My fundamental argument: The way the average person is using AI today is as "Thinking as a Service" and this is going to have absolutely devastating long term consequences, training an entire generation not to think for themselves.
The critical difference between AI and a tool like a calculator, to me, is that a calculator's output is accurate, deterministic and provably true. We don't usually need to worry that a calculator might be giving us the wrong result, or an inferior result. It simply gives us an objective fact. Whereas the output of LLMs can be subjectively considered good or bad - even when it is accurate.
So imagine teaching an architecture student to draw plans for a house, with a calculator that spit out incorrect values 20% of the time, or silently developed an opinion about the height of countertops. You'd not just have a structurally unsound plan, you'd also have a student who'd failed to learn anything useful.
> The critical difference between AI and a tool like a calculator, to me, is that a calculator's output is accurate, deterministic and provably true.
In current situation, by vibing and YOLOing most problems, we are losing the very ability we still need and can't replace with AI or other tools.
I think past successes have led to a category error in the thinking of a lot of people.
For example, the internet, and many constituent parts of the internet, are built on a base of fallible hardware.
But mitigated hardware errors, whether equipment failures, alpha particles, or other, are uncorrelated.
If you had three uncorrelated calculators that each worked 99.99% of the time, and you used them to check each other, you'd be fine.
But three seemingly uncorrelated LLMs? No fucking way.
This is why I differentiated "uncorrelated" from "seemingly uncorrelated." Sorry if that wasn't clear.
In point of fact, most technological revolutions have fairly immediately benefited a significant number of people in addition to those in the top 1% -- either by increasing demand for labor, or reducing the price of goods, or both.
The promise of LLMs is that they benefit people in the top 1% (investors and highly paid specialists) by reducing the demand for labor to produce the same stuff that was already being produced. There is an incidental initial increase in (or perhaps just reallocation of) labor to build out infrastructure, but that is possibly quite short-lived, and simultaneously drives a huge increase in the cost of electricity, buildings, and computer-related goods.
But the benefits of new technologies are never spread evenly.
When the technology of travel made remote destinations more accessible, it created tourist traps. Some well placed individuals and companies do well out of this, but typically, most people living near tourist traps suffer from the crowds and increased prices.
When power plants are built, neighbors suffer noise and pollution, but other people can turn their lights on.
We haven't yet begun to be able to calculate all the negative externalities of LLMs.
I would not be surpised if the best negative externality comparisons were to the work of Thomas Midgley, who gifted the world both leaded gasoline and CFC refrigerants.
I'm not saying this is ideal, but maybe there's another perspective to consider as well, which is lowering barriers to entry and increased ownership.
Many people can't/won't/don't do what it takes to build things, be it a house or an app, if they're starting from zero knowledge. But if you provide a simple guide they can follow, they might end actually building something. They'll learn a little along the way, make it theirs, and end up with ownership of their thing. As an owner, change comes from you, and so you learn a bit more about your thing.
Obviously whatever gets built by a noob isn't likely to be of the same caliber as a professional who spent half their life in school and job training, but that might be ok. DIY is a great teacher and motivator to continue learning.
Contrast to high barriers to entry, where nothing gets built and nothing gets learned, and the user is left dependent on the powers that be to get what he wants, probably overpriced, and with features he never wanted.
If you're a rocket surgeon and suddenly outsource all your thinking to a new and unpredictable machine, while you get fat and lazy watching tv, that's on you. But for a lot of people who were never going to put in years of preparation just to do a thing, vibing their idea may be a catalyst for positive change.
When slop becomes easier, there are a lot more people ready to push it to others than people that tries to produce guenuine work. Especially when theh are hard to distinguish superficially.
I fear for trying to get it to unlearn code from the last building code cycle when there's changes
A certain group of people have something wrong with their brain where they can't be "educated" and are forced to learn by studying and such. The protagonist of the story is one of these people and feels ashamed at his disability and how everyone around him effortlessly knows things he has to struggle to learn.
He finds out (SPOILER) that he was actually selected for a "priesthood" of creative/problem solvers, because the education process gives knowledge without the ability to apply it creatively. It allows people to rapidly and easily be trained on some process but not the ability to reason it out.
