[HN Gopher] The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us - it's when ...
___________________________________________________________________
The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us - it's when we stop using
our own minds
Author : NotInOurNames
Score : 299 points
Date : 2025-10-05 11:08 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theargumentmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theargumentmag.com)
| waynecochran wrote:
| For the record I am a pre-AI human and I read this.
| DFHippie wrote:
| Too many never decided to start using their minds. They won't
| notice the transition.
| rimeice wrote:
| I'm undecided on this, initially I was on the "this is bad, we're
| outsourcing our thinking" bandwagon, now after using AI for lots
| of different types of tasks for a while now, I feel like
| generally I've learnt so much, so much more quickly. Would I
| recall it all without my new crutch? Maybe not, but I may not
| have learnt it in the first place without it.
| drbojingle wrote:
| Agreed. I've engaged with different tech since moving things
| along is now easier.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You are not necessarily typical.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Right. It doesn't matter how smart you still are if the
| majority of society turns into Idiocracy. Second, we're all
| at risk of blind spots in estimating how disciplined we're
| being about using the shortcut machine the right way. Smart
| people like me, you, grandparent aren't immune to that.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| 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 population of people that
| became web developers. Before that when the microcomputer
| revolution was happening, there were once again an order of
| magnitude more users than developers.
|
| Even old tech - such as written language - has this property.
| The number of readers dwarfs the number of writers. And even
| within the set of all "writers", if you were to investigate
| most text produced, you'd find that the vast majority of it
| is falls into that long tail of insipid banter, gossip,
| diaries, fanfiction, grocery lists, overwrought teenage love
| letters, etc.
|
| The ultimate consequences of this tech will depend on the
| interplay between those two groups - the tool wielders and
| the product enjoyers - and how that manifests for this
| particular technology in this particular set of world
| circumstances.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > The number of readers dwarfs the number of writers.
|
| That's a great observation!
|
| 'Literacy' is defined as the ability to both read _and_
| write. People as a rule can write, even if it isn 't a
| novel worth publishing they do have the ability to encode a
| text on a piece of paper. It's a matter of quality rather
| than ability (at least, in most developed countries, though
| even there there are still people who can not read or
| write).
|
| So think that you could fine-tune that observation to
| 'there is a limited number of people that provide most of
| the writings'. Observing for instance Wikipedia or any
| bookstore would seem to confirm that. If you take HN as
| your sample base then there too it holds true. If this goes
| for one of our oldest technologies it should not be
| surprising that on a forum dedicated to creating businesses
| and writing the ability to both read and write are taken
| for granted. But they shouldn't be.
|
| The same goes for any other tech: the number of people
| using electronics dwarfs the number of circuit designers,
| the number of people using buildings dwarfs architects and
| so on, all the way down to food consumption and farmers or
| fishers.
|
| Effectively this says: 'we tend to specialize' because
| specialization allows each to do what they are best at.
| Heinlein's universal person ('specialization is for
| insects') is an outlier, not the norm, and probably sucks
| at most of the things they claim to have ability for.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > Heinlein's universal person ('specialization is for
| insects') is an outlier, not the norm, and probably sucks
| at most of the things they claim to have ability for.
|
| This is quoted elsewhere in this thread
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45482479). Most of
| the things are stuff that you will be doing at some point
| in your life, that are socially expected from every human
| at part of human life or things you do daily. It also
| only says you should be able to do it, it does not need
| to be good; but should the case arise, that you are
| required to do it, you should be able to deal with it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >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 Google substitute has consequences to
| readers, and using it to cut corners for writers has even
| worse consequences. I don't think we've had tech like this
| that can argued as dangerous on both sides of the aisle
| simultaneously.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Sorry, but my comment wasn't about you in particular. It
| was about the tech domain in general. I know absolutely
| nothing about you so I would not presume to make any
| statements about you in that sense.
|
| > But society's given them ways to either retire or seek
| new work if needed. I'm not seeing that here.
|
| No, not really. For the most part they became destitute
| and at some point they died.
|
| What you are not seeing is that this is the end stage of
| technological progress, the point at which suddenly a
| large fraction of the people is superfluous to the people
| in charge. Historically such excess has been dealt with
| by wars.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >For the most part they became destitute and at some
| point they died
|
| Having opportunity doesn't mean they will seize it. I
| will concede that if you are disrupted and in your 50's
| (not old enough to retire, and where it becomes difficult
| to be re-hired unless you're management) you get hit
| especially hard.
|
| But it's hard to see the current landscape of jobs now
| and suggest that boomers/older GenX had nothing to fall
| back on when these things happen. These generations
| chided millennials and Gen Z for being "too proud to work
| a grill". Nowadays you're not even getting an interview
| at McDonald's after submitting hundreds of applications.
| That's not an environment that let's you "bounce back"
| after a setback.
|
| >Historically such excess has been dealt with by wars.
|
| Indeed. We seem to be approaching that point, and it's
| already broken out in several places. When all other
| channels are exhausted, humans simply seek to overthrow
| the ones orchestrating their oppression.
|
| In this case that isn't AI. At least not yet. But it's a
| symptom of how they've done this.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Having opportunity doesn't mean they will seize it.
|
| Well, in that sense everybody has opportunity. But I know
| quite a few people who definitely would not survive their
| line of employment shutting down. A lot of them have
| invested decades in their careers and have life
| complications, responsibilities and expenses that stop
| them from simply 'seizing opportunity'. For them it would
| be the end of the line, hopefully social security would
| catch them but if not then I have no idea how they would
| make it.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Think of it like alcohol.
|
| Some people benefit from the relaxing effects of a little bit.
| It helped humanity get through ages of unsafe hygiene by acting
| as a sanitizer and preservative.
|
| For some people, it is a crutch that inhibits developing safe
| coping mechanisms for anxiety.
|
| For others it becomes an addiction so severe, they literally
| risk death if they don't get some due to withdrawal, and death
| by cirrhosis if they keep up with their consumption. They
| literally cannot live without it or with it, unless they
| gradually taper off over days.
|
| My point isn't that AI addiction will kill you, but that what
| might be beneficial might also become a debilitating mental
| crutch.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Think of it like alcohol_
|
| Better analogy is processed food.
|
| It makes calories cheaper, it's tasty, and in some
| circumstances ( _e.g._ endurance sports or backpacking) is
| materially enhances what an ordinary person can achieve. But
| if you raise a child on it, to where it's what they reach for
| by default, they're fucked.
| techjamie wrote:
| It comes down to how you use it, whether you're just getting an
| answer and moving on, or if you're getting an answer and then
| increasing your understanding on why that's the correct answer.
|
| I was building a little roguelike-ish sort of game for myself
| to test my understanding of Raylib. I was using as few external
| resources as possible outside of the cheatsheet for functions,
| including avoiding AI initially.
|
| I ran into my first issue when trying to determine line of
| sight. I was naively simply calculating a line along the grid
| and tagging cells for vision if they didn't hit a solid object,
| but this caused very inconsistent sight. I tried a number of
| things on my own and realized I had to research.
|
| All of the search results I found used Raycasting, but I wanted
| to see if my original idea had merit, and didn't want to do
| Raycasting. Finally, I gave up my search and gave copilot a
| function to fill in, and it used Bresenham's Line Algorithm. It
| was exactly what I was looking for, and also, taught me why my
| approach didn't work consistently because there's a small
| margin of error when calculating a line across a grid that
| Bresenham accounts for.
|
| Most people, however, won't take interest in why the AI answer
| might work. So while it can be a great learning tool, it can
| definitely be used in a brainless sort of way.
| juped wrote:
| Now imagine how much better
|
| - the code
|
| - your improvement in knowledge
|
| would have been if you had skipped copilot and described your
| problem and asked for algorithmic help?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Now imagine that he's interested in finishing his game, not
| the intricacies of raycasting algorithms.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Idk, depends on the situation. Is he a student trying to
| show stuff on a resume? Is he a professional trying to
| sell a product? Is he a researcher trying to report
| findings? A startup trying to land a pitch?
|
| The value isn't objective and very much depends on end
| goals.People seem to trounce out the "make games, not
| engines" without realizing that engine programmers still
| do exist.
| techjamie wrote:
| It was just a small personal test of skill with no
| purpose or stakes. Not even really with intent to make a
| real game, just a slice of something that resembled a
| game to see how far I could get without help. Then, once
| I got as far as I could, research and see how I could do
| better.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| This reminds me of my experience using computer-assisted
| mathematical proof systems, where the computer's proof search
| pointed me at the Cantor-Schroder-Bernstein theorem, giving
| me a _great_ deal of insight into the problem I was trying to
| solve.
|
| That system, of course, doesn't rely on generative AI at all:
| all contributions to the system are appropriately attributed,
| etc. I wonder if a similar system could be designed for
| software?
| tkgally wrote:
| That's the problem, I think: Using AI will make some people
| stupider overall, it will make other people smarter overall,
| and it will make many people stupider in some ways and smarter
| in other ways.
|
| It would have been nice if the author had not overgeneralized
| so much:
|
| https://claude.ai/share/27ff0bb4-a71e-483f-a59e-bf36aaa86918
|
| I'll let you decide whether my use of Claude to analyze that
| article made _me_ smarter or stupider.
|
| _Addendum: In my prompt to Claude, I seem to have misgendered
| the author of the article. That may answer the question about
| the effect of AI use on me._
| jacquesm wrote:
| > That's the problem, I think: Using AI will make some people
| stupider overall, it will make other people smarter overall,
| and it will make many people stupider in some ways and
| smarter in other ways.
|
| And then:
|
| > It would have been nice if the author had not
| overgeneralized so much
|
| But you just fell into the exact same trap. The effect on any
| individual is a reflection of that person's ability in many
| ways and on an individual level it may be all of those things
| depending on context. That's what is so problematic: you
| don't know to a fine degree what level of competence you have
| relative to the AI you are interacting with so for any given
| level of competence there are things that you will miss when
| processing an AI's output. The more competent you are the
| better you are able to use it. But people turn to AI when
| they are _not_ competent and that is the problem, not that
| when they are competent they can use it effectively. And
| despite all of the disclaimers that is exactly the dream that
| the AI peddlers are selling you. 'Your brain on steroids'.
| But with the caveat that they don't know anything about your
| brain other than what can be inferred from your prompts.
|
| A good teacher will be able to spot their own errors, here
| the pupil is supposed to be continuously on the looking for
| utter nonsense the teacher utters with great confidence. And
| the closer it gets to being good at some stuff the more
| leeway it will get for the nonsense as well.
| echelon wrote:
| I feel like I these doom prognostications were also written
| during the industrial revolution, the invention of electricity,
| the invention of television, the invention of the internet, ...
|
| We've turned out okay.
| NoOn3 wrote:
| At least someone survives all the time. For him Everything is
| okay...
| HPsquared wrote:
| Socrates on writing
|
| "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of
| those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their
| memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters
| which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of
| their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not
| of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the
| appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many
| things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to
| know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and
| hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only
| appear wise."
| lapcat wrote:
| Technically, this was the character "Socrates" in the writing
| on Plato.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| glad you brought up a historical note.
|
| Some of the best thinking across history -
| euclid,newton,einstein - happened in the pre-computer era.
| So, let alone AI, even computers are not necessary. Pen,
| paper and some imagination/experimentation were sufficient.
|
| Some in tech are fear mongering to seek attention.
| watwut wrote:
| That prediction qas right there, actually. We did lost the
| memorization capabilities. Memorization is not just about
| rote learning, it was kind of technology about how to
| structure text so that it is easy to remember.
|
| Second, Socrates was generally arrogant in stories. That
| attitude you see there was not special disdain to reading, it
| was more off his general "I am better then everyone else
| anyway" attitude.
| pizza234 wrote:
| You haven't read the article, which actually says the opposite:
|
| > A few weeks ago, The Argument Editor-in-Chief Jerusalem
| Demsas asked me to write an essay about the claim that AI
| systems would take all of our jobs within 18 months. My initial
| reaction was ... no?
