out how to communicate with LLMs
|
| Communicating with 'guess-the-next-token' machines is just
| ELIZA version X.Y.
|
| You can also ask your dog it they want another treat, or if
| they want to play Quake. They're merely listening for key words
| and tone of voice and reacting to them according to their
| experience with that matrix. And LLMs don't even understand
| tone of voice, and they never will.
| orangecat wrote:
| _And LLMs don 't even understand tone of voice, and they
| never will._
|
| My favorite part of AI discourse is the confident assertions
| that AIs will never be able to do things that they've been
| doing for months.
| oneofyourtoys wrote:
| The year is 2035, the age of mental labor automation. People
| subscribe to memberships for "brain gyms", places that offer
| various means of mental stimulation to train cognitive skills
| like critical thinking and memory retention.
|
| Common activities provided by these gyms include fixing
| misconfigured printers, telling a virtual support customer to
| turn their PC off and back on again, and troubleshooting
| mysterious NVIDIA driver issues (the company has gone bankrupt 5
| years ago, but their hardware is still in great demand for
| frustration tolerance training).
| riffic wrote:
| can't it go the other way? Can't AI be developed to improve and
| strengthen human cognition? I'm incredibly naive and ill informed
| but feel that you can go both ways (growth vs fixed mindsets?)
| AISnakeOil wrote:
| Just as any muscle gets weaker the less you use it, same goes for
| intelligence.
| allenrb wrote:
| I've told people at work, including my boss and his boss, that it
| will be time for me to go if and when my job ever becomes
| "translating business problems into something AI can work with."
|
| Right now I'm curious to see how long I can keep up with those
| using AI for more mundane assistance. So far, so good.
| labrador wrote:
| I'm a retired computer programmer. All my time is free time. I'm
| using AI as a cognitive amplifier. I'm learning at a much faster
| rate than I would without AI. I don't have to waste time doing
| google searches and reading thru irrelevant material to find
| something germane to my research.
|
| I don't depend on AI for anything. I am not doing corporate work.
| Could it be that what people are experiencing is that they are
| becoming less suitable for corporate work as AI and robots
| replace them? Isn't this a good thing? Shouldn't the focus be on
| using AI to bring out the innate talents of humans that aren't
| profit driven?
| zdragnar wrote:
| You've already got your brain trained in the underlying
| fundamentals. The way you use AI is going to be slightly
| different from how someone who is just starting out would
| experience and adapt to it.
|
| For the same reason, we were required to have graphing
| calculators, but not TI-92 or similar models in calculus class.
| While the utility is fine for people who have already learned
| the concepts, attempting to learn advanced algebra or other
| math with a symbolic solver available cripples your long term
| retention.
|
| The question of "what is motivating the task" doesn't really
| factor very well into "how does this tool affect a novice", at
| least not in any similar circumstance I have seen.
| labrador wrote:
| If you're right, then we should not use AI in elementary and
| high schools as a learning tool. I suspect most people think
| we should.
| johnea wrote:
| That's a really inspiring hope, but, sadly, not the reality.
|
| The current "AI" tech is in fact developed FOR the profit.
| There is 0 concern at the capital investing level for enhancing
| any innate human talents. In fact the effort is explicitly
| intended to REPLACE humans with automation in tasks that have
| traditionally required those innate human skills.
|
| I do believe you find learning and research to be enhanced, and
| I agree in general that the tech has a great deal of possible
| benefit, but sadly that's not what ownership hopes to use it
| for (statistically speaking that is. not all ownership is
| created equally).
|
| This is the luddite problem all over again: it's not the looms
| that are the problem, it's ownership's interest in shifting
| funds that would be paid to workers into the coffers of
| corporate profit.
|
| Could advances in technology benefit ownership, and still
| insure that labor can earn a decent living? Of course it COULD!
| It's just that given the precedent of human history, that's not
| how it WILL be used...
| labrador wrote:
| Computers were initially seen in the 60's and 70's as
| corporate and scientific tools. Many couldn't imagine one day
| we would have them in the home. Once that happened, people
| used computers for all sorts of non-profitable endeavors like
| painting, music, social discussion, etc... I believe AI will
| follow a similar trajectory. I can't really speak to how AI
| is used in corporations to improve the bottom line because I
| no longer work in them, but I do see how it enhances my
| personal learning and creativity. Given time, I expect more
| people to explore AI beyond profit-driven use cases, just
| like we did with personal computers.
