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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine where we are headed. You understand every step of what it did and can appreciate the complexity but it'll only take a few generations for this to become something like magic to the tech priests beseeching the machine spirits for blessings

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I think you're overestimating how much the average person knows about how technology operates today, or 30 years ago, or 1000. In some sense, we have been living with magic and tech priests since the Romans built the aqueducts. I wouldn't be surprised if widespread, cheap AI makes it easier for the average person to learn how things around them work, if they are so inclined.

I meet kids today who haven’t heard of Microsoft, who regularly play GTA and hand in assignments made in Powerpoint. 20 years ago I discovered that a friend didn’t know Xbox and Word were both from Microsoft. It’s really hard to understand what is common knowledge in different parts of society.

Indeed. You'd be shocked how few people on Hacker News even know the difference between cross stitch and blackwork.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

Those are just products who cares?

I think the GP is alluding to understanding the fundamental way a thing works.

Kids today don’t even know where the files are stored or anything about partitions, drives, directory structure or even how much disk space is available.

They have some files, synced to OneDrive and do everything else fully online (Canva, etc.)

Most of them have never seen a computer with a drive other than C:

Kids today don't even know the most basic x86 assembly instructions! A whole class of third graders, and not one of them could tell me the difference between MOV and LEA!!!! Can you believe it?!?!

Apt username.

My son has never seen a C: drive before. Heck, we got him a Macbook Neo a few weeks ago and I don’t think he has left more than a few coding apps since then. Thankfully he isn’t using AI yet.

Kids in college 20 years ago didn’t know that either. Some of them didn’t understand that they had a school email address.

The point is, eventually not even experts will understand what it's doing

I'm always shocked by the amount of people that have been looking and using refrigerators their whole life.... And have zero idea how it works.

  > widespread, cheap AI makes it easier for the average person to learn how things around them work, if they are so inclined.

It looks to me that the far more common use case will be to manipulate technology rather than understand it.

The example with the synth is excellent. Today that kind of work demands somebody knowledgeable operate the AI harness. In short order, the AI may very well come up with the solution of looking online for example programs to decompile without the user even understanding what that means.

To your point, we would think that just because we gained access to a vast mass of knowledge via web archives (such as Wikipedia), people would have become smarter overall, that no person with access to this would choose not to acquire the knowledge at hand. But here we are, surrounded by people who choose to stay ignorant. So, I imagine the same will happen with AI. The vast majority of people will keep using their chatbots and never in their lives will they solve their problems with these tools beyond asking general questions for troubleshooting.

I don’t think much of them will be inclined to since information and “knowledge“ will be easily available via a prompt in any LLM. They won’t care to know what’s going on under the hood of anything. I mean, they already don’t want to and they have Google, Wikipedia and all sorts of things available to them.

If religion and human technology are any guide, there will be a lot of this but it will never be the entire sum of human activity. Some of us are just too damn curious. We go straight for the curtain. I refuse to believe that very human pattern won’t continue.

"In the distant future, humans live in a computer-aided society and have forgotten the fundamentals of mathematics, including even the rudimentary skill of counting.

The Terrestrial Federation is at war with Deneb, and the war is conducted by long-range weapons controlled by computers which are expensive and hard to replace. Myron Aub, a low grade Technician, discovers how to reverse-engineer the principles of pencil-and-paper arithmetic by studying the workings of ancient computers which were programmed by human beings, before bootstrapping became the norm—a development which is later dubbed "Graphitics"." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

I’m all for the sci-fi extremes that we might lose valuable skills to cognitive delegation, but the idea that we as a society will forget how to count is… extremely stupid.

To be fair, the average person already doesn't know how to do simple arithmetic.

I'm not convinced that's where we are heading. LLMs are really good at explaining things ("explain to me like I'm a 5 year old").

Imagine someone in a position of power mandating that LLMs should not be good teachers.

Some manager at LLM provider: "hey, we can sell 'education' ability as a separate product!".

You jest, but I’m actually convinced education-tuned LLMs are (today) the only way education outcomes can actually improve in the AI era. As is, students are leveraging them for doing homework which makes homework useless, you want and economically need a model which can work as a 1:1 tutor with minimal supervision (and some hardware so lessons aren’t keyboard-driven).

> and some hardware so lessons aren’t keyboard-driven).

What's wrong with (screen-, probably) keyboard?

Writing with a pen or pencil has better learning outcomes than with a keyboard for neurological reasons.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/

Most kids can't use a keyboard and never will. Their Apple Pencil scribbles don't seem to make them particularly smarter.

Pen&pencil-> create something from (almost) nothing. Stylus input-> subpar slow interface for computation.

Ipad data storage above par organisational help (no loosing lousy stuffed in bag paper).

I kinda liked the AI to transpose handwritten/drawn notes into digitally orderable artifacts. Seen a couple Show HNs. Are there any advances in the field (preferably OSS or one time purchaseable as alternatively)

(To add on to this: the utter physical imprecision of stylis pens is annoying. I can FEEL where a sharpt tip of a tool that is elongating my hand touches a surface and how it moves on a very fine scale/resolution. Probably not a problem for people who have not developed highly sensitive sensomotor perception because they grew up with a lot of flattness in there surrounding and not much plasticity, but: my god are these things clumsy. I always want to reach for a sharpener when i use an apple pencil lol.

You can buy finer-tipped replacement caps for the mechanical pencil effect. Then there is the second problem: the texture of glass instead of paper.