|
| [...]
|
| > The problem is whether we will degrade our own capabilities
| in the presence of new machines. We are so fixated on how
| technology will outskill us that we miss the many ways that we
| can deskill ourselves.
|
| [..]
|
| > Students, scientists, and anyone else who lets AI do the
| writing for them will find their screens full of words and
| their minds emptied of thought.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is already happening. In spite of all of the disclaimers
| that the AI make mistakes the fact that it is given higher
| billing in for instance google search results (but also lots of
| other similar places) means people will interpret it as having a
| higher reputation because that's how we were conditioned to
| consume search results. This is doing massive damage already, for
| instance, essay writing, making summaries, reading comprehension
| and research skills are dwindling because the teachers in high
| school (and lower as well, but that's where it is most visible)
| are not able to keep up with the ease with which good looking
| slop can be produced. Schools will need to radically alter their
| programs if they want to continue to be able to educate but they
| don't exactly turn on a dime when it comes to technology and
| there are - unfortunately - lots of teachers who themselves lack
| skills and the ability to transfer those skills. If you graduated
| before AI became mainstream your diploma will be worth more than
| those that graduated after.
| watwut wrote:
| School will have to rely on homework less. It ia nkt that deep
| or complicated. It does not require super radical reform.
|
| Ypu can still make the tests and exams checking what students
| know. There will be less "generate bs at home" tasks and more
| "come back with a knowledge" which will likely be an
| improvement.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > "generate bs at home" vs. "come back with a knowledge"
|
| They are the same picture!
| iisan7 wrote:
| Except for one thing ... Schools tend not to fail many
| people. When an entire cohort has a different level of
| ability, standards adjust. Possibly some proctored,
| standardized exams might be more comparable over time. I have
| read that, controlling for student demographics, SAT scores
| (frequently used for US college entrance) were increasing
| until the mid 2000s and then flat since then.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Yes that's always true for the preceding school, but it
| really only means that the student needs to work harder or
| fail later on as the final job enabling exam isn't going to
| move.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The burden on teachers is already crazy high. That would only
| work if we multiply the number of teachers by 3 or so with a
| corresponding reduction in class size. The education system
| would collapse due to funding and recruitment issues.
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's happened to me recently, I've relied so much on LLMs for
| coding and after hours of spinning the wheel, I realized, it has
| no idea, when it fixes something it's mostly a guess, most I've
| the time we're just debugging by adding logging statements and
| the code we've created looks crap and is mostly wrong, full of
| fluff, or hard to understand.
|
| I've been coding without my LLM for 2 hours and it's just more
| productive...yes it's good for getting things "working" but yeah,
| we still need to think and understand to solve harder problems.
|
| My initial impressions blew me away because generating new things
| is a lot simpler than fixing old things, yes it's still useful,
| but only when you know what you're doing in the first place.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| > the code we've created looks crap and is mostly wrong, full
| of fluff, or hard to understand
|
| I don't disagree in general but I've had a lot of success
| asking the LLMs to specifically fix these things and make
| things more maintainable when specifically prompted to do so. I
| agree debugging and getting things working it often needs
| supervision, guidance and advice. And architecture it often
| gets a little wrong and needs nudges to see the light.
|
| I'm not great at this stuff and I got tired of reviewing things
| and generating suggestions to improve implementations (it
| seemed to be repetitive a lot) but I am having good results
| with my latest project using simulated ecosystems with
| adversarial sub-projects. So there's the core project I care
| about with a maintainer agent/persona, an extension with an
| extension developer agent/persona (the extensions provide
| common features built upon the core with the perspective of
| being a third-party developer), and an application developer
| that uses both the core and extensions. I have them all write
| reports about challenges and reviewing the sub-projects they
| consume, complaining about awkwardness and ways the other
| parties could be improved. Then the "owner" of each component
| reviews the feedback to develop plans for me to evaluate and
| approve. Very often the "user" components end up complaining
| about complexity and inconsistency. The "owner" developers tend
| to add a lot multiple ways of doing things when asked for new
| features until specifically prompted to review their own code
| to reduce redundancy, streamline use and improve
| maintainability. But they will do it when prompted and I've
| been pretty happy with the code and documentation it's
| generating.
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's not the article is about though, you're doing all this
| "engineering" to have success with the "AI". You're not
| really "depending on it", which is more in the spirit of the
| article and what I found myself starting to do. At some point
| you think , I'll either do it myself, or use "AI", at which
| point you will start to become dependent on it.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Ah I see what you mean. I interpret "depending on it" to
| have shifted. I want to depend on a particular project for
| my work, and if it happened to exist on github, I would
| have just used that. But it doesn't exist so I have created
| a fake github "community" to develop the part that I will
| depend on and I don't want to think about a lot of the API
| design for things I haven't thought about yet, I just want
| it to work and be ergonomic.
|
| But my point remains specifically about the crappy code AI
| writes. In my experience, it will clean it up if you tell
| it to. There's the simple angle of complexity and it does
| an okay job with that. But there's the API design side also
| and that's what the second part is about. LLM will just add
| dumb ass hacks all over the place when a new feature is
| needed and that leads to a huge confusing integration mess.
| Whereas with this setup when I want to build an extension
| the API has been mostly worked out and when I want to build
| an application the API has mostly been worked out. That's
| the way it would work if I ran into a project on github I
| wanted to depend on.
| Veedrac wrote:
| A refusal to even acknowledge that AI might work isn't a very
| sensible refutation of the risks we're going to face.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| > A refusal to even acknowledge that AI might work isn't a very
| sensible refutation of the risks we're going to face.
|
| That's probably why they're not doing that. The core premise--
| we will rely on AI so much that we will de-skill ourselves--
| _requires_ acknowledging that AI works.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > The core premise-- we will rely on AI so much that we will
| de-skill ourselves-- requires acknowledging that AI works.
|
| No it doesn't require that because the vast majority of
| people aren't rational actors and they don't optimize for the
| quality of their work - they optimize for their own comfort
| and emotional experience.
|
| They'll happily produce and defend low quality work if they
| get to avoid the discomfort of having to engage in
| cognitively strenuous work, in the same way people
| rationalize every other choice they make that's bad for them,
| the society, the environment, and anyone else.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| It doesn't have to be perfect, or even good, to 'work': it
| just has to perform the expected function well enough to
| satisfy their use case, which is low-effort text generation
| without significant quality requirements. Therefore, it
| absolutely _works._
| dcastonguay wrote:
| My current opinion is that AI is just a thing that is going to
| further amplify our existing tendencies (on a person-to-person
| basis). I've personally found it to be extremely beneficial in
| research, learning, and the category of "things that take time
| because of the stuff you have to mechanically go through and not
| because of the brainpower involved". I have been able to spend so
| much more time on things that I feel require more human thinking
| and on stuff I generally enjoy more. It has been wonderful and I
| feel like I've been on a rocket ship of personal growth.
|
| I've seen many other people who have essentially become meatspace
| analogues for AI applications. It's sad to watch this happen
| while listening to many of the same people complain about how AI
| will take their jobs, without realizing that they've _given_ AI
| their jobs by ensuring that they add nothing to the process. I
| don't really understand yet why people don't see that they are
| doing this to themselves.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| It fulfills steve jobs promise that a computer is a bicycle for
| your mind. It is crazy to me that all these poeple think they
| are going to lose their ability to think. If you didn't lose
| your ability to think to scrolling social media then you aren't
| going to lose it to AI. However, I think a lot of people lost
| their ability to think by scrolling social media and that is
| problematic. What people need to realize is that they have
| agency over what they put in their mind and they probably
| shouldn't put massive amounts of algorithmically determined
| content without first considering if its going to push them in
| a particular direction of beliefs, purchases, or lifestyle
| choices.
| mtillman wrote:
| 1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255603105_The_Eff
| ec...
|
| 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25509828/
|
| 3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392560878_Your_Br
| ai...
|
| I'm pretty convinced it should be used to do things humans
| can't do instead of things humans can do well with practice.
| However, I'm also convinced that Capital will always rely on
| Labor to use it on their behalf.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| That's always been the issue for me. It's not the
| technology itself, it's that virtually the entire
| initiative is being pushed by venture capital with a "we
| want to make more money than God" mission that means they
| call every person calling for caution a Luddite/anti-
| progress. That's basically how every thing on the Internet
| has expanded over the last 20 years and the results have
| been, if I'm being insanely generous, mixed at best.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I also think that being a little more cautious would have
| yielded many, if not most of the benefits we've received
| while avoiding many of the downfalls. Most of these
| companies knew their products were negatively affecting
| their users-- e.g. instagram and teen girl self esteem--
| but actively suppressed it because it would inhibit
| making dump trucks full of money off of it. People who
| stand to make that money will ALWAYS say you're going to
| ruin _everything_ if you do anything at all to impede
| progress-- that 's ridiculous. The people that use their
| turn signal and drive within 10mph of the speed limit
| still reach their destination, and with dramatically less
| risk than the people that drive pedal-to-the-metal,
| tailgating, with that self-absorbed fuck-everybody-else
| attitude.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEIrQUXm_hY
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Preach. This is exactly what I'm driving at.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I think it's more "We want to use money to become gods",
| and AI is very much part of that.
|
| They're going to be rather surprised when this doesn't
| work as planned, for reasons that are both very obvious
| and not obvious at all. (Yet.)
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I don't think that a couple papers counts for much of
| anything. A couple scientific articles form an opinion
| about a topic. The evidence shown in those papers are
| certainly something to think about, but there hasn't been
| enough time or effort put into the use of understanding how
| AI technologies aide technical work and the ability to
| solve more complex problems to make some sort of suggested
| claim that it is inherently bad.
|
| Compare this body of work to the body of work that has
| consistently showed social media is bad for you and has
| done so for many years. You will see a difference. Or if
| you prefer to focus on something more physical,
| anthropogenic climate change, the evidence for the standard
| model of particle physics, the evidence for plate
| tectonics, etc.
|
| I'm not saying we shouldn't be skeptical that these
| technologies might make us lazy or inable to perform
| critical functions of technical work. I think there is a
| great danger that these technologies essentially fulfill
| the promise of data science across industries, that is, a
| completely individualized experience to guide your choices
| across digital environments. That is not the world that I
| want to live in. But, I also don't think that my mind is
| turning to mush because I asked Claude Code to write some
| code to make a catboost model that would have taken me a
| few hours to try out some idea.
| visarga wrote:
| Time goes forward, in the future when will you be in a
| situation you can't access a LLM? Better use LLM as much
| as possible to learn the skills of controlling agents,
| scaffolding constrains, docs, breaking problems in such a
| way that AI can solve them. These are the skills that
| matter now.
|
| We don't practice much using the assembler either, or the
| slide ruler. I also lost the skill to start an old
| Renault 12 which I owned 30 years ago, it is a complex
| process believe me, there were some owners reaching
| artist level at it.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Exactly. Why should I not learn new things and how they
| work? What is the point of living if not learning new
| things?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >in the future when will you be in a situation you can't
| access a LLM?
|
| In an interview setting, while in a meeting, if you're
| idling on a problem while traveling or doing other work,
| while you are in an area with weak reception, if your
| phone is dead?
|
| There are plenty of situations where my problem solving
| does not involve being directly at my work station. I
| figured out a solution to a recent problem while at the
| doctor's office and after deciding to check the API docs
| more closely instead of bashing my head on the compiler.
|
| >We don't practice much using the assembler either, or
| the slide ruler.
|
| Treating your ability to research and critically think as
| yet another tool is exactly why I'm pessimistic about the
| discipline of the populace using AI. These aren't skills
| you use 9-5 then turn off as you head back home.
| pojzon wrote:
| Apple will most likely inject LLM model into iphone
| directly. It wont be amazing but it will work for most
| things.
|
| Sad truth is future will most likely invalidate all
| ,,knowledge" beside critical thinking.
| ben_w wrote:
| > I'm pretty convinced it should be used to do things
| humans can't do instead of things humans can do well with
| practice. However, I'm also convinced that Capital will
| always rely on Labor to use it on their behalf.
|
| When computers were new, they were on occasion referred to
| as "electronic brains" due to their capacity for
| arithmetic.
|
| Humans can, with practice, do arithmetic well.
|
| A Raspberry Pi Zero can do arithmetic faster than the
| combined efforts of every single living human even if we
| all trained hard and reached the level of the current
| record holder.
|
| Should we stop using computers to do arithmetic just
| because we can also do arithmetic, or should we allow
| ourselves to benefit from the way that "quantity has a
| quality all of its own"*?
|
| * Like so many quotes, attributed to lots of different
| people. Funny how unreliable humans can be with information
| :P
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > If you didn't lose your ability to think to scrolling
| social media ...
|
| Didn't we?
| jader201 wrote:
| > _However, I think a lot of people lost their ability to
| think by scrolling social media and that is problematic._
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Specifically, most of the billionaires. They're all
| deranged lunatics now, between COVID, social media, and
| being told they couldn't say the n-word with impunity for
| two weeks back in 2020.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| They always were. COVID just had them fully mask off (no
| pun intended). I still remember Musk trying to call those
| cave rescuers pedophiles because they wouldn't use his
| plan instead. That was 2018.