The wikipedia entry also has link to the text but the above is nicer IMHO, just the raw text. From a previous HN discussion some weeks ago!
It is unclear that a human thinking about things is going to be an advantage in 10, 20 years. Might be, might not be. In 50 years people will probably be outraged if a human makes an important decision without deferring to an LLM's opinion. I'm quite excited that we seem to be building scaleable superintelligences that can patiently and empathetically explain why people are making stupid political choices and what policy prescriptions would actually get a good outcome based on reading all the available statistical and theoretical literature. Screw people primarily thinking for themselves on that topic, the public has no idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
That said, I maintain there are huge qualitative differences between using a calculator versus "hey computer guess-solve this mess of inputs for me."
I'll add another analogy. I tell people when I tip I "round off to the nearest dollar, move the decimal place (10%), and multiply by 2" (generating a tip that will be in the ballpark of 18%), and am always told "that's too complicated". It's a 3 step process where the hardest thing is multiplying a number by 2 (and usually a 2 digit number...). It's always struck me as odd that the response is that this is too complicated rather than a nice tip (pun intended) for figuring out how much to tip quickly and with essentially zero thinking. If any of those three steps appear difficult to you then your math skills are below that of elementary school.
I also see a problem with how we look at math and coding. I hear so often "abstraction is bad" yet, that is all coding (and math) is. It is fundamentally abstraction. The ability to abstract is what makes humans human. All creatures abstract, it is a necessary component of intelligence, but humans certainly have a unique capacity for it. Abstraction is no doubt hard, but when in life was anything worth doing easy? I think we unfortunately are willing to put significantly more effort into justifying our laziness than we will to be not lazy. My fear is that we will abdicate doing worthwhile things because they are hard. It's a thing people do every day. So many people love to outsource their thinking. Be it to a calculator, Google, "the algorithm", their favorite political pundit, religion, or anything else. Anything to abdicate responsibility. Anything to abdicate effort.
So I think AI is going to be no different from calculators, as you suggest. They can be great tools to help people do so much. But it will be far more commonly used to outsource thinking, even by many people considered intelligent. Skills atrophy. It's as simple as that.
I tell people when I tip I "round off to the nearest dollar, move the decimal place (10%), and multiply by 2" (generating a tip that will be in the ballpark of 18%), and am always told "that's too complicated".
I would tell others to "shift right once, then divide by 2 and add" for 15%, and get the same response.
However, I'm not so sure what you mean by a problem with thinking that abstraction is bad. Yes, abstraction is bad --- because it is a way to hide and obscure the actual details, and one could argue that such dependence on opaque things, just like a calculator or AI, is the actual problem.
So, shift right twice? ;)
> Yes, abstraction is bad
No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
I'm sorry, I think you are teaching people the wrong thing if you are blanket statement saying "abstraction is bad". You are throwing the baby out with the bath water. You can "over abstract" and that certainly is not good but that's not easy to define as it is extremely problem dependent. But with these absurd blanket statements you just push code quality and performance down.
Over abstraction is bad because it can be too difficult to read or it can be bad because it de-optimizes programs. "Too difficult to read or maintain" is ultimately a skill issue. We don't let the juniors decide that but neither should we have abstraction where only wizards can maintain things. Both are errors.
But abstraction can also greatly increase readability and help maintain code. It's the reason we use functions. It's the reason we use OOP. It helps optimize code, it can help reduce writing, it can and does do many beneficial things.
Lumping everything together is just harmful.
Saying abstraction is bad is no different than saying "python is bad", or any duck typing language (including C++'s auto), because you're using an abstract data type. The "higher level" the language, the more abstract it is.
Saying abstraction is bad is no different than saying templates are bad.
Saying abstraction is bad is no different than saying object oriented programming is bad.
Saying abstraction is bad is saying coding is bad.
I'm sorry, literally everything we do is abstraction. Conflating "over abstraction" with "abstraction" is just as grave an error as the misrepresentation of Knuth's "premature optimization is the root of all evil." Dude said "grab a fucking profiler" and everyone heard "don't waste time making things work better".
