Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> Q. Isn’t it inevitable that AI will make us lazier?

> A. Calculators also made us lazier. Why aren’t we doing math by hand anymore? You should be taking notes by hand now instead of recording me. We use technology to take shortcuts, but we have to be strategic in how we take those shortcuts.

An unpopular opinion I have is that most of the doomsaying about technology making us dumber is true. Yes, even back to Socrates. I won't say all, but I'd safely say a lot. What happened was that we developed tools, lost certain capacities without necessarily losing the capabilities that came with them, and redefined the level a normal human should function at. My only point is that people don't like to think that maybe they themselves are less intelligent—in many ways—than people who urinated outside and didn't know what the sky was. But I don't see how it could be any other way. When we say things like "I don't need to remember, I can write it down", and "I don't need to do arithmetic in my head, I'll let a calculator do it", or "I don't need to read the article, someone will explain it in the comments" we are accepting the consequences of that, good and bad.

People aren’t dumber, or smarter. They just focus on what’s the next important thing to tackle.

For example, I doubt any website programmer knows the circuitry, assembly code, OS level calls, networking, etc, that make any webpage element do anything. Let alone can sit there and calculate any of the mathematical requirements needed to do any of that. But they know how to use an IDE and a framework like React.

All this is a long way of saying:

…on the shoulders of giants. AI is just the new tool needed for the next step up.

Yeah, I'm not sure I understand how moving up an abstraction layer necessarily makes you less intelligent. I also don't think it makes you smarter. For the average individual, I feel like it simply moves your "cursor" up the stack, but you're not necessarily increasing your context window.

Perhaps the confusion comes from the fact that we often produce more complex things as we move up layers. It's then assumed that the people who made them must be more intelligent, but as I said, I don't think that's a fair assessment.

I would say the real measurement for intelligence here is how much of the abstraction layers you actually understand. In other words, can you move your cursor back down the stack and operate just as well as in the higher layers? Can you do this while unifying the complex interactions between each layer into a cohesive model? I've noticed that even AI tends to be pretty bad at this last step. It often takes prodding to get it to see the subtle errors often introduced when working with complex systems.

It's a completely different thing. You are talking about civilisation constructs, parent is talking about things like mental fitness, abilities to perform tasks in real-time by yourself.

For example, card payments are a crutch. If you pay by card / phone everywhere and then out of the sudden you are to pay in cash, it becomes mildly challenging vs. if you are used to pay in cash you don't think about it. The brain is capable of a great deal of automation, performing learned actions is effortless. Unlike a calculator or a spreadsheet, the buyer is not doing anything, just buying. It's not a bicycle, it's a crutch. It simply atrophies the mental bandwidth. The mind becomes more lax, less sharp, when it does not engage.

Now imagine what it will do to people's brains when instead of thinking about solutions themselves, they will ask the AI for everything. Those neurons will atrophy and the person will be even less skilled to ask the AI the right questions than if they did not use the AI in the first place. I think the key will be a balance between doing the work yourself and delegating the stuff to AI, but it will be difficult to find that balance. Just like smartphones can be very useful but in the end are a net negative to society.

> redefined the level a normal human should function at

To a level much higher.

We stopped doing many repetitive, tedious things, but in return moved to things that are way more abstract and complex.

And that's happening everywhere. Even farmers are getting ever closer to being full on system architects.

Oh, you didn't learn to do quickly calculate square roots in your head? Instead you spent that time on learning about relativity in high school physics class.

By calling the people of the past smarter, you are really underselling the amount and depth of abstract though happening everywhere today.

> Oh, you didn't learn to do quickly calculate square roots in your head? Instead you spent that time on learning about relativity in high school physics class.

The math examples always get me, because there's a level of understanding missing here that, yes, you should still have:

You may not be able to do the square-root yourself, but you should have a good-enough understanding of what a square-root is that if you enter into a calculator the square-root of a 6-digit number and get back another 6-digit number, you should know immediately that's wrong, and double-check you entered it correctly.

Part of the concern a lot of us have is people who not only do not have that understanding, but that think it's unnecessary to get that understanding, and skip over it entirely.

Oh but can't you see, laziness is one of the greatest motivators of all time. The desire to unburden ourselves from the tedious and faulty process of mental math lead to the invention of the calculator. Walking is hard so we domesticated horses and invented automobiles. Sending messages takes forever so we'll lay a telegram cable across the ocean floor.

I no longer need to calculate in my head, walk 10 miles to get food, or wait for weeks to hear from my friends who moved across the country. Maybe it's making me dumber, lazier, weaker compared to my forerunners, but dumbest of all would be to ignore these advantages just because I'm no longer appealing to some guys idea of Ideal Intelligence.

I agree, and maybe a better frame is 'capable'.

I can do math with a calculator, but if it is taken away?

I can feed myself with doordash, but if it is taken away?

I can program a complex web-scale app, but if all those tools are taken away?

What is left?

Somebody who will die fast.

Reliance on all of this is removing agency and resiliency. By the law of numbers, the planet still has people who know some of the fundamentals that make the existence of the rest viable.

But if it is taken away?

I think technology makes the people who create it smarter, and doesn’t affect average people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com