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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.
| daxfohl wrote:
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| > 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.
| bgwalter wrote:
| Except that generative "AI" is a tricycle for the mind that
| prevents you from ever learning how to ride a bicycle.
| j4coh wrote:
| It's more like a bus where you can sit there and stare out
| the window if you like. But somehow it also gives people
| the illusion that they are driving the bus, giving them a
| sense of self satisfaction while robbing them of the
| opportunity to actually create or learn something.
| MattRix wrote:
| It's less like a bicycle for the mind, and more like a bus.
| Sure you're gonna get there quickly, but you'll to end up at
| the same place as a bunch of other people, and you won't
| remember the route you took to get there.
| program_whiz wrote:
| Honestly I feel my skills atrophying if I rely on AI too
| much, and many people I interact with are much weaker still
| (trying to vibe code without ever learning). To take your
| analogy further, having a single speed bike lets you go
| further faster and doesn't have a big impact on your "skills"
| (physical in this case), but deferring all transport to cars,
| and then to an electric scooter so you never have to walk
| definitely will cause your endurance / physical ability to
| walk to disappear. We are creatures that require constant use
| of and exercise of our capabilities or the system crumbles.
| Especially for high-skill activities (language, piano, video
| games, programming), proficiency can wane extremely quickly
| without constant practice.
| password54321 wrote:
| The post was largely about young people who are growing up with
| these tools and are still at the stage of developing their
| habits and tendencies. Personally I am glad I learnt
| programming before LLMs even if it meant the tedious searches
| on stackoverflow because I didn't feel like I was coming up
| against a wave of new technology when it came to future job
| searches. Having done so I can understand and appreciate the
| _intrinsic_ value of learning these things but western culture
| is largely about _extrinsic_ values that may lead to the future
| generation on missing out on learning certain skills.
| jstanley wrote:
| Personally I am glad I learnt programming before
| StackOverflow! Precisely because it meant I had to learn to
| figure things out myself.
|
| I still _use_ StackOverflow and LLMs, but if those things
| were available when I was learning I would probably not have
| learnt as much.
| mcny wrote:
| 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 to understand my problem better.
|
| The change with LLM is I can now just ask my hare brained
| questions first and figure out why it was a stupid question
| later
| skydhash wrote:
| I can't check, but I don't think I've ever asked
| questions on StackOverflow, or even Reddit. Maybe I'm
| lucky, but my searches have always given me enough leads
| to find my own solutions or where to find them. There's a
| lot of documentations and tips floating around the
| internet. And for a lot of technologies, the code is
| available as well (or a debugger).
| gertlex wrote:
| I always enjoyed documenting things. So got great delight
| out of carefully asking the few questions I was really
| stuck on on stack overflow... and then half the time
| later coming up with a solution and adding that good
| answer.
|
| (Mostly this ended up being weird Ubuntu things relating
| to usecases specific to robots... not normal programming
| stuff)
| latexr wrote:
| _Of course_ you're supposed to put in work, _that's how
| you learn_. You have to _think through_ your problem, not
| just look at the back of the math book to copy the
| answer.
|
| The problem with Stack Overflow is not that it makes you
| do the work--that's a good thing--but that it's too often
| too pedantic and too inattentive to the question to
| realise the asker _did_ put in the work, explained the
| problem well, and the question is not a duplicate. The
| reason it became such a curmudgeonly place is precisely
| due to a constant torrent of people treating it like you
| described it, _not_ putting in the effort.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| 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 multiple angles to
| make sure I had a good mental model.
|
| All that is to say, there is something to be said for
| answering "stupid" questions yourself (your own or other
| people's).
| blooalien wrote:
| > ... "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..." :)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Oh, yeah.
|
| SO is infamous for treating question-askers badly.
|
| I have used LLMs for some time, and have no intentions of
| ever going back to SO. I get tired of being insulted.
|
| _> The only stupid question is the one you don 't ask.
|
| - A poster on my old art teacher's studio wall._
| bloomca wrote:
| Pretty much this. Even in topics I'm decently
| knowledgeable, I feel like the vibe from SO answers will
| be "just read the spec" or source code; so I usually was
| able to string other answers together.
|
| With LLMs you can start with first principles, confirm
| basic knowledge (of course, it hallucinates but I find
| it's not that hard to verify things most of the time) or
| just get pointers where to dive deeper.
| lisbbb wrote:
| That's interesting. When SO came out, I was a big
| contributor, all in on getting the karma points and
| whatnots. Eventually, I realized I was being bullied by a
| bunch of Europeans who had never actually worked a real
| job in their entire lives and were, for lack of a better
| term, "software enthusiasts." Invariably, I would answer
| something based on actual experience only to get
| downvoted because some idiot hobbyist thought it was
| incorrect. The thing about this biz is that there are
| things that are blatantly incorrect for sure, but all
| correctness is some shade of gray, highly dependent on
| particular situations. People who lack experience have no
| sense of any of that, though.
|
| A second major issue with SO is that answers decay over
| time. So a good answer back in 2014 is a junk answer
| today. Thus, I would get drive by downvotes on years old
| discussions, which is simply irritating.
|
| So I quit SO and never bothered to answer another single
| question ever again.
|
| SO has suffered from enshitification, and though I
| despise that term, it does sort of capture how sites like
| SO went from excellent resources into cesspools of filth
| and fools.
|
| That LLMs are trained on that garbage is amusing.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > Personally I am glad I learnt programming before
| StackOverflow!
|
| I have not, but at the beginner level you don't really need
| it, there are tons of tutorials and language documentation
| that is easier to understand. Also beginners feel
| absolutely discouraged to ask anything, because even if the
| question is not a real duplicate, you use all terms wrong
| and thus get downvoted to hell and then your question is
| marked as a duplicate to something, that doesn't even
| answer your question.
|
| Later it's quite nice to ask for clarifications of e.g. the
| meaning of something specific in a protocol or the
| behaviour of a particular program. But quite quickly you
| don't actually get any satisfying answers, so you revert to
| just read the source code of the actual program and are
| surprised how easy that actually was. (I mean it's still
| hard every time you start with a new unknown program, but
| it's easier than expected.)
|
| Also when you implement a protocol, asking questions on
| StackOverflow doesn't scale. Not because the time you need
| to wait for answers; even if that were zero, it still takes
| to long time and is deeply unsatisfying to develop a
| holistic enough understanding to write the code. So you
| start reading the RFCs and quickly appreciate how logically
| and understandable they are. You first curse how
| unstructured anything is and then you recognize that the
| order follows what you need to write and you can just trust
| the text and write the algorithm down. Then you see that
| the order in which the protocol is described actually works
| quite well for async and wonder what the legacy code did,
| because not deviating from the standard is actually easier.
|
| At some point you don't understand the standard, there will
| be no answer on StackOverflow, the LLM just agrees with you
| for every conflicting interpretation you suggest, so you
| hate everything and start reading other implementations. So
| no, you still need to figure out a lot for yourself.
| obscurette wrote:
| My professor at uni said that people who have learned to
| search for information before the internet came along are
| the best at searching for information on the internet. My
| personal experience agrees and I'm very glad I'm one of
| such people.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Good lord, I'm not glad.
|
| It was _horrible_. Because it wasn 't about "figuring
| things out for yourself." I mean, if the answer was
| available in a programming language or library manual, then
| debugging was easy.
|
| No, the problem was you spent 95% of your debugging time
| working around bugs and unspecified behavior _in the
| libraries and API 's_. Bugs in Windows, bugs in DLL's, bugs
| in everything.
|
| Very frequently something just _wouldn 't work_ even though
| it was supposed to, you'd waste an entire day trying to get
| the library call to work (what if you called it with less
| data? what if you used different flags?), and then another
| day rewriting your code to use a different library call,
| and praying that worked instead. The amount of time utterly
| _wasted_ was just _massive_. You didn 't learn anything.
| You just suffered.
|
| In contrast, today you just search from the problem you're
| encountering and find StackOverflow answers and GitHub
| issues describing your exact problem, why it's happening,
| and what the solution is.
|
| I'm _so happy_ people today don 't suffer the way we used
| to suffer. When I look back, it seems positively
| masochistic.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| It's true that the time figuring out the buggy behaviour
| would now be less, but the buggy API doesn't go away
| only, because it exists on Github. If you would be able
| to change the source code now, you would've been able to
| fix it back then.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I'm so happy people today don't suffer the way we used
| to suffer.
|
| TBF Ali bugs in some framework you're using still
| happens. The problem wasn't eliminated, just moved to the
| next layer.
|
| Those debugging skills are the most important part of
| working with legacy software (which is what nearly all
| industry workers work in). It sucks but is necessary for
| success in this metric.
| crazygringo wrote:
| My point wasn't that the bugs don't exist anymore.
| Obviously they still do.
|
| My point is that I can frequently figure out how to work
| around them in 5 minutes rather than 2 days, because
| someone else already did that work. I can find out that a
| different function call is the answer, or a weird flag
| that doesn't do what the documentation says, or whatever
| it is.
|
| And _my_ problem of it taking _two days_ to debug
| something _is_ eliminated, usually.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >My point is that I can frequently figure out how to work
| around them in 5 minutes rather than 2 days
|
| Guess I'm just dumb then. I'm still taking days to work
| around some esoteric, underdocumented API issues in my
| day-to-day work.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Guess you missed my use of the words "frequently" and
| "usually", which I intentionally used instead of
| "always".