| thombles wrote:
| I'm, uh, not a fan of AI, however in this case I would strongly
| recommend everybody ctrl-f the juicy quotes in the 404media
| article and see where they came from in the full text of
| Microsoft's study. Both of the leading quotes come from the
| _introduction_, where they're talking at a high level about a
| paper from 1983. It's enormous clickbait.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Obvious advice for students: Human brains are neural networks-
| they have to be trained. If you have the already trained
| artificial neural network do all the work, it means your own
| neural network remains untrained.
|
| You are tremendously better off getting a bad grade doing your
| own work than getting a good one using ChatGPT.
| jonahx wrote:
| For those who read only the headline or article:
|
| > In this paper, we aim to address this gap by conducting a
| survey of a professionally diverse set of knowledge workers ( =
| 319), eliciting detailed real-world examples of tasks (936) for
| which they use GenAI, and directly measuring their perceptions of
| critical thinking during these tasks
|
| So, they asked people to remember times they used AI, and then
| asked them about their own perceptions about their critical
| thinking when they did.
|
| How are we even pretending there is serious scientific discussion
| to be had about these "results"?
| Tossrock wrote:
| "The Impact Of Taking A Survey About AI On Answers To A Survey
| About AI" doesn't have the same ring to it.
| Deprogrammer9 wrote:
| Don't listen to Microscam yo!
| derefr wrote:
| How odd. I don't think I'm thinking any less hard when making use
| of LLM-based tools. But then, maybe I'm using LLMs differently?
|
| I don't build or rely on pre-prompted agents to automate specific
| problems or workflows. Rather, I only rely on services like
| ChatGPT or Claude for their generic reasoning, chat, and "has
| read the entire web at some point" capabilities.
|
| My use-cases break down into roughly equal thirds:
|
| ---
|
| 1. As natural-language, iteratively-winnowing-the-search-space
| versions of search engines.
|
| Often, I want to know something -- some information that's
| definitely _somewhere_ out there on the web. But, from 30+ years
| of interacting with fulltext search systems, I know that
| traditional search engines have limitations in the sorts of
| queries that 'll actually do anything. There are a lot of
| "objective, verifiable, and well-cited knowledge" questions that
| are just outside of the domain of Google search.
|
| One common example of fulltext-search limitations, is when you
| know how to describe a thing you're imagining, a thing that may
| or may not exist -- but you don't know the jargon term for it (if
| there even is one.) No matter how many words you throw at a
| regular search engine, they won't dredge up discussions about the
| thing, because discussions about the thing just _use_ the jargon
| term -- they don 't usually bother to _define_ it.
|
| To find answers to these sorts of questions, I would have
| previously ask a human expert -- either directly, or through a
| forum/chatroom/subreddit/Q&A site/etc.
|
| But now, I've got a new and different kind of search engine -- a
| set of pre-trained base models that, all by themselves, perform
| vaguely as RAGs over all of the world's public-web-accessible
| information.
|
| Of course, an LLM won't have crystal clarity in its memory --
| it'll forget exact figures, forget the exact phrasing of
| quotations, etc. And if there's any way that it can be fooled or
| misled by some random thing someone made up somewhere on the web
| once, it will be.
|
| But ChatGPT et al _can_ sure tell me the right jargon term (or
| entire search query) to turn what was previously, to me, almost
| deep-web information, into public-web information.
|
| ---
|
| 2. As a (fuzzy-logic) expert system in many domains, that learned
| all its implications _from_ the public information available on
| the web.
|
| One fascinating thing about high-parameter-count pre-trained base
| models, is that you don't really need to do _any_ prompting, or
| supply _any_ additional information, to get them to do a vaguely-
| acceptable job of _diagnosis_ -- whether that be diagnosing your
| early-stage diabetic neuropathy, or that mysterious rattle in
| your car.
|
| Sure, the LLM will be wrong sometimes. It's just a distillation
| of what a bunch of conversations and articles spread across the
| public web have to say about what are or aren't the signs and
| symptoms of X.
