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Comment by guybedo | Hacker News Reader

As technology evolves, humans lose their capacities as their tools get better.

What's the average human's mental calculation capacities compared to our ancestors when the electronic calculator didn't exist ? Who can calculate integrals by hand nowadays ?

AI is the ultimate tool. Who needs to get a phd when your computer can do the work / solve the task better than you would do and in a fraction of the time you'd require.

Sure there's still gonna be a need for specialists but on average most humans are losing their capacities because their tools get better.

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I can still do integrals by hand. AI isn't the ultimate tool, it still can't do basic proofs and it's not doing neither automated proofs using a proof assistant language. Everytime I see someone say something like this I assume they do pretty insignificant work.

> I can still do integrals by hand

good for you if you can do integrals by hand, i would bet though you're in the small minority of people who can do that.

> AI isn't the ultimate tool, it still can't do basic proofs and it's not doing neither automated proofs using a proof assistant language

I meant AI as in human level AI and above. It will for sure be the ultimate (intellectual) tool that can solve any intellectual task.

> Everytime I see someone say something like this I assume they do pretty insignificant work.

I'm having a hard time following your line of thought, although you might be right and i might be doing insignificant work compared to you.

Sorry for being too aggressive it's just I see a lot of people (managers) talking like current chatgpt can replace people at my line of work (R&D in long term economic planning) and I can't see people even begin to formulate the right questions, and never mind understanding the answers.

> As technology evolves, humans lose their capacities as their tools get better.

I don't follow this argument. Did humans become LESS capable when they invented a hammer?

Surely we became less capable at solving that problem without a hammer.

If we had the hammer taken away we'd figure it out again. We got better at things, but we didn't actually lose any capacity.

If we had all the computers taken away, would we figure them out again? Maybe, but how long would it take?

Take it this way: it took decades for China to catch up on technology. Now they have, and what the Western world realises is that it's pretty hard to catch up.

If your whole nation becomes mostly reliant on AI, and another nation actually knows WTF they are doing, then it may become a problem.

Our whole nation can't make computers, just specialized individuals. This is what happens to a society as it advances. We don't all need to do everything, we fit specific roles, and it's a real problem in modern society.

Suddenly people need specific degrees to do entry level positions, making it difficult to move from one vocation to another without returning to school and getting another degree or diploma. We have the potential to do those other roles, but the specialization demands focus and time. This problem has nothing to do with AI, and its use isn't going to change that dynamic.

To be fair, what has happened in modern history is that the West has lost its ability to build hardware in favour of doing software, because that was more profitable. China is slowly getting better at doing hardware in general, it's getting obvious with robotics.

We can say "this is what happens to a society as it advances", sure. But it also means that if China stops building our hardware tomorrow, we're screwed.

Enters AI: teach all your citizens to depend on AI, and they will depend on the few companies that build AI. Which are generally controlled by those billionaires that keep showing that we should fear them. Maybe that is what happens to a society as it advances, but is it desirable?

If we look at history, what happens to a society as it advances is collapsing. Usually it's painful for those who live during the transition. Turns out we are probably those who will live it.

Now if we wanted our society to be more resilient to the changes that are coming, we would have to reduce those dependencies and get back in control as much as possible. AI is doing the opposite of that.

I saying this as no fan of AI but, honestly, this again seems unrelated to AI. Building computers are not skills the average populace had, and I don't see any signs that the people who did make those decisions are outsourcing their choices to AI.

I don't know what you mean when you say "what happens to a society as it advances is collapsing". Civilizations both advanced and not have collapsed. All that being advanced did was make it more obvious when they do. This is blaming technology when time is the actual culprit.

It feels like we're blaming AI when it's really profit chasing that's killing us.

> Civilizations both advanced and not have collapsed.

Which one(s)?

> Building computers are not skills the average populace had

Which is not at all a reason for the average populace to give up on other skills, is it?

Adanced? Rome. The easter island people were not specifically advanced, but they had a societal collapse from which they never recovered. Lots of civilizations have collapsed. Are we blaming the North America Indigenous populations or the Mayan civilization of collapsing because of their technology? It could be argued they collapsed because they weren't advanced enough.

Sorry, can you tell me again which one of those civilizations you mention hasn't collapsed yet?

I'm really confused. You say: "there are great civilizations who have not collapsed, let me give you examples!" and you proceed giving me examples of civilizations that... collapsed.

Humans become reliant on tools all the time. I bet the folks in an average Amazonian tribe know a lot more about lighting a fire, catching and processing wild game, and building an improvised shelter than my excuse for camping skills. They aren’t reliant on electricity or a Bic lighter, that’s for sure.

Would I trade places with them? No.

In what way is a hammer an intellectual tool?

That wasn't the claim. The claim was:

"As technology evolves, humans lose their capacities as their tools get better."

That's because you're beginning with the assertion that LLMs are tools. You cannot create things with an LLM. You can't be creative with them. They are not useful for building things. What you get out of an LLM is a regurgitation of existing information, peppered with assumptions based on your query.

They're not tools.

A hammer helps you build a house. An LLM helps you read StackOverflow in the most inefficient means possible.

This is just nonsense, and obviously untrue.

It is easy to show that LLMs can create new things (“write a poem about libc”) or answer questions that cannot be googled (“can a pair of scissors cut through a Ford F150?”)

The poem won't be unique. It will follow a basic formula and make sure to pick up the words you asked it to use. You might not get the exact same poem every single time, but there's a reason that you can tell when something has been generated.

A good recent example are the lyrics of the songs on an album by a band called Saor. The album is called Amidst the Ruins.

Aren't tools exactly things that produce same result time after time? Say a nail gun. It fires a nail. CNC machine it is a tool making things, but does not itself do anything original. Hell, cookie cutter make cookie cuts. And I consider it to be a tool. One could free hand them too, but most don't...

Although a hammer is a useful tool, it's obviously not that advanced of a tool.

As soon as you have an 'advanced' tool that can automate things or do things for you better/faster/with less efforts, you don't need to learn that skill anymore, why would you ?

It doesn't mean the capacity is lost forever and the skill can't be learned anymore, but it's gonna be less and less frequent at the population level.

Nowadays, how many people can:

- make fire without a match or a lighter ?

- add large numbers or do math operations without a calculator ?

- reach a destination without a gps ?

- learn history dates, lists of cities / states / etc...

In the end, it's a bit similar to how species evolve. When a function isn't needed anymore, the organism tends to evolve without it.

Given that a hammer is a primordial tool, a first tool, you'd think that that switch would be the most striking at that moment. We went from having no tool at all to a tool.

I think you're mixing definitions of things. We don't lose any capacity at all, we just lose the need for a skill in our day to day life. We haven't evolved away from the ability to create fire, we just don't need that knowledge at this moment. I don't know how to hunt a gazelle, but the hunter didn't know how to drive.

Both "evolution" and "capacity" seem to be incorrect words to describe this phenomena.

Might be true, but I have a form of dyscalculia that made almost any sort of math impossible for me, so for this it doesn't affect me as I am not capable either way.

But AI has taken away my ability to think to solve a problem via code. Now all I do is just ask it.

> Who can calculate integrals by hand nowadays ?

Anyone who did calculus at the uni level, at least. And to paraphrase my algorithms professor, "I know nothing, but I know where to look when I need it" which is another paraphrase of Plato. Higher education will teach you how to get yourself out of a moat if you were ever to face the unknown. AI will not.

Then we need new capacities, attentive to our emergent means, and institutional frameworks capable of germinating them.

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