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I guess I should have used "frequently" and "usually"
| when describing that I constantly run into problems
| relating to API's that cause mini-rabbit holes.
|
| The thing is these API's are probably just as massive as
| old school OS cosebases, so I'm always tripping into new
| landmines. I can be doing high level gameplay stuff one
| week. Then the next week I need to figure out how
| authoring assets works, and then the next week I'm
| performing physics queries to manage character state. All
| in the same API that must span 10s of millions of lines
| of code at this point.
| lisbbb wrote:
| I don't know that it's that much easier today. I ran into
| lots of odd issues with Next.js and authentication and
| there wasn't a whole heck of a lot of useful info out
| there about it. Github does help, but you have to wait
| for the devs to reply.
|
| There are tons of obfuscated Java jar libraries out there
| that are not upgradeable that companies have built
| mission critical systems around only to find out they
| can't easily move to JVM 17 or 25 or whatever and they
| don't like hearing that.
| lisbbb wrote:
| All the while having some dolt of a PM asking for status
| updates.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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 of
| study and work.
| leptons wrote:
| 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).
| fragmede wrote:
| How has your experience with AI been?
| leptons wrote:
| Not great, honestly. It's rather like pulling a lever on
| a slot machine. And I'm not really into gambling.
| blooalien wrote:
| > 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?
| agentcoops wrote:
| I agree with you on the question of extrinsic values and do
| not envy people who are starting college right now, trying to
| make decisions about an extra-ordinarily unclear future. I
| recently became a father and I try to convince myself that in
| eighteen years we'll at least finally know whether it has all
| been hype or not.
|
| However, on the intrinsic value of these new tools when
| developing habits and skills, I just think about the
| irreplaceable role that the (early) internet played in my own
| development and how incredible an LLM would have been. People
| are still always impressed whenever a precocious high
| schooler YouTubes his way to an MVP SaaS launch -- I hope and
| expect the first batch of LLM-accompanied youth to emerge
| will have set their sights higher.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >However, on the intrinsic value of these new tools when
| developing habits and skills, I just think about the
| irreplaceable role that the (early) internet played in my
| own development and how incredible an LLM would have been.
|
| I don't know about that. Early internet taught me I still
| need to put in work to to find answers. I still had to read
| human input (even though I lurked) and realize a lot of
| information was lies and trolls (if not outright scams). I
| couldn't just rely on a few sites to tell me everything and
| had to figure out how to refine my search queries. The
| early internet was like being thrown into a wilderness in
| many ways, you pick up survival skills as you go along even
| if no one teaches you.
|
| I feel an LLM would temper all the curiosity I gained in
| those times. I wouldn't have the discipline to use an LLM
| the "right way". Clearly many adults today don't either.
| catigula wrote:
| I think what you will find is that many people fundamentally
| _don 't care_ about their job for various reasons, chiefly of
| which is most likely that they don't feel fairly compensated,
| and thus outsourcing their labor to AI isn't the fundamental
| identify transplant you think it is.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| The problem is, that many people are also incapable of adding
| much to the process. We have had that kind of situation long
| before "AI". There are tons of gatekeepers and other types of
| people out there, that are a net negative, wherever they are
| employed, either by doing bad work, which someone else needs to
| clean up after them, or by destroying work culture with silly
| shortsighted dogmatism of how things must work, clueless middle
| management, and so on. We need to leave these people somewhere.
| Maybe with "AI" a few more of these are revealed, but the
| problem stays the same. Where do we leave all these people?
| What task can we give them, that is not dehumanizing can we
| give them, where they will be a positive, instead of net
| negative to society? Or do we leave it all up to chance, that
| one day they will find something they are actually good at, and
| that doesn't result in net negative for humanity? What is the
| future of all the people? UBI and letting them figure it out
| doesn't look like such a bad idea.
| zdw wrote:
| For an example of where this already happened, look at the number
| of people who literally don't have a minor inkling of how to plan
| a route or navigate without a GPS and mapping software.
|
| Sure, having a real-time data source is nice for avoiding
| construction/traffic, and I'd use a real-time map, but going
| beyond that to be spoon fed your next action over and over leads
| to dependency.
| heisenbit wrote:
| GPS allowed me to go where I would have been hesitant to
| venture before.
| PessimalDecimal wrote:
| Can you draw this analogy or a bit? What hesitation has an
| LLM helped you overcome?
| LPisGood wrote:
| Why do you consider relying on navigation apps to be over
| dependency? Planning a route is basically an entirely useless
| skill for most people, and if they do need to for some odd
| reason, it's pretty easy.
| zdw wrote:
| In my observation of others, it's not an easy skill unless
| you've done it before. Most people have little idea where
| they are and no idea what they would do next if the turn-by-
| turn tech failed on them. I'd argue it is useful the first
| time you want to take a scenic route, or optimize for things
| other than shortest travel time, like a loop bike route that
| avoids major streets.
|
| Not to say that apps aren't useful in replacing the paper
| map, or doing things like adding up the times required (which
| isn't new - there used to be tables in the back of many maps
| with distances and durations between major locations).
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > In my observation of others, it's not an easy skill
| unless you've done it before.
|
| I always feel like they aren't even trying. Like you just
| make a point were you are, a point were you want to do,
| draw a straight line, take the nearest streets, and then
| you can optimize ad libitum.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Shockingly, many people don't dare doing that any longer.
| WillAdams wrote:
| And for the societal cost of that see stories such as:
|
| https://www.npr.org/2011/07/26/137646147/the-gps-a-fatally-m...
|
| and for the way this mindset erodes values and skills:
|
| https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2018...
| IshKebab wrote:
| The "societal cost" you linked literally says this happens
| with paper maps too. The cause is incorrect maps, not GPS.
|
| (And of course, idiotic behaviour... but GPS doesn't cause
| that.)
|
| Overall GPS has been an absolutely _enormous_ benefit for
| society with barely any downside other than nostalgia for map
| reading.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I think that is exactly the point, that leads people to act
| in idiotic ways: GPS has been too damn good, so people
| blindly trust it, even second guessing or ignoring their
| own perception. The more reliable and easy to access a tool
| is, the more we trust it and often blindly trust it.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| But this is just proof that long ago we ceded
|
| The ballad of John Henry was written in the 1840s
|
| "Does the engine get rewarded for its steam?" That was the
| anti-automation line back then
|
| If you gave up anything that was previously called "AI" we
| would not have computers, cars, airplanes or any type of
| technology whatsoever anywhere
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Does the engine get rewarded for its steam?" That was the
| anti-automation line back then
|
| Sure, and it was wrong because it turns out the conductor
| does get rewarded. Given train strikes that had to be denied
| as recently as a few years ago, it's clear that's an
| essential role 150 years later.
|
| With how they want to frame AI as replacing labor, who's
| being rewarded long term for its thinking? Who's really being
| serviced?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Then its firmly an organizational problem with how reward
| is allocated in human society.
|
| Humans haven't figured out how to include all humans and
| ecological systems into the same "tribe" and therefore the
| infighting between artificially segregated human groups,
| disconnected with ecological "externalities" which prevents
| a sustainable cooperative solution.
|
| So most likely it will continue to be a small number of
| humans dominating the rest with increasingly powerful tools
| that reduce the number of humans required to act in active
| domination or displacement roles.
|
| Humanity long ago decided that its everyone for themselves
| and to encode "might makes right" into ritual, mythology
| and organizational formation-operations.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yes. And do we know what this leads to in history?
| Conflicts, violent uprising, coups, and wars. At some
| point, the population reaches a breaking point and outs
| the oppressors. This happening as recent as last month,
| so 2025 isn't any different from 1525.
|
| The tool itself doesn't matter, but the people are
| falling into the same cycle once again. I can see LLM's
| used ethically and carefully managed to assist the
| populace. That's clearly not what's happening and is the
| entire reason I'm against them. It's tiring being
| dismissed as a luddite just because I don't want big tech
| to yet again recklessly ransack the populace with no
| oversight.
| foxglacier wrote:
| It seems arbitrary to set the limit of how much pointless
| busywork we need as just the amount you're used to. Maybe maps
| are already dumbing it down too much and we should work out
| directions from a textual description of landmarks and compass
| bearings that's not specific to our route? In my opinion,
| dependency on turn-by-turn directions is fine because we do
| actually have the machines to do it for us. We're equally
| dependent on all sorts of useful things that free us to think
| about something actually useful that really can't be done for
| us. For example, consumer law means we can walk into a shop and
| buy something without negotiating a contract with each seller
| and working out all the ways we might get cheated.
|
| Maybe the place to draw the line is different for each
| individual and depends on if they're really spending their
| freed-up time doing something useful or wasting it doing
| something unproductive and self-destructive.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| I don't have an inkling of how to navigate. I don't really see
| the problem.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I just can't comprehend how people can accept that. I mean
| sure you can use your handheld computer, but when I wouldn't
| know where I am and what I need to do to go to where I intend
| to be, I would feel very alone, lost and abandoned, like
| being Napoleon on Elba. In a completely foreign city, often I
| just look at a map before the journey for the general
| direction and then just keep running, without thinking much.
| That works quite well, because street design is actually
| logical and where it isn't there are signs. I'm surprised
| that you often wouldn't even need a map; because you just
| need to look at the signs, they will tell you.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Idk man I think maybe you should consider that there's no
| upside to this insecurity.
|
| I've blitzed through the formerly famous Tokyo subway
| system mindlessly without a clue.
|
| I have utterly no idea what the different us highways in my
| area are but it's never really affected me besides being
| unable to join in mundane discussions of traffic on 95 or
| whatever
| port11 wrote:
| I always thought I had a good sense of navigation, until I
| realised it was getting quite bad.
|
| More or less at the same time I found "Human Being: Reclaim 12
| Vital Skills We're Losing to Technology", and the chapter on
| navigation hit me so hard I put the book down and refused to
| read any more until my navigation skills improved.
|
| They're quite good now. I sit at the toilet staring at the map
| of my city, which I now know quite well. No longer navigate
| with my phone.
|
| I'm scared about the chapter on communication, which I'm going
| through right now.
|
| I do think we're losing those skills, and offloading more
| thinking to technology will further erode your own abilities.
| Perhaps you think you'll spend more time in high-cognition
| activities, but will you? Will all of us?
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > and the chapter on navigation hit me so hard I
|
| Don't leave as hanging, what were they saying?
| port11 wrote:
| Hmm, it's very well written and I don't mean to butcher it.
| It touches on how the people of Polinesia would navigate
| and do it better than Western colonisers. It mentions
| tricks such as memorising reference points, understanding
| the cardinal directions, and whatnot. Print a map of your
| city and put it in the loo. I don't know, it's a great book
| and I won't do it any justice.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Perhaps you think you'll spend more time in high-cognition
| activities, but will you? Will all of us?
|
| When I can get a full time job again, I plan to. I was trying
| to learn how to 3d model before the tech scene exploded 3
| years ago. I'm probably not trying to take back all 12
| factors (I'm fine with where my writing is as of now, even if
| it is subpar), but I am trying to focus on what parts are
| important to me as a person and not take any shortcuts out of
| them.
| crazygringo wrote:
| And so what? Why not be dependent?
|
| I grew up with a glove box full of atlases in my car. On one
| job, I probably spent 30 minutes a day planning the ~4h of
| driving I'd do daily to different sites. Looking up roads in
| indexes, locating grid numbers, finding connecting roads
| spanning pages 22-23, 42-43, 62-63, and 64-65. Marking them and
| trying not to get confused with other markings I'd made over
| the past months. Getting to intersections and having no idea
| which way to turn because the angles were completely different
| from on the map (yes this is a thing with paper maps) and you
| couldn't see any road signs and the car behind you is honking.
|
| What a waste of time. It didn't make me stronger or smarter or
| a better person. I don't miss it the same way I don't miss long
| division.
| tdrz wrote:
| > It didn't make me stronger or smarter or a better person.
|
| Yes, it did.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Believe me, it didn't.
|
| Planning routes isn't exactly rocket science. There's not
| much to learn. It just takes a lot of time. It's busywork.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Planning routes isn't exactly rocket science. There's
| not much to learn.
|
| And people can't go that far to begin with. SThat's the
| scary part.
|
| These little things we think of as insignificant add up
| and give us our ability to think. Change how we perceive
| and navigate (no pun intended) the world. Letting one or
| two of these factors rust probably won't cost us, but how
| far off are we really from the WALL-E future of we
| automate all our cognition, our spatial reasoning, and
| our curiosity?