If you want to minimize abstraction then you can go write machine code. Anything short of that has abstracted away many actions and operations. I'll admire your skill but this is a path I will never follow nor recommend. Abstraction is necessary and our ability to abstract is foundational into making code even work.
*I will die on this hill*
> because it is a way to hide and obscure the actual details
> one could argue that such dependence on opaque things, just like a calculator or AI, is the actual problem.
In that sense I think getting caught up in “religion bad for tech” zeitgeist misses the point of what religion actually is. Collectively shared ritual. Belief in God, and specific shades of that, is just the step of the dance the bird does in this case. Taking a step back, plenty of atheists engage in collectively shared ritual too. Belief in the 9-5, the bludgeon that is the four years to specialize vs lifelong apprentanceships towards true mastery, economics constraining choice rather than pure skill. Do these rituals not also hold our species and technological development back? If we talk about religion, it is worth also considering the mountain of other blockers towards progress we have built for ourselves in this collectively agreed upon daily society ritual we all partake upon.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoreanism/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia
With regards to Pythagoreanism, Pythagoras himself thought of mathematics in religious ways. From the entry on Pythagoras (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/) in the SEP:
> The cosmos of the acusmata, however, clearly shows a belief in a world structured according to mathematics, and some of the evidence for this belief may have been drawn from genuine mathematical truths such as those embodied in the “Pythagorean” theorem and the relation of whole number ratios to musical concords.
There are numerous sections throughout both of these entries that discuss Pythagoras, mathematics, and religion. Plato too is another fruitful avenue, if you wanted to explore that further.
Actual knowledge about systems work much better more often than not, LLMs are not sentient and still need to be driven to get decent results.
The cash register says you owe $16.23, you give the cashier $21.28, and all hell breaks loose.
At other places, they take the $20, look confused, and fart around with the change for awhile.
On the other hand, our hard right has a trifecta of business, gun culture, and religion.
You're lacking the religion and gun culture, and trying to take away your health care would be the third rail, so in some respects, it would be difficult for you to follow us.
Also, without that trifecta, it seems that it would be somewhat more difficult to push the sort of anti-education agenda that gets pushed here, both at the university level and at lower levels (e.g. giving equal time to science and creationism).
You have to remember that the US was, in large part, founded by dogmatic malcontents who couldn't get along with their neighbors.
Can’t say the same for LLM. Our teachers were right with the internet of course as well. If you remember those early internet wild west school days, no one was using the internet to actually look up a good source. No one even knew what that meant. Teachers had to say “cite from these works or references we discussed in class” or they’d get junk back.
At first the internet was unreliable. Nobody could trust the information it gave you. So teachers insisted that students only use their trusted sources. But eventually the internet matured and now it would be seen as ridiculous for a teacher to tell a student not to do research on the internet.
Now replace "the internet" with "LLMs".
I graduated high school in '04 and even then I was only allowed to use this system called "Galileo" which was basically a curated listed of encyclopedic articles specifically meant for education and research.
No one is making cool shit for themselves. Everyone is held hostage ensuring Wall Street growth.
The "cross our fingers and hope for the best" position we find ourselves in politically is entirely due to labor capture.
The US benefited from a social network topology of small businesses. No single business being a lynch pin that would implode everything.
Now the economy is a handful of too big to fails eroding links between human nodes by capturing our agency.
I argued as hard as I could against shipping electronics manufacturing overseas so the next generation would learn real engineering skills. But 20 something me had no idea how far up the political tree the decision was made back then. I helped train a bunch of people's replacements before the telecom focused network hardware manufacturer I worked for then shut down.
American tech workers are now primarily cloud configurators and that's being automated away.
This is a decades long play on the part of aging leadership to ensure Americans feel their only choice is capitulate.
What are we going to do, start our own manufacturing business? Muricans are fish in a barrel.
And some pretty well connected people are hinting at similar sense of what's wrong: https://www.barchart.com/story/news/36862423/weve-done-our-c...