Update: I meant to compare calculators to something like a slide ruler for logarithms. I'm not from US and I tend to forget that some people use calculators to take 20% of 500.
This is the author's lament. These students are skipping over personal mastery.
I got an engineering degree and don't remember ever being required to do math without a calculator. Of course, some things are easier if you don't need to bust out a calculator for everything.
I'm glad that we have calculators and computing devices, but I'm not glad that they have made teens with basic numeracy into an endangered species. Many tools we use expand our understanding, but the calculator causes our arithmetic skills to atrophy.
The point is, one is hard pressed to find anyone who can do much arithmetic-- even trivial things.
But, if symbolic manipulation is done by hand and then numbers just plopped in to get final result and estimation if answer is realistic enough. Well I think that is fair enough.
And spreadsheets are also useful when you need to add up bunch of things or multiply them.
LLMs are different.
A closer analogy would be something like computer algebra systems, especially integration. We can offload differentiation cheaply, immediately, and perfectly, but integration will frequently have a "unable to evaluate" result. I genuinely wonder whether integral-requiring-workers are better or worse at it as a result of growing up with CAS tools. People on the periphery (a biologist, for example) are undoubtably better off since they get answers they couldn't get before, but people on the interior (maybe a physicist) might be worse at some things they wish they could do better, relative to those who came up without those tools.
With a calculator, the end result is still the same: a (typically numerical) answer of some kind. Writing one's own essay vs. getting an LLM to regurgitate it results in vastly different outcomes.
Fact is, even if they are capable of fully replicating and even replacing actual human thought, at best they regurgitate what has come before. They are, effectively, a tutor (as another commentator pointed out).
A human still needs to consume their output and act on it intelligently. We already do this, except with other tools/mechanisms (i.e. other humans). Nothing really changes here...
I personally still don't see the actual value of LLMs being realized vs their cost to build anytime soon. I'll be shocked if any of this AI investment pays off beyond some minor curiosities - in ten years we're going to look back at this period in the same way we look at cryptocurrency now - a waste of resources.
Perpetuating a broken system isn't an argument about the threat of AI. It's just highlighting a system that needs revitalization (and AI/LLMs is not that tool).
I keep seeing this repeated, but it seems people either take it as being self evident or have a false assumption about how transformers work.
What changes is the educational history of those humans. It's like how the world is getting obese. On average, we have areas we empirically don't choose our own long term over our short term. Apparently homework is one of those things, according to teachers like in TFA. Instead of doing their own homework, they're having their "tutor" do their homework.
Hopefully the impact of this will be like the impact of calculators, but I also fear that the impact will be like having tutors do your homework and take your tests until you hit a certain grade and suddenly the tools you're reliant on don't work, but you don't have practice doing things any other way.
Aside from blindly copying and pasting a response, in which case the learner wasn’t interested in learning and probably would have plagiarized from somewhere else anyway, I have found LLM to be an incredible, endlessly patient teacher that I’m never afraid to ask a question of.
My kids who are in the tween and teenage years, are incredibly skeptical and dismissive of AI. They regard AI art as taking away creative initiative from artists and treat LLM similar to the way we treated Google growing up, if they use them at all. It’s a tool which can be helpful for answering questions that is part of the landscape of their knowledge building.
That knowledge acquisition includes school, YouTube and other short videos, their peers (online and off) Internet searches, and asking AI. Generally, I regard asking AI as one of the least problematic sources of info in that environment.
While I tend to be optimistic as a default, I truly do think that the ability to become less ignorant by asking questions is a net positive for humanity.
The only thing I truly lean on AI for right now is as an editor, helping me turn my detailed bullet points into decently crafted prose, and for generating clear and concise transcripts and takeaways from long meetings. To me that doesn’t seem like the downfall of human knowledge.
- Socrates (written down by Plato)
It's also the tendency towards the "precautionary principal" AKA Nietzschian "last-man" style thinking applied to the world infinitely.
We should root this kind of thinking out aggressively, at least from the academy.
Normally, I just glance at what action I should take next (i.e. continue straight for 2km and then take a left turn at X) and then follow the road signs to do so. But I've noticed some Uber drivers and other people who keep their eyes almost permanently at the app for locating themselves, even when there's a clear GPS or network disconnection, like in an underground pass. This often results in wasted time when the app doesn’t catch up with reality, and the driver misses a turn.
I could probably work with printed turn by turn instructions, but that’s about it.
And I think that probably comes close to what the other post had in mind with „cannot navigate“
P.S: I was born here and lived here all my life.
So they'll end up driving everywhere they go. Work, groceries, restaurants, etc. Always driving. Many won't go down paths that weren't previously suggested by their GPS. And often those destinations aren't designed to be walkable either. Massive parking lots separating the various storefronts. Corporate campuses completely surrounded by a sea of parking lots and garages. Nowhere to walk.