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >. 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >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
| lapcat wrote:
| I feel lucky now that I grew up and attended school before
| ChatGPT, before smartphones, before social media, before
| ubiquitious internet.
|
| I can't say that I'm totally unaffected by contemporary
| technology, and my attention span seems to have suffered a
| little, but I think I'm mostly still intact. I read most days for
| pleasure and have started a book club. I deliberately take long
| walks without bringing my smartphone; it's a great feeling of
| freedom, almost like going back to a simpler time.
| majorbugger wrote:
| I feel quite similar, thankfully I grew up in the 90s/early
| 00s, and still love to read.
| Trias11 wrote:
| AI is just a helpful tool.
|
| Ages ago someone surely cried that cars will cause our legs to
| disfunction.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Given the current obesity epidemic, I would argue that is the
| case --- a marked contrast to the development of the bicycle:
|
| https://www.roadbikereview.com/threads/editorial-the-bicycle...
|
| >When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his
| attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for
| the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for
| man's convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body
| became. Here, for once, was a product of man's brain that was
| entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or
| irritation to others.
|
| ~ Elizabeth West, Author of Hovel in the Hills
| majorbugger wrote:
| Smartphones are just a helpful tool, yet in conjunction with
| social media they can be attributed to decline of social
| relations and attention in children, raising levels of
| depression, etc.
| watwut wrote:
| Considering some people have problem to walk even short
| distances, it happened for those who drive everywhere.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Our new batch of interns and new grads relies too much on AI,
| they have a lot of trouble thinking and writing for themselves.
| brador wrote:
| AI is here. AGI is here. Moving those goalposts again isn't gonna
| do a thing.
|
| The human/machine meld will continue until completed.
|
| Call me when a machine can set goals.
| raincole wrote:
| When it comes to "humans collectively..." kind of grand scheme
| issues, I just can't take the risk of AI making us stupider too
| seriously, compared to:
|
| - Wars and violence to resolve geopolitical problems
|
| - The biggest trading partner of most countries is waging tariff
| warfare
|
| - Climate change
|
| - Declining birth rate in almost every country
|
| - Healthier foods are getting more expensive despite our
| technology and nutrition knowledge [0]
|
| I'm not saying there is 0 chance that AI will make people dumb,
| but it just doesn't seem to be such an emergency humans should
| collectively be worried about.
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpql53p9w14o.amp
| justonceokay wrote:
| I don't want to nitpick but the declining birthrate is almost
| certainly driven by us becoming smarter, not dumber. In most
| countries the birthrate was propped up heavily by teen
| pregnancy, which the internet and access to healthcare is
| slowly eradicating worldwide.
|
| If we as humans can't maintain our current population without
| getting high schoolers pregnant, then so be it.
| raincole wrote:
| I didn't say declining birth rate is a result of people being
| dumber.
|
| And I also don't think higher education necessarily means
| smarter. I'm quite confident that in the next decade,
| worldwide educational attainment will keep rising with only
| some temporary setbacks. If making people smart is as simple
| as sending them to colleges we really have nothing to worry
| about.
|
| But anyway neither was my point.
| foxglacier wrote:
| You've been reading too much news. There are global societal
| risks but they're not just whatever the popular bogeymen of
| hour are supposed to be. Some of your concerns might even be
| backwards. I doubt you've critically thought about any of these
| and are just regurgitating what was fed to you.
|
| If you lived in an earlier time, you'd be worrying about the
| rise of homosexuality, communism, atheism, etc.
| raincole wrote:
| 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 listed are much more
| 'real' than AI making people stop thinking. (Including the
| birth rate one - yeah, I'm well aware that many people think
| it's a good thing. As someone whose mother worked at a
| nursing home, in a country with TFR of 0.78, I just don't
| agree with them. I believe people hugely underestimate the
| manpower needed to take care of the elderly and disabled.)
| questionableans wrote:
| 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
| for their peers---not necessarily hard physical labor, but
| being out in their communities helping, which is rewarding
| and will help them stay healthy, too.
|
| Easy immigration for regular people so they can move to
| where they're needed.
|
| General efficiency so we're not wasting resources. This
| requires both technological and lifestyle changes, even for
| the rich. The more efficient we can get, the less we have
| to reduce our overall population.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Okay, that sounds like a reasonable plan, but this also
| means that we need to stop the decline at some point, and
| this is not currently a solved problems since that's what
| governments try to achieve right now. Also the decline
| happens in the regions were not much decline is needed
| and in regions were it would be needed the population is
| currently increasing. Also population growth was how we
| have dealt with technological shifts in the past, so we
| need a new way for that.
| questionableans wrote:
| Immigration helps even out where populations are located.
| Immigrants built America.
|
| I really don't think we have anything to worry about not
| having any people left. There's still plenty of innate
| drive to reproduce, both biologically and intellectually
| (as in, educating far more people than the number of kids
| you could ever have).
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Well, there is immigration and there is immigration.
| There are people that move between similar socialized
| countries, directly from one high-paying job to the next.
| Every country wants to have them. Then there are
| basically refugees, that are only named immigrants,
| because they happen to flee through another country. They
| might also have had a well paying job, but they often
| need to learn the language, they often need to learn the
| economic system, the law system, the social norms, etc.
| This takes quite some investment, both in time and money
| from them and the society they migrate to. Learning these
| things already takes years for young people, whose only
| job is to do this. It's much harder for an adult, because
| learning complete new things is harder for adults and
| they also need to cover the bills. They can be the
| smartest person in their country, but they will still
| struggle. On top, they need to fight with the immigration
| offices, have family abroad they want to support, might
| intend to return to their home, instead of settling.
| Thus, they will be an investment first, rather then an
| asset. Some place the time frame for this to be 18 years.
| I question whether investing in children is really the
| worse approach. Even when it is, then it is quite immoral
| to let another poorer country pay the bills for their
| education and then import them.
|
| > Immigrants built America.
|
| These were masses building a new country, not integrating
| into an existing; they had a way lower living standard, a
| lot of them died. It did not go well for the existing
| society in America. The people forming the government
| were british rich aristocrats. And don't think these
| situations are comparable.
| questionableans wrote:
| It's undeniably worth investing in immigrants, including
| refugees. Rhetoric otherwise is just veiled racism. These
| people already exist. It's our duty to take care of them
| as global citizens, just like it's our duty to care for
| the elderly and others.
|
| I also think you'd be surprised how little time to pay
| off would actually be needed. Give people a calm space
| and community (including their friends and family), and
| we will all flourish.
| raincole wrote:
| 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...
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Despite the magazine being named _the Argument_ , this article
| falls into the typical pattern of claiming "the problem isn't X,
| it's Y", and then spending the rest of the article body building
| support for Y, but never once making any argument that refutes X.
| slackfan wrote:
| [flagged]
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| That would only come close to working as an argument if X and
| Y were mutually exclusive, but this article doesn't even
| bother to make the case that they are, nor is there any
| reason why they would be.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _this article doesn 't even bother to make the case that
| they are_
|
| Because it's trivial? Outsmarting can happen because the
| tortoise runs faster or the hare slows down.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Deadline X isn't relevant when deadline Y comes earlier.
| That doesn't mean that deadline X couldn't also kill the
| project, that just doesn't matter when you can show that
| deadline Y already did.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Refuting X is not necessary if it's a subjective perspective
| svat wrote:
| Typically, such articles can be charitably interpreted as
| saying "I worry more about Y than X", rather than as literally
| making two separate claims (that X isn't a problem, and that Y
| is). So as a reader if you're trying to get value out of the
| article, you can focus on evaluating Y, and ignore X that the
| article does not address.
|
| In this particular case, the article is even explicit about
| this:
|
| > _While we have no idea how AI might make working people
| obsolete at some imaginary date, we can already see how
| technology is affecting our capacity to think deeply right now.
| And I am much more concerned about the decline of thinking
| people than I am about the rise of thinking machines._
|
| So the author is already explicitly saying that he doesn't know
| about X (whether AI will take jobs), but prefers to focus in
| the article on Y ("the many ways that we can deskill
| ourselves").
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I agree that may be the charitable interpretation. But so
| often these points are phrased in a way that directly
| attempts to dismiss someone else's concerns ("the real danger
| with AI isn't the thing you're worried about, it's the thing
| I'm worried about!"). I feel like they shouldn't be doing
| that unless they're going to present some kind of reasoning
| that supports both pillars of that claim.
|
| There's nothing stopping them from simply saying "an under-
| recognized problem with AI is Y, let me explain why it should
| be a concern".
|
| Expressing the article as an attack on X, when in fact the
| author hasn't even put five minutes of thought into
| evaluating X, is just a click bait strategy. People go in
| expecting something that undermines X, but they don't get it.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| Humans have a tendency to embed their cognition in the world,
| this is probably one of our greatest strengths as a species.
|
| AI allows for you to offload a lot of cognitive effort, allowing
| you to free up your mind, but the only catch is that AI can be
| politicized and more confident than accurate.
|
| If AI companies can focus on improving accuracy on facts and make
| their AI more philosophically grounded on the rest, it would
| allow people to free up their minds for their immediate real
| lives.
|
| Don't mistake thinking for intelligence.
| gdulli wrote:
| We collectively used social media very responsibly so I'm sure
| that at a society level we well also be thoroughly disciplined in
| our use of AI.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| This feels in line with this same argument that has come along
| with virtually every other tech innovation to help humans work
| less, think less, travel less, basically do anything less than
| they did. So, "tools", in essence.
|
| Is AI special here? Maybe, if it's truly an existential risk.
| kristianc wrote:
| I always think for pieces like these which claim atrophy, well
| yes , but what about the things that you would have never even
| tried without it. The barrier to many things isn't becoming lazy
| when you're already halfway proficient, it's getting started in
| the first place. AI lowers the getting started cost of almost
| everything exponentially.
|
| If the argument is that people shouldn't be able to get started
| on those things without having to slog though a lot of mindless
| drudgework - then people should be honest about that rather than
| dress it up in analogies.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Can't say the author's fixation on reading long texts resonates
| with me. I'm sure Newton's Principia is interesting and all
| but... no I'm not going to read that.
|
| Conciseness is a valuable thing. It wasn't practical to convey
| knowledge in a short form previously because printing and
| distributing a blog post worth of info was too expensive.
|
| On some level long form content just seems... poorly written.
| It's long for the sake of being long.
|
| There are things to be concerned about with students today. They
| are generally shockingly bad at literacy and numeracy. But I
| don't buy that a lack of long form books are the culprit.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Can't say the author's fixation on reading long texts
| resonates with me_
|
| It's an attention and working memory test.
|
| I don't think I've ever prided myself on focus. But signing off
| social media ten years ago has absolutely left me in a
| competitive place when it comes to deep thinking, and that's
| not because I've gotten better at it.
|
| > _It wasn't practical to convey knowledge in a short form
| previously because printing and distributing a blog post worth
| of info was too expensive_
|
| This is entirely ahistoric. Pamphlets and books published in
| volumes, where each volume would today be a chapter, was the
| norm. The novel is a modern invention.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| > This is entirely ahistoric. Pamphlets and books published
| in volumes, where each volume would today be a chapter, was
| the norm. The novel is a modern invention.
|
| I'd be curious to see some examples but I doubt these are
| anywhere near the size of a one or two page blog post.
|
| The referenced example is principia mathematica
| ineedasername wrote:
| "I don't buy that a lack of long form books are the culprit"
|
| I agree that they might not, in themselves, be a necessary
| requirement, however: the ability to engage with material,
| short or long, at a level of deep focus and intentionality is
| important. And one of the (extremely common, historically)
| stronger methods of doing this is with long form content, the
| less passive and more challenging the better.
|
| It touches on the topic of generally transferable-- or diffuse,
| neurologically speaking-- skills. It's what is frustrating when
| speaking with folks who insist on ideas like "I shouldn't have
| to take all these non-STEM courses". A truly myopic world view
| that lacks fundamental understanding of human cognition,
| especially for the subgroup with this sentiment that will
| readily affirm the inverse: Non-STEM folks should nonetheless
| have a strong grounding in maths and sciences for the modes of
| thinking they impart.
|
| Why the difference? It's a strange, highly mechanistic and
| modular view of how critical thinking faculties function. As
| though, even with plenty of exclusivity, there isn't still
| enormous overlapping structures that light up in the brain with
| _all_ tasks that require concentration. The salience network in
| particular is critical when reading challenging material as
| well as during stem-related thinking, eg Math. Which,
| ironically, means the challenging courses involving analytical
| literature are precisely the courses that, taken seriously,
| would lay down neural pathways in a persons salience network
| that would be extremely useful in thinking about challenging
| math problems with more tools at your disposal, more angles of
| attack.
