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Comment by cmiles8 | Hacker News Reader

I fear for this generation of folks that are losing the ability to think. They have a very sad existence ahead.

Unfortunately, I think it's just a continuation of a trend that already started pre-covid. I was surprised that most juniors and interns I worked with seemed to lack the ability to "self-help" and Google basic questions they had. I think it reflects a schooling system in the US that doesn't teach any real critical thinking - just studying until you "know" the answer, without actually teaching students the intuition of how to get there. The result is that when they encounter something not even novel, but slightly unfamiliar they don't even make an attempt to start or immediately tunnel vision down the wrong path without taking a first step back. Funnily, the latter approach feels similar to how LLMs perform on truly novel problems, too.

I try to be optimistic but then I talk with friends who are teachers and it is very grim. I'm sure the students will eventually learn the lesson but only after they have failed a lot in future. It really is taking the easy short term gains for hard long term punishments.

But look at many parts of the world and you see that it isn't unique.

I saw it from some Cooker-anti Vax folks the saying "You future doctor is currently using ChatGPT so you had better get your health in order now." And on that one point I had to agree with them. A weird future awaits.

The world is quite fine taking long-term Ls for short-term gains. That's the zeitgeist of the 21st century.

The end result of that is a shit society to live in, but overall welfare is not what we optimize for.

100% agree. I see some of the less dogmatic religions like philosophical Taoism and you could imagine some of them being plucked from a thousand years ago into today and they would just be like "Yeah, this is the road to ruin but you choose this."

The ability to think and no attention to detail whatsoever. I mean, proofreading is absolutely necessary, regardless of how the text was written.

The problem is, human beings on average will only go through the work if they are FORCED to go through the work due to a lack of existence of an easy way. Plenty of people who argue for AI don't seem to understand that the difficulty in preventing laziness is proportional to the strength of the automation enabling that laziness, and AI is much stronger than any other type of automation we've seen so far.

It's just too tempting for most and talking all day about how one should check sources is antiquated because that only worked decently when cheating wasn't so easy. Academic ethics and responsibility cannot scale in the age of AI.

> human beings on average will only go through the work if they are FORCED to go through the work

So force them.

We still see green colored things in more detail than, say, blue stuff, because once upon a time we relied on that to better navigate dense foliage, and also always had one eye peeled for dangerous animals hiding in said foliage (AFAIK, I wasn't there).

But we can't proofread stuff because it's too easy to cheat? No. If most people don't bass the minimum bar then most people don't pass the minimum bar, that doesn't move the bar. Being unable to see green doesn't make the jungle blue. Even if "the average person" no longer can't. And if most people cheat whenever they can, and if they can cheat most of the time, then we can't have a society. That is, we can have one without them, or none at all.

I think there's some truth to this, however, I remember hearing similar arguments when people where using calculators on things they were suppose to be working out by hand.

I bet if you had one of these students explain the rationale behind a strategy they put together for winning at TFT, he or she would likely give you a very well thought out, coherent, and smart line of thinking.

If I had to guess, I would bet that it has far less to do with people being "unwilling to think" and far more of kids becoming exhausted by the boring, learn by memorization, pad your writing to fill space, monotony of an old and outdated education system, divorced from anything at all resembling the real world.

Speaking from experience, I did horrible in school and 100% would've been using ChatGPT whenever I could just to get through it.

The second I got out of school and found out work is far more result/merit based, I "learned" really, really quickly.

The old Mark Twain classic: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

Every generation thinks the new generation is getting soft, but there is a critical difference this time. Things like calculators replaced the mechanics of multiplication and long division. You still had to know what to multiply and divide, however. In contrast, AI is replacing high level thinking. Now, you just copy questions wholesale into your favorite LLM and copy the answers back. That’s different and a lot more troubling, IMO.

The ability to think has never been nurtured nor valued by the education system much, passing exams with high grades was.

That was always the goal and what the adult world would rate anyway.

And that meant that memory and repetition ended up being the core of the education system and it works very well from law to very advanced math where memorizing proofs and substitution rules is most of the curriculum anyway.

Problem solving, critical thinking, these things never really showed up or were valued by the system.

It was always the grades.

So a system that has emphasized the wrong metrics has always been gamified. AI is only speeding this gamification.

It will most likely cause issues. On other hand it really might be existence that quite a lot people prefer. Not having to put any effort into anything at all...

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