That said, there's still exploring possible in a car-centric place. I tend to take alternate paths to get places, purposefully "get lost" driving around, and explore places I've never been before. But that has costs and lots of people don't bother doing that.
But that doesn’t help me for anything beyond that radius and probably not even there, because those routes go through parks and other stuff, so the car routes would be different.
Quick external lookups are a huge productivity boost since you don't have to spend all the time memorizing something.
I have an awesome sense of direction which I attribute to almost never using navigation apps unless I'm really worried about traffic, and even then, I can usually find a less crowded non-recommended router, because I know my way around.
Memorizing directions though? Nah. Takes a while to memorize and is quick to lookup and not used frequently.
Knowing basic syntax for a programming language? That needs to be in RAM.
> That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
> "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."
> "To forget it!"
> "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose..."
> "But the Solar System!" I protested.
> "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
For example, there's a notion in this thread relying on GPS makes you soft and that unless you learn how to navigate the way your forebears did you'll be unprepared or something. I find this proposition just as dubious as the notion that actively forgetting that the earth goes around the sun helps you solve murder mysteries.
It seems to me as though such assessments are often driven by self-interest and the desire to maximize the social utility of one's own knowledge and experience. Of course, those who believe that that "GPS makes you soft" is unquestionably true may find fault with my perspective.
I also just find that passage hilarious. It's simultaneously so misguided and yet so compellingly crafted, which is what makes for great satire whether intentional or not. My Dad read Sherlock Holmes stories aloud to me when I was a kid and that passage has always stuck with me. But perhaps this wasn't the right audience to share it with.
Drive around the country and you'll notice that sometimes Google maps doesn't work because your phone doesn't have reception.
I use the documentation panel of the inspector in Xcode, all the time, and write my code to generate this documentation.
I’m too grizzled to care much about being sneered at by insecure folks. I am able to get the job done; quickly, and of extremely high quality.
This is really a big part of the reason for them. Newer cars are all aerodynamically contoured and this results in a high rear deck and a shallow angle on the rear window. It's much harder to see behind the car.
I still turn my head and also use the wing mirrors to reverse. It's habit and I find it easier than looking at a screen.
Someone about four feet tall can easily walk past the rear of my car and aside from the half second of them in the side mirrors (which I can't see if I'm looking backwards anyways) there's no way I'd be able to see them looking backwards. But the ultra-wide angle camera mounted low on the gate I'd see them easily.
Plus, with the position of the camera at the end of the vehicle and its FOV, there are angles I wouldn't possibly be able to see with a car parked on either side of me. Coupled with radar sensors able to detect cross traffic before its even possibly visible in that situation the sensors greatly enhance by ability to see the situation than if I was entirely relying on turning around.
I do turn around while reversing, but more of just a double check of the overall scene. Same with double checking side mirrors while reversing. But a large amount of what I'm looking at is the screen.
I would blame my (pretty small) commercial driving experience. But no, not really. Before I ever took a Smith System course, I would have had trouble understanding this. I'm regularly concerned, to say the least, at the complacency/obliviousness I've seen. I don't get how someone could be comfortable with not having active situational awareness of these things.
And that's the only way I can imagine it being a realistic concern that children or other drivers will suddenly and unexpectedly appear in their path. Which is the only serious kind of thing I can imagine those camera FOVs helping with. Which they shouldn't have to, because people should be cognizant that backing is one of the more risky parts of driving in terms of likelihood of any kind of collision during it, so they should be on guard -- not merely as they are backing up, but the whole way to the car. Any children in the area should be easily noticed -- unless they are lying in wait on purpose for some reason -- and positive knowledge of their locations should be actively maintained until backing is done. Nearby cars parked but still running, or with people getting in or out of them, etc., should also be fairly trivially observed and noted. If positive awareness has been broken, then so has confirmation of a clear path, and in that case it's completely reasonable to go as far as getting back out of the car and walking a few steps and taking a couple of seconds to evaluate who is within "reach" and what they could conceivably do to screw up your day in the time it takes you to get out of the parking space. It seems like it isn't that much of a reach to do some simple due diligence that should, in a ideal world, make the backup camera a solution in search of a problem.
I don't know if you're a network person or what (in 30-second hindsight, networking knowledge may not be necessary to understand the "metaphor") but often it feels as if I'm on Collision Avoidance and everyone ("everyone") else is using Collision Detection.
In the way we currently live, no they wouldn't. But it sounds like you're saying "wouldn't be able to", full stop, which I don't believe is true. There is no reason that all 8 billion people (with the "necessary skills") couldn't grow their own food, theoretically. It would require the west giving up the way we live, but it's worth noting that this doesn't make it impossible.
Put yourself on the OpenAI IPO waiting list right now!
/s