Hacker News Reader

Comment by m000 | Hacker News Reader

I think you're missing that a lot of what we call "learning" would be categorized as "busy work" after the fact. If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid. Which may be a goal on itself for our AI overlords.

As mr Miyagi said: "Wax on. Wax off."

This may turn out very profitable for the pre-AI generations, as the junior to senior pipeline won't churn seniors at the same rate. But following generations are probably on their way to digital serfdom if we don't act.

View on HN

> If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid.

I've seen this same thing said about Google. "If you outsource your memory to Google searching instead, you won't be able to do anything without and you'll become dumber."

Maybe that did happen, but it didn't seem to result in any meaningful change on the whole. Instead, I got to waste less time memorizing things, or spending time leafing through thousand page reference manuals, to find something.

We've been outsourcing parts of our brains to computers for decades now. That's what got me interested and curious about computers when I got my first machine as a kid (this was back in the late 90s/early 00s). "How can I automate as much of the boring stuff as possible to free myself up for more interesting things."

LLMs are the next evolution of that to an extent, but I also think they do come with some harms and that we haven't really figured out best practices yet. But, I can't help but be excited at the prospect of being able to outsource even more to a computer.

Indeed, this line of reasoning goes all they way back to Socrates who argued that outsourcing your memory to writing would make you stupider [1]:

> 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 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.

I, for one, am glad we have technologies -- like writing, the internet, Google, and LLMs -- that let us expand the limits of what our minds can do.

[1] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

If you extend Google to include social networks the damage to human mental health and well being is difficult to calculate.

But that is a design choice and not a fundamental property!

Can we settle for "fundamendal design choice"?

Pathway to Idiocracy.

> Which may be a goal on itself for our AI overlords.

That doesn't seem exactly likely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com