Hacker News Reader

Comment by MSkill1 | Hacker News Reader

I do feel like I'm offloading thinking to an AI, but I think that's a good thing. I envision a world where users and AI are aligned without corporate interference. AI lets me offload things that I don't need to know and frees up my brain to push farther than I could before. At least that's how it feels to me.

View on HN

>AI lets me offload things that I don't need to know and frees up my brain to push farther than I could before.

How can you push your brain go farther than ever, when you don't use it for the basic task?

Higher Math does not work without understanding "lower" Math, running long runs does not work without starting on shorter runs. Thinking about complicated staff will probly not work, if you can't think about the easy stuff.

One can not learn a language without vocabulary and skipping learning verbs in a foreign language, because dictionaries exists does not bring one closer to being able to speak.

I agree that when you're building mathematical understanding, you have to do it brick by brick. But the fact of the matter is it's been decades since I did a long division problem by hand. AI lets me jump into areas that I would previously have had to spend a month studying before I could begin building - That's what I mean by it lets me reach farther, faster.

You don't always have to do division by hand. I would make the argument that it's probably good to do it occasionally. At least enough to remember how.

I don't think offloading things that you "think" you don't need to know is a realistic thing. Instead this seems like some slippery slope of intellectual degradation where slowly you'll replace more and more parts of the thought process with AI which ends in some rather sad existence.

I agree, I suspect that when we say "oh, I don't need to know this", what we really mean is we have that unpleasant feeling behind our eyes that says this is not going to gratify my goal

The issue being, gratification is rarely a good guideline. It just means collapsing the gap between doing the thing and the idea of having done the thing. But that gap is where you actually learn things

Is a good thing depending on which ones. And our taste on what to specialize our judgment into varies a lot. One thing I do use as criteria to detect it can be a problem is in lack of understanding and lack of control of the layers that are part of verifications and diagnosing power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com