|
| But those are the same articles _you 'd_ read. The LLM will
| almost always outperform _you_ in "doing your own research"
| (unless you go as far as to read journal papers -- I don't know
| of any LLM base model that's been trained on arXiv yet...). It
| won't be as good at medicine as a doctor, or as good at
| automotive repair as an automotive technician, etc. -- but it
| _will_ be better (i.e. more accurate) at those things than an
| interested amateur who 's watched some YouTube videos and read
| some pop-science articles.
|
| Which means you can just tell LLMs the "weird things you've
| noticed lately", and get it to hypothesize for you -- and, as
| long as you're good at being _observant_ , the LLM's hypotheses
| will serve as great _lines of investigation_. It 'll suggest
| _which experts or specialists_ you should contact, _what tests_
| you can perform yourself to do objective differential
| diagnostics, etc.
|
| (I don't want to under-emphasize the usefulness of this. ChatGPT
| figured out my house had hidden toxic mold! My allergies are gone
| now!)
|
| ---
|
| 3. As a translator.
|
| Large-parameter-count LLM base models are actually _really,
| really good_ at translation. To the point that I 'm not sure why
| Google Translate et al haven't been updated to be powered by
| them. (Google Translate was the origin of the Transformer
| architecture, yet it seems to have been left in the dust since
| then by the translation performance of generic LLMs.)
|
| And by "translation", I do literally mean "translating entire
| documents from one spoken/written human language to another." (My
| partner, who is a fluently-bilingual writer of both English +
| [Traditional] Chinese, has been using Claude to translate English
| instructions / documents into Chinese for her [mostly monolingual
| Chinese] mother to better understand them; and to translate any
| free-form responses her mother is required to give, back into
| English. She used to do these tasks herself "by hand" -- systems
| like Google Translate would provide results that were worse-than-
| useless. But my partner can verify that, at least for this
| language pair, modern LLMs are _excellent_ translators, writing
| basically what she would write herself.)
|
| But I _also_ mean:
|
| * The thing Apple markets as part of Apple Intelligence --
| translation between writing styles (a.k.a. "stylistic editing.")
| You don't actually need a LoRA / fine-tune to do this; large-
| parameter-count models already inherently know how to do it.
|
| * Translating between programming languages. "Rewrite-it-in-Rust"
| is trivial now. (That's what
| https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/translating-all-c-to...
| is about -- trying to build up an agentive framework that relies
| on both the LLM's translation capabilities, and the Rust
| compiler's typing errors on declaration change, to brute-force
| iterate across entire codebases, RiiRing one module at a time,
| and then recursing to its dependents to rewrite them too.)
|
| * Translating between pseudocode, and/or a _rigorous_ description
| of code, and actual code. I run a data analytics company; I know
| far more about the intricacies of ANSI SQL than any man ought to.
| But even I never manage to remember the pile of syntax features
| that glom together to form a "loose index scan" query. (WITH
| RECURSIVE, UNION ALL, separate aliases for the tables used in the
| base vs inductive cases, and one of those aliases referenced in a
| dependent subquery... but heck if I recall which one.) I have a
| crystal-clear picture of what I want to do -- but I no longer
| need to look up the exact grammar the SQL standard decided to use
| yet again, because now I can dump out, in plain language, _my_
| (well-formed) mental model of the query -- and rely on the LLM to
| _translate_ that model into ANSI SQL grammar.
| AtomBalm wrote:
| Literacy makes human memory atrophied and unprepared. Kids these
| days can't even recite the Illiad from memory!
| tunesmith wrote:
| I like to think of problems as having two components:
| specification and implementation.
|
| With using GenAI (and/or "being a manager") aren't they somewhat
| inversely related?
|
| I find implementation level programmers to generally be poor at
| stating specifications. They often phrase problems in terms of
| lacking their desired solutions. They jump straight to
| implementation.
|
| But a manager has to get skilled at giving specification: being
| clear about what they expect, without stating how to do it. And
| that's a skill that needs to be quickly developed to use GenAI
| well as well. I think getting good at specifying is definitely
| worthwhile, and I think GenAI is helping a lot of people get
| better at that quickly.
|
| Overall, it seems that should very much be considered part of
| "critical thinking".
| RecycledEle wrote:
| You decide to rot as AI does the work, or you decide to learn
| from the AI.
|
| The same is true of managers. I have had managers who yelled at
| me to do things they did not understand. They rotted on the
| inside. Other managers learned every trick I brought to the
| company. They grew.
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