|
| It really shouldn't require much of an intuitive leap to
| realize that reading and interpreting complex works of literary
| creativity or other areas of a GenHumanities topics will help
| impart the ability to think in creative ways. It's in the task
| name. Spending 3x16 hours in a class for a semester, roughly
| the same for work outside the class, 6 or 7 times throughout a
| 4 year college stretch is a very small cost for value.
|
| I think the foundational failing of education for the past
| decades falls into all of these gaps in understanding and the
| inability to engage with the learning process because too few
| people can even articulate the relevance of highly relevant
| material.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| I don't really agree about the premise here. We want people
| to surpass some basic level of competency in literacy and
| numeracy skills. The bars which people fall below here are
| not impressive. Are forced courses a good means to achieve
| that? In my opinion, no, these forced courses are
| functionally useless.
|
| You can't teach things students don't care to learn.
| raincole wrote:
| Reading books is good for your brain. Even just fiction [0].
|
| But I do think people often approach this issue wrong.
| Especially, as demonstrated by the OP article:
|
| > "Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown's English department,
| told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even
| a sonnet," Horowitch wrote.
|
| It's a wrong question to ask why people can't focus on a
| sonnet.
|
| The real question is: why do the students who are not
| interested in literature choose to major _English_? What
| societal and economical incentives drove them to do that?
|
| [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4733342/
| NaomiLehman wrote:
| I would say that fiction is incredibly more important than
| reading non-fiction, in general, for human development.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| Reading sets up, programs and tunes the holodeck in your
| brain. The better the holodeck is programmed, the better
| and more accurate the simulation is.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| > It wasn't practical to convey knowledge in a short form
| previously because printing and distributing a blog post worth
| of info was too expensive.
|
| I don't think this is true, people have been printing
| newspapers, pamphlets, and leaflets for hundreds of years.
|
| It isn't only long form content that the printing press was
| good for, It's just that the long term content tends to be
| remembered longer. Probably because it isn't just long for the
| sake of being long :p
| daxfohl wrote:
| I agree with your main point, though with an asterisk.
|
| I don't think concise is necessarily better than long, nor do I
| think long is better than concise. The thing is, humanity tends
| to go in cycles. Poems for Babylonians, long epics for the
| Greeks, back to poems for Shakespeare and Goethe, then the
| Russians brought back epics. Kind of a mix during the 20th
| century, but poetry seemed to slowly fade, and novels trended
| generally shorter. (All of this is very 30K foot-view; of
| course there were many exceptions in every era).
|
| Philip Roth predicted the end of the era of the novel at some
| point, long (relatively) before AI [1]. He said that, similar
| to poetry in the early 20th century, humanity has evolved past
| the meaningfulness of the long-form novel.
|
| This doesn't mean "the humanities is dead." It just means that
| we're entering another cycle where a different from of
| humanities needs to take over from what we've had in the past.
|
| Anyone arguing that the death of the long-form novel is
| equivalent to the death of humanities is missing the fact that
| "humanities" is not a precisely-defined set of topics written
| in stone. Though it can seem like this is the case at any one
| point in time, humanities can, and must, exist in many forms
| that will invariably change as humanity's needs do likewise.
| That's why its prefix is "human".
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/books/philip-roth-
| apprasi...
| r_singh wrote:
| AI is essentially a puppet and will always be one. If you rely on
| it to educate yourself about anything non-objective (that cannot
| be measured), it will reflect the biases it's tuned to,
| presenting a version of reality shaped by the perspectives and
| interests of its ultimate puppet masters--the board and major
| (non-futile) shareholders.
| dagmx wrote:
| Atrophy has really been an issue in my recent hiring cycles for
| good senior engineers.
|
| 80% of senior candidates I interview now aren't able to do junior
| level tasks without GenAI helping them.
|
| We've had to start doing more coding tests to weed their skill
| set out as a result, and I try and make my coding tests as
| indicative of our real work as possible and the work they current
| do.
|
| But these people are struggling to work with basic data
| structures without an LLM.
|
| So then I put coding aside, because maybe their skills are
| directing other folks. But no, they've also become dependent on
| LLMs to ideate.
|
| That 80% is no joke. It's what I'm hitting actively.
|
| And before anyone says: well then let them use LLMs, no. Firstly,
| we're making new technologies and APIs that LLMs really struggle
| with even with purpose trained models. But furthermore, If I'm
| doing that, then why am I paying for a senior ? How are they any
| different than someone more junior or cheaper if they have become
| so atrophied ?
| k__ wrote:
| It's a matter of opinion what you should know and what you can
| easily google or ask an LLM.
| dagmx wrote:
| If someone needs to continuously google how to use the basic
| data structures in a language they use every day, then I
| worry about their ability for knowledge retention as a whole.
| Herring wrote:
| "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an
| invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building,
| write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone,
| comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act
| alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch
| manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight
| efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
|
| -- Robert A. Heinlein
|
| (It's a matter of opinion)
| dagmx wrote:
| Except I'm not hiring someone to do 20 things. I'm hiring
| them to do the one thing they say they can do.
|
| Would I hire a taxi driver who can't drive to drive me
| somewhere?
|
| Why would I hire a software engineer who can't
| demonstrate their abilities.
| Herring wrote:
| edit: wasting my time
| dagmx wrote:
| Please re-read the original comment. All your suggestions
| are addressed there and I explain why this is inadequate.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I'm hiring them to do the one thing they say they can
| do.
|
| If you hire an amazing programmer but then ask for a
| quick report on their implementation and it's gibberish.
| Is that satisfactory? Their job isn't to write reports.
|
| If you ask them during lunch to grab your meal from the
| desk and they spill it everywhere, is that satisfactory?
| You didn't hire then for their ability to carry a plate.
|
| EDIT: I should add here that I agree with your hiring
| approach. I just think you're critiquing this quote in
| the wrong way. The point of the quote is that humans have
| a capacity to learn and perform many tasks, even if they
| do some better than others. LLMs hinder this ability.
| 0x696C6961 wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the point you're trying to
| make. Do you think a senior developer needs a basic
| understanding of the language they use or not?
| ben_w wrote:
| > Do you think a senior developer needs a basic
| understanding of the language they use
|
| 4 years ago, I'd have said "obviously".
|
| At this point? Only for specialist languages the LLMs
| suck at. (Last I tried, "suck at" included going all the
| way from yacc etc. upwards when trying to make a custom
| language).
|
| For most of us, what's now important is: Design patterns;
| architectures; knowing how to think of big-O
| consequences; and the ability to review what the AI farts
| out, which sounds like it should need an understanding of
| the programming language in question, but it's
| surprisingly straightforward to read code in languages
| you're not fmiliar with, and it gets even easier when
| your instruction to the AI includes making the code easy
| to review.
| dagmx wrote:
| It's not just the language but the domain within the
| language.
|
| I see both the latest Claude and GPT models fall over on
| a lot of C++, Swift/ObjC and more complex Python code.
| They do better in codebases where there is maximal
| context with type hints in the local function. Rust does
| well, and it's easier to know when it's messed up since
| it won't compile.
|
| They also tend to clog up code bases with a cacophony of
| different coding paradigms.
|
| A good developer would be able to see these right away,
| but someone who doesn't understand the basics at the
| least will happily plug along not realizing the wake
| they've left.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I think you're approaching the quote the wrong way. It's
| more like "a C++ developer should be able to look at
| Javascript and ascertain the gist of what's happening,
| even if they can't finely dissect the exact issues on a
| language level."
|
| Though the quote is more broad than that. It's really
| saying "a C++ developer should be able to write up a
| report, participate in an interview panel, plan a small
| party for Jane's birthday this Friday, and be able to
| make conversation with the external partner coming in
| today". Few of us are simply just writing code all day.
| raincole wrote:
| I think it depends on what you consider "basic data
| structures"...
|
| If it's the List and Dict (or whatever they are called in
| that language) then maybe. But I'd not expect someone to
| spell the correct API by heart to use Stack, Queue, Deque,
| etc, even they're text book examples of "basic" data
| structures.
| dagmx wrote:
| For me, in a coding test, basic data structures are
| (using Python terms for brevity):
|
| - lists
|
| - dictionaries
|
| - sets
|
| - nested versions of the above
|
| - strings (not exactly a data structure)
|
| strings are tenuously in my data structures list because
| I let people treat them as ascii arrays to avoid most of
| the string footguns.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| The question is: What are they better at? If you think the
| answer is "Nothing", I would be suspicious.
| dagmx wrote:
| It's never nothing, but it's a matter of whether that
| something is enough of a differentiator.
|
| More so, can they demonstrate that in interviews. We
| specifically structure our interviews so coding is only
| one part of them, and try and suss out other aspects of a
| candidate (problem solving, project leading, working with
| different disciplines) and then weight those against the
| needs of the role to avoid over indexing on any specific
| aspect. It also lets us see if there are other roles for
| them that might be better fits.
|
| So a weak coder has opportunities to show other
| qualities. But generally someone interviewing for a
| coding heavy role who isn't a strong coder tends to not
| sufficiently demonstrate those other qualities. Though of
| course there are exceptions.
| Narciss wrote:
| I was actually thinking about this the other day while vibe
| coding for a side project.
|
| I am a lead engineer, but I've been using AI in much of my code
| recently. If you were to ask me to code anything manually right
| now, I could do it, but it would take a bit to acclimate to
| writing code line by line. By "a while", I mean maybe a few
| days.
|
| Which means that if we were to do a coding interview without
| LLMs, I would probably flop without me doing a bit of work
| beforehand, or at least struggle. But hire me regardless, and I
| would get back on track in a few days and be better than most
| from then on.
|
| Careful not to lose talent just because you are testing for
| little used but latent capabilities.
| dagmx wrote:
| In your scenario though, how do you avoid hiring based on
| blind faith?
|
| How do I know you aren't just a lead with a very good team to
| pick up the slack?
|
| How do I separate you from the 20 other people saying they're
| also good?
|
| Why would I hire someone who can't hit the ground running
| faster than someone else who can?
|
| Furthermore, why would I hire someone who didn't prepare at
| all for an interview, even if just mentally?
|
| How do you avoid just hiring based on vibes? Bear in mind
| every candidate can claim they're part of impressive projects
| so the resume is often not your differentiator.
| htrp wrote:
| We're gonna have to reinvent swe hiring
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| You invest time into actually looking at applications
| properly and look at their previous work and ask them
| questions about that. The curious and learning mind will
| probably have some projects, because they are not only into
| the job for the money, but because they have a passion for
| the job. That's not a requirement, but it distinguishes the
| great ones from the mediocre ones.
| dagmx wrote:
| That's also something any number of people can fake
| easily. There's a ton of smooth talkers who can hype up a
| project and talk in abstract about their previous
| projects but weren't on the side of delivering it.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Show code and explain, or it didn't happen. Takes a
| capable interviewer, of course, to distinguish sweet talk
| from profound knowledge.
| woooooo wrote:
| Leetcode was always a skill mostly practiced for interviews
| though, right? Arguably its a better signal now in the era of
| vibecoding that someone can do it themselves if they have to.
| It used to be "yeah of course I'm responsible in my job, I
| use a library for this stuff". But in this era, maybe
| performative leetcode has more value as a signal that you can
| really guide the AI.
| roxolotl wrote:
| Isn't the solution to tell the interviewee that they will
| have to write some code without llm support? In the case of
| someone like you I'd hope they'd take that as notice to spend
| a tiny bit of time getting back up to speed. If it really is
| just a day or two then it shouldn't be an issue
| dagmx wrote:
| Yes, I fore warn all candidates that they will do a coding
| test, with examples of similar tests.
|
| They are allowed to suggest the language they're most
| familiar with, they're told they don't need to finish and
| they don't need to be correct.
