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Comment by mnky9800n | Hacker News Reader

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.

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1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255603105_The_Effec...

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25509828/

3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392560878_Your_Brai...

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.

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEIrQUXm_hY

The number of times I’ve been in an argument with colleagues and said “it’s all tools, use the tool for the job” to close out my point can’t be over overstated lol. So many film vs digital arguments in particular.

Preach. This is exactly what I’m driving at.

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.)

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.

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.

>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.

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.

> "when will you be in a situation you can't access a LLM...?"

When you're unemployed, homeless, or cash strapped for other reasons, as has happened to more than a few HNers in the current downturn, and can't make your LLM payments.

And that doesn't even account for the potential of inequality, where the well-off can afford premium LLM services but the poor or unemployed can only afford the lowest grades of LLM service.

Exactly. Why should I not learn new things and how they work? What is the point of living if not learning new things?

> 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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> If you didn't lose your ability to think to scrolling social media ...

Didn't we?

> However, I think a lot of people lost their ability to think by scrolling social media and that is problematic.

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.

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.

I only read two sentences max of any comment since I downloaded TikTok.

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.

Except that generative "AI" is a tricycle for the mind that prevents you from ever learning how to ride a bicycle.

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.

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