It's enough to make "explanation" a separate "educational" license to make it less broad used. Or disable it in some countries (this is happening already).

Wait, really? Can you give specifics?

Use VPN and try switching countries for yourself. Start from non-EU ones. You'll see.

This is why locally running LLMs must be the future. We don't all need PHD level AIs to answer 99% of our queries, or to teach us a new thing. I'd encourage everyone to learn how to run and deploy local LLMs, even if they are not quite there yet in terms of performance.

There's a big difference between having something explained to you and developing expertise in it.

I don't see an AI-as-explainer future where expertise isn't sacrificed en masse.

Capitalism rarely supports a currently economically unproductive alternative for future good reasons.

The recent AI tech layoffs are a warning sign that corporate leaders will happily shoot their company's (and the future's) expertise to pad next quarter's financials and trust in 90% correct, but much cheaper, AI.

"There's a big difference between having something explained to you and developing expertise in it."

No, there isn't. You get things explained in University. Then you build on top of this knowledge.

That's not at all how university works.

You are explained things (least important part) and then you invest substantial amounts of time in practicing and exercising those new skills.

Then, in your junior level jobs, the same cycle repeats.

That exercise component isn't going to happen in university with AI in the loop, because AI will be able to shortcut basic practice.

And it isn't going to happen in junior level work, because AI will be able to do those jobs more economically efficiently.

See previous from HN fp for a more eloquent explanation: https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/

A post that lives rent-free in my head points out that a kid who is addicted to chatgpt is going to be more literate - and therefore likely better educated - than a kid who is addicted to tiktok

and both saw the world through an inherited training/feed bias and censorship, hurray!

Just like they always have. There’s a reason religion is mostly inherited.

Everything a human knows has to be learned

Has there ever been a modern time when this wasn't the case?

I mean: I can only go back so far, but I remember the 1980s well-enough. At that time, most of the new information that came into my brain from outside was sourced from public schools, newspapers, and the evening news on TV.

None of these sources were particularly unfiltered, uncensored, or unbiased. It was always an abbreviated approximation of someone else's idea of the truth.

Even in pre-modern times censorship was the norm. Heck, it wasn’t until the printing press was invented that the powers that be had to start doing it explicitly.

I've been writing code since my teens, I've studied assembly... yet the fact that _things_ start happening when I press the power button on my computer are pure magic to me and I like it this way.

I started digging a few times, but, I prefer the "magic".

I prefer at least a superficial understanding.

Hopefully, there will never be a time when at least some folks are not reading books such as:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44882.Code

turtles all the way down

Eh. The only real things you need are:

- On startup processing begins at a known address, and you put the bootloader code over there. Hardware engineers can guarantee this for you.

- Every time you execute an assembly instruction, the program counter either explicitly jumps to a new location or else it just increments by 1. Hardware people can also make this happen as easily as implementing an adder.

Don't get me wrong, there are LOTS of layers between the hardware and most "useful" programs any of us will ever write. But all of them are pretty understandable. They're often not very complicated, just tedious.

Similarly for making a basic CPU that implements the logic you’re describing. In 2006 or so I made a super simple microcontroller on an FPGA for a course project. It had a whopping 256 bytes of RAM, 1kB of ROM, and I think four 8-bit registers plus a 16-bit program counter. You could only jump +/- 256 bytes. It was largely useless but also incredibly satisfying.

Keats blamed Newton for taken the magic out of the rainbow with a prism. Personally I think the magic only got greater.

I'm genuinely puzzled by how you know enough about a system to even understand there is a basic assembly language, but still consider how "switching on" is 'pure magic'.

Doesn't the one explain the other ? It may be turtles all the way down, but at some point there's a fundamental turtle - be it LEA or CMP ?

There is an absolute gulf between knowing what assembly is and a functional computer

Fair. I've just never come across someone who knows what assembly-language is, and who doesn't understand how a computer works. The journey of discovery is usually from the top-down, not the bottom-up.

I think it will be just like Dr. Know in Spielberg's "AI" movie from 2001 — I found it amazing how the oracle, though giving mystic-sounding obfuscated answers, was actually intelligent enough to figure out (a) what the kid was asking for and (2) give the correct answer.

It is amazing how Dr. Know projects where AI is likely to go. And a Kubrick script, no less. Even the commercial overlap, where you pump in coins as the only way to get answers. Did it not also have ads? Truly prescient.

Honestly, don't think so. That's certainly the path one might extrapolate if the next generation grows up exactly the same way as the current generation, but that's not how it works.

They will be exposed to this technology throughout childhood as their brains develop and they will develop unique ways to work with it we don't entirely understand just like GenY with cell phones and GenX with home computers. I think you deeply underestimate how adaptable we are as a species, but if you consider that we've been running the same OS and Bios as a species for the past ~40K years, perhaps you might be more optimistic?

As I recall, the Dr. knows were programmed to feed that information to runaway mechas who, who were, in turn, programmed to seek out the blue fairy.

Probably a lesson in there somewhere.

Kids grew up on this man, they are master prompters. You’ll be asking them to fix your holoTV and your crypto phone when you’re too old to read the brainfuck.

Give it six more months and you'll have a second "oh shit" moment when you peek behind the curtain of LLMs shitting the bed.

I guess tech unsavvy people who are easily amused by LLM tricks will always exist, but they'll be an increasingly smaller minority as time goes on.

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