|
| It's just about seeing how they work through something.
|
| If someone like the person you replied to would show up
| that unprepared , I would really question their own
| judgement of their abilities.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| The problem becomes distinguishing someone like you, who has
| the skill but hasn't recently used it vs someone who doesn't
| have the skill.
| rurp wrote:
| Expecting senior job applicants to have regained basic coding
| skills seems reasonable to me. I would be skeptical of an
| applicant who hadn't made the level of effort you're
| describing before applying.
| Ekaros wrote:
| A few days to brush up those skills really should not be
| too much to ask. I am against leetcode as much as anyone.
| But maybe just maybe refamiliarising yourself with well
| fundamentals is not bad idea. At least on the most
| prominent technologies you advertise.
| risyachka wrote:
| >> and I would get back on track in a few days
|
| Thats the issue. How can one be sure you can actually get
| back on track - or - you never were on the track in the first
| place and you are just an AI slopper?
|
| Thats why on interview you need to show skills. And on actual
| job you can use AI.
| alchemism wrote:
| Pair a senior with an agent LLM, pair a junior with an agent
| LLM, measure the output over some cycles. You will find your
| answer in the data, one way or another.
| dagmx wrote:
| Truthfully, in my experience, they both end up performing
| near the level of the LLM. It's an averaging factor not an
| uplifting one.
| alchemism wrote:
| Right now we are seeing junior hiring fall off a cliff,
| whether or not LLMs are responsible is hard to say. But if
| it does turn out that everyone performs to the level of the
| LLM, then a vast amount of business dollars can be saved by
| hiring starving English majors exclusively and dispensing
| with STEM majors altogether.
| dagmx wrote:
| I said it's an averaging factor not an absolute match.
|
| A senior with a LLM will likely still outperform a
| junior. A CS major with an LLM will out perform an
| English major.
|
| But is the senior out performing the junior at a level
| that warrants the difference in salary?
|
| Then people will point to the intangibles of experience,
| but will forget the intangibles of being fresh and new
| with regards to being malleable and gung-ho.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| I keep hearing this however I was just at a career fair
| for University of Washington CSE new grads (representing
| my company) and it was packed with companies hiring.
| Obviously, this is just an anecdote, is there any good
| data showing the real situation?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| It's anecdata from layoff reports and whatever people see
| from their own employer / industry.
|
| To add my two cents of anecdotes from what I can tell in
| the creative agency world: shit sucks hard at the moment.
| Clients are cutting back budgets _hard_ and a lot of them
| explicitly ask for AI strategies - obviously in terms of
| saving money. Blockchain craze was similarly bad when it
| comes to client requests for stuff that Just Did Not Make
| Sense, but at least there was _money_ pouring in. And it
| 's that way across the industry, everyone I know feels
| the same. There's no money from clients that would pay
| for juniors, so no juniors are getting hired even if it
| might blow up in five, six years when there are no fresh
| juniors/intermediates around.
|
| Personally, I decided to part ways. There's many places I
| want to be, but the creative industry when the AI bubble
| and hiring anti-bubble finally pops? Oh hell no.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I mean, I don't know if I can specifically find new grad
| tech industry that gets a tech job. But definitely look
| at hiring numbers in tech and among the youngest
| demographic. They both aren't good, like pretty much all
| jobs right now outside of healthcare
|
| The BLS works as well, for now. I think that's quickly
| going to change with future reports.
|
| This was also making the rounds last ywar:
| https://futurism.com/the-byte/berkeley-professor-grads-
| job-m...
| risyachka wrote:
| Nope, you don't pair senior dev with llm. You allow them
| use llm, but not an agent.
|
| IF agent starts generating code - nobody will have time and
| stamina to rewrite all the slop, it will just get approved.
|
| Copy/paste from chat is the only way to ensure proper
| quality so that developer can write high quality code and
| just outsource to AI tasks that are boring or generic.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| What do you consider senior?
|
| We've seem to have had a significant title-inflation in the
| last 5 years, and everybody seems to be at least a senior.
|
| With no new junior positions opening up, I'm not even sure I
| blame them.
| dagmx wrote:
| A senior to me is someone who can tackle complex problems
| without significant supervision , differentiated from a lead
| in that they still need guidance on what the overall tasks
| are. They should be familiar enough with their tech stacks
| that I can send them to meetings (after the requisite on-
| boarding time) to represent the team if needed (though I try
| and not overload my engineers with meetings) and answer
| feasibility questions for our projects. They don't need
| constant check ins on their work. I should be able to bounce
| ideas of them readily on how to approach bigger problems.
|
| A junior being someone who needs more granular direction or
| guidance. I'd only send them to meetings paired with a
| senior. They need close to daily check ins on their work. I
| include them in all the same things the seniors do for
| exposure, but do not expect the same level of technical
| strength at this time in their careers.
|
| I try not to focus on years of experience necessarily, partly
| because I was supervising teams at large companies very early
| in my career.
| spaceballbat wrote:
| Grade inflation has spilled over into the corporate world. I've
| interviewed people titled "principal" who would barely qualify
| as "senior" a few decades ago.
| ben_w wrote:
| "Senior" was already a weird title, given it could have been
| anything from 3-10 years of experience even back in 2021.
|
| I've seen people with 10 years experience blindly duplicate
| C++ classes rather than subclass them, and when questioned
| they seemed to think the mere existence of `private:` access
| specifiers justified it. There were two full time developers
| including him, and no code review, so it's not like any of
| the access specifiers even did anything useful.
| spaceballbat wrote:
| The jump from junior to senior means you can self start and
| have created enough of a network to seek out help. Junior
| used to be a 1-3 year training period. Senior to principal
| means you have signififcant positive impact across the
| company: upper management relies on you to define the
| roadmap. Most people hang out in 'senior' for their entire
| careers because they never have that drive to stand out.
| Thats why there are titles like "staff" and "senior staff"
| to promote people who don't have what it takes to get to
| principal.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I always wondered why don't we have just developer level.
| That is for those with say 5-7 years of experience. That
| are skilled enough to do their bit on their own, but
| might not yet fully see the big picture on whole
| application scale for whole thing...
|
| Straight from junior to senior just feels weird jump.
| Junior and Senior sound like adjectives to me.
| Qualifiers. And there should be some middle point in
| between where bulk of the workforce doing the actual job
| should be.
| erichocean wrote:
| > _Firstly, we're making new technologies and APIs that LLMs
| really struggle_
|
| LLMs absolutely excel at this task.
|
| Source: Me, been doing it since early July with Gemini Pro 2.5
| and Claude Opus.
|
| So good, in fact, that I have no plans to hire software
| engineers in the future. (I have hired many over my 25 years
| developing software.)
| dagmx wrote:
| So you've made a decision based on three months of use.
|
| I am legitimately interested in your experience though. What
| are you creating where you can see the results in that time
| frame to make entire business decisions like that?
|
| I would really like to see those kinds of productivity gains
| myself.
| erichocean wrote:
| I'll give you an easy example. LMDB has a (very) long-
| standing bug where "DUPSORT" databases become corrupted
| over time.
|
| Separately, I wanted to make some changes to LMDB but the
| code is so opaque that it's hard to do anything with it
| (safely).
|
| So I gave the entire codebase to Gemini Pro 2.5 and had it
| develop a glossary for local variable renames and for
| structure member renames. I then hand-renamed all of the
| structures (using my IDE's struct member refactoring
| tools). Then I gave the local variable glossary and each
| function to Gemini and had it rewrite the code. Finally, I
| had a separate Gemini Pro 2.5 context and a Claude Opus
| context validate that the new code was LOGICALLY IDENTICAL
| the previous code (i.e. that only local variables were
| renamed, and that the renaming was consistent).
|
| Most of the time, GPro did the rewrite correctly the first
| time, but other times, it took 3-4 passes before GPro and
| Opus agreed. Each time, I simply pasted the feedback from
| one of the LLMs back into the original context and told it
| to fix it.
|
| The largest function done this way was ~560 LOC.
|
| Anyway, the entire process took around a day.
|
| However, at one point, GPro reported: "Hey, this code is
| logically identical BUT THERE IS A SERIOUS BUG." Turns out,
| it had found the cause of the DUPSORT corruption, without
| any prompting--all because the code was much cleaner than
| it was at the start of the day.
|
| That is wild to me! (It actually found another, less
| important bug too.)
|
| Without LLMs, I would have never even attempted this kind
| of refactoring. And I certainly wouldn't pay a software
| engineer to do it.
|
| > _What are you creating where you can see the results in
| that time frame to make entire business decisions like
| that?_
|
| I've developed new libraries (using GPro) that have APIs it
| can reliably use. What's easy for LLMs can be hard for
| humans, and what's easy for humans can be hard for LLMs. If
| you want to use LLMs for coding, it pays to need code they
| are really good at writing. AI-first development is the big
| win here.
|
| (This is all in Clojure BTW, which isn't really trained for
| by vendors. The idea that LLMs are ONLY good at, e.g.
| Python, is absurd.)
| dagmx wrote:
| While your lldb use is interesting,, I'm very much
| interested in what you said you're doing greenfield. What
| is the scope of that?
|
| Clojure has enough code out there that it's well covered
| by the major LLMs.
| drdaeman wrote:
| > aren't able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping
| them
|
| I'm assuming "unable" means not complete lack of knowledge how
| to approach it, but lack of detail knowledge. E.g. a junior
| likely remembers some $algorithm in detail (from all the recent
| grind), while a senior may no longer do so but only know that
| it exists, what properties it has (when to use, when to not
| use), and how to look it up.
|
| If you don't think of something regularly, memory of that fades
| away, becomes just a vague remembrance, and you eventually lose
| that knowledge - that's just how we are.
|
| However, consider that not doing junior-level tasks means it
| was unnecessary for the position and the position was about
| doing something else. It's literally a matter of specialization
| and nomenclature mismatch: "junior" and "senior" are frequently
| not different levels of same skill set, but somewhat different
| skill sets. A simple test: if at your place you have juniors -
| check if they do the same tasks as seniors do, or if they're
| doing something different.
|
| Plus the title inflation - demand shifts and title-catching
| culture had messed up the nomenclature.
| dagmx wrote:
| I don't test rote algorithmic knowledge in our coding tests.
| Candidates can pick their language
|
| Candidates can ask for help, and can google/llm as well if
| they can't recall methods. I just do not allow them to post
| the whole problem in an LLM and need to see them solve
| through the problem themselves to see how they think and
| approach issues.
|
| This therefore also requires they know the language that they
| picked to do simple tasks , including iterating iterables
| drdaeman wrote:
| That's weird. Any senior developer worth their salt surely
| should know that LLMs produce a lot of weird nonsense with
| one-shot prompts, so they need to talk design first, then
| code the implementation.
|
| This said, IMHO one-shot is worth a try because it's
| typically cheap nowadays - but if it's not good (or, for
| interview reasons, unavailable) any developer should have
| the skills to break the problem down and iterate on it,
| especially if all learning/memory-refreshing resources are
| so available. That's the skill that every engineer should
| have.
|
| I guess I must take my words back - if that's how nowadays
| "seniors" are then I don't know what's going on. My only
| guess is that you must've met a bunch of
| scammers/pretenders who don't know anything but trying to
| pass for a developer.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > including iterating iterables
|
| I would've chosen a language without iterators, what would
| you do then??
| dagmx wrote:
| It doesn't need to explicitly be an iterable. But can you
| loop through an array as part of the problem solve.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| That sounds really hard, you can only hope to solve that
| with AI. /s
|
| Good luck, sounds like a fair hiring process.
| sktrdie wrote:
| > then why am I paying for a senior ?
|
| Because they know how to talk to the AI. That's literally the
| skill that differentiates seniors from juniors at this point.
| And a skill that you gain only by knowing about the problem
| space and having banged your head at it multiple times.
| htrp wrote:
| Except most junior devs will be better than sr devs at
| wholehearted ai adoption
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >That's literally the skill that differentiates seniors from
| juniors at this point.
|
| If your product has points where llms falter, this use a
| useless metric.
|
| >and having banged your head at it multiple times.
|
| And would someone who relied on an LLM be doing this?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| The actual skill is having knowledge and knowing when to not
| trust the AI, because it is hallucinating or bullshitting
| you. Having worked on enough projects to have a good idea
| about how things should be structured and what is extensible
| and what not. What is maintainable and what not. The list
| goes on and on. A junior rarely has these skills and
| especially not, when they rely on AI to figure things out.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Are you sure you're not just mostly seeing the candidates who
| are using LLMs to pass through the earlier screening phases
| with flying colors despite their lack of skills? (i.e., they
| haven't atrophied, they just weren't very good to begin with).
| There's always a lot of unqualified applicants to a job but
| LLMs can make them way more effort to filter out.
| dagmx wrote:
| We have the coding test as the second phase now for
| specifically that reason, and might have more once they're
| doing the full interview set.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| That's what I said about compiled languages. No one knows how
| to optimize assembly anymore, they just let the compiler do it.
| wyre wrote:
| Why not let them use LLMs? LLM's are a tool for the job so you
| wind the find the candidate that can most effectively use that
| tool in your role. If LLM's struggle with your technologies and
| API's then a developer that can use an LLM for development with
| good results should be a desirable thing, right?
|
| Can the senior developer understand and internalize your
| codebase? Can they solve complex problems? If you're paying
| them to be a senior developer, it likely isn't worth their time
| to concern themselves with basic data structures when they are
| trying to solve more complex problems.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You literally asked the question the GP pre-emptively
| answered. Read their last paragraph.
|
| >Can the senior developer understand and internalize your
| codebase?
|
| Would you trust someone who needs llms in the hiring phase to
| be able to do this higher order tasks if they can't nail down
| the fundamentals?
| derekcheng08 wrote:
| AI is (or has the potential to be) a gigantic abstraction layer
| and software engineering is filled with abstraction layers. But
| one thing that has consistently held true is that the best
| engineers -- while taking advantage of abstractions -- also have
| the curiosity and intelligence to peel back and at least
| understand the gist of what's going on behind the scenes. So
| while most of us will never write a TCP/IP stack, it's helpful to
| know the protocol. While many will simply call into a hosted
| distributed database, strong engineers will know broadly how it
| is implemented and there are availability/consistency trade-offs,
| etc.
|
| It's the same here: if you just shut off your brain and do what
| AI says, copy/pasting stuff from/to chat windows, that's going to
| be a bad time.
| simianwords wrote:
| Why does everyone talk about this part of the issue but never the
| other one? Society can't progress if we can't delegate the boring
| stuff and work on complicated stuff. How else will it progress?
|
| Do you think we could have progressed to this level if we were
| still calculating stuff by hand? Log tables??
| IT4MD wrote:
| The race for AI, running over anything and anyone that stands
| between an AI and resources like energy, water, etc, combined
| with corporations shoving AI, unasked for, into anything and
| everything will ensure everyone hates everything about AI, except
| for the Ponzi scheme winners like Altman.
| thisisit wrote:
| This seems like the age old discussion of how new technology
| changes our lives and makes us "lazy".
|
| Before the advent of smartphones people needed to remember phone
| numbers and calculate on the fly. Now people don't even remember
| their own numbers and save it on somewhere and open the
| calculator app for smallest of things.
|
| But there are still people who can do both. They are not luddites
| rather not fully reliant on smartphones.
|
| Same thing is going to happen with LLMs.
|
| At some point restricting LLM usage is going to be considered
| good parenting just like restricting phones are today. Use it for
| some purpose but not all.
| daxfohl wrote:
| The author may have hit on the answer without realizing it. He's
| in the gym doing pull-ups. Is his lat strength necessary for some
| important part of his survival? Highly unlikely. Pre-20th
| century, when most work was highly physical, would he have gone
| out after work to research and test out efficient lat exercises?
| Probably not either.
|
| If we're not using our brains for work, then maybe it'll actually
| increase our deliberateness to strengthen them at home. In fact,
| I can't imagine that not to be the case. I mean, it's possible we
| turn into a society of mindless zombies, but fundamentally, at
| least among some reasonable percentage of the population, I have
| to believe there is an innate desire to learn and understand and
| build, and a relationship-building aspect to it as well.
| kagevf wrote:
| One approach would be to write code first, then run it by AI to
| get a critique. I think that strikes a good balance between
| avoiding atrophy and still getting the benefits of the tool.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Hug your pre-LLM era senior software engineers tightly, they
| aren't making more of them. And some of them are already
| deteriorating after 2 years of LLM tech.
| jmward01 wrote:
| There is some discussion here, but the counterargument was never
| raised: We are transitioning to new things to learn and focus on
| so the old tests and measures aren't valid.
|
| Think of it like this: If 3d printing (finally) gets good enough,
| is it an issue that most people aren't good at traditional
| manufacturing? I think we have discussion to be had here but
| articles like this always strike me as shallow since they keep
| judging now based on the past. This is a common problem. We see
| it in politics (make X great again anyone?) and it is a very hard
| problem to solve since understanding 'better' is a very hard
| thing to do even with hindsight much less when you are in the
| middle of change. I do think AI has serious harms, but if all we
| do is look for the harms we won't find and capture the benefits.
| Articles should balance these things better.
| artur_makly wrote:
| One way schools, from middle and high schools to universities,
| can mitigate AI-driven cheating and cognitive decline is by
| radically rethinking how they conduct final exams.
|
| They should require in-person oral dissertations, presented
| before a panel of one to three teachers and lasting one to two
| hours. Ideally, the topic would be based on the student's own
| original thesis.
|
| This approach restores creativity and critical thinking, because
| at any moment during the examination, teachers can ask probing
| questions, explore unexpected tangents, and even encourage real-
| time brainstorming.
|
| THIS is the kind of challenge that can help our species evolve
| beyond its current state of neurological atrophy.
|
| NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study has been doing this
| since'72
|
| https://gallatin.nyu.edu/
|
| *it was probably the most stimulating 4 years of my life.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| How is this not what is currently the norm? How do
| dissertations work at your university, if they are not exactly
| this?
| more_corn wrote:
| So like right now? Writing structures your thinking and clarifies
| your ideas. Students just have chat gpt write for them.
|
| Vibe coding takes the heavy thinking and offloads it to the
| machine. Even people who know how turn off their brains when they
| vibe code.
|
| The time is now. The effects are available for inspection today.
| Pair with ai on something you know well. Find the place where it
| confidently acts but makes an error. Check in on your ability to
| reactivate your mind and start solving the problem.
|
| It feels like waking up without coffee. Our minds are already
| mostly asleep when we lean on Ai for anything.
| arikrak wrote:
| I recently wrote a short post on something similar: while AI is
| able to solve increasingly longer tasks, people's attention spans
| are getting shorter. https://www.zappable.com/p/ai-vs-human-
| attention-spans
|
| Hopefully people can learn to use AI to help them, while still
| thinking on their own. It's not like that many of the assignments
| in school were that useful anyways...
| daxfohl wrote:
| The education system is already a relic of the past. All the
| points mentioned in the article assumes that a classroom full of
| students writing five-paragraph essays on The Red Badge of
| Courage in 12-point TNR with one-inch margins, hastily graded by
| an overworked, underpaid public school teacher is still the best
| way to teach kids in 2025 about critical thinking.
|
| I picture going forward we'll have much more personalized AI-led
| curricula that students work on at their own pace. The AI systems
| can let you use as much or as little AI autocompletion as they
| feel appropriate, can test your understanding real-time by adding
| some subtle mistakes or opportunities for improvement, and
| iterate until you get it.
|
| The main issue I worry about is perhaps the opposite. With
| education actually becoming more effective and interesting, what
| happens to kids' social and collaboration skills? And maybe
| that's where human teachers can still add value. Or in discipline
| and motivation, etc. IDK exactly how that plays out, but I
| imagine there's still a role for human teachers to play, and
| perhaps that aspect is even more important than "lecturer" and
| "grader" that takes most of their time now.
| port11 wrote:
| It's ironic we assume a technology that hallucinates random
| garbage will be any better than underpaid and overworked
| teachers. The solution, to me, would be better paid and better
| supported teachers.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| This comment feels like it was written in 2023.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Underpaid, overworked, and also often the unemployable dregs
| who would take such a horrible job. In the US we destroyed
| education by whining about taxes and public employee unions,
| and cutting the legs out from under it with charters, but
| that doesn't mean that the teachers that are left are worth
| anything; in fact it makes it more likely they aren't.
|
| If there's anything I'm both hoping that LLMs will replace,
| and also think of as one of the most vitally important
| reasons to have locally running, open models, it's teaching.
| I'm from the age when teaching was "good," and it was bad.
| The reason why people remember the teachers they were in love
| with was because of how distinct they were from the rest.
|
| Teachers can be used to teach hard things, like
| socialization, cleaning, cooking, and how to do backflips.
| obscurette wrote:
| Are you a parent? Have you ever seen a kid growing up? 90%+ of
| kids wouldn't care at all about any work or learning without
| social pressure from parents, teachers and peers. That's the
| whole point of schools - to create a social pressure to put all
| this knowledge into heads of kids in hope that some of this
| would be useful for them. And to do it through all these
| awfully messy years we call childhood and adolescence.
| logicchains wrote:
| I don't know where you grow up but in most of the developed
| world kids mock kids for putting effort into study; peers
| provide social pressure against learning, not towards it.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| That depends on _peer quality_. And it 's why so much of
| education outcomes depends on peer quality.
|
| It's also why there's a considerable opposition to
| tracking.
|
| If you evaluate academic ability, inevitably, the students
| who want to learn things are going to be closer to the top,
| and the ones who don't want to learn things are going to be
| closer to the bottom.
|
| Now, group students up by ability aggressively: the "top
| end classes" are going to devour the school program - while
| the "bottom end classes" would devolve into a pandemonium.
|
| Naturally, the parents of the bottom end students would
| want there to be zero tracking, so that the average "peer
| quality" pulls their children up, and the parents of the
| top end students want there to be the most aggressive
| tracking possible, so that the average "peer quality"
| doesn't drag their children down.
|
| A big part of what the rich parents pay for when they send
| their kids into those expensive private schools is access
| to better "peer quality". "If a kid's parents are rich"
| isn't a perfect proxy for "if the kid wants to be learning
| things", but it outperforms the average. And if a private
| school is actually willing to expel the most disruptive
| students, then it's going to tip the scales even further.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Expanded/revised version of this article:
|
| https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-end-of-thinking
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45372507)
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Our survival, not hypotetical, but actual, on an individual basis
| is tied directly to how much value we personally can extract from
| others.
|
| AI, even when it provides a net benefit, does threathen the value
| potentially offered by individuals.
|
| It's complicated.
| manmal wrote:
| The article sets out with an urban legend that doesn't hold
| water:
|
| > More time is more tension; more pain is more gain.
|
| While this meta analysis [1] found that:
|
| > Results indicate that hypertrophic outcomes are similar when
| training with repetition durations ranging from 0.5 to 8s.
|
| Maybe author should have chosen the amount of training resistance
| for the intro allegory (perceived effort?). This would have made
| their point just as well.
|
| 1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25601394/
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| I have a friend who I suspect has resorted to answering me with
| AI when I ask him a question via text message that he may not
| know the answer to. Many people do not want to appear to not know
| things, so they resort to this tactic. I personally find it to be
| a terrible trend.
| suyash wrote:
| This article explains 'Cognitive Time Under Tension' quite well:
| https://sekol.ninja/cognitive-time-under-tension-the-missing...
| arbirk wrote:
| Agree. It is al about what we make the robots do. You can give a
| "dumb ai" a gun and let it rampage.
|
| Let's celebrate humanity and our robot friends (looking at my
| romba)
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