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Comment by xnickb | Hacker News Reader

The question for me is where it leaves innovation. Have we really peaked as a species that we so easily want to give up on the young and hand them over a tool that would substitute reasoning?

Call me naive or old, but I don't see a need to think critically when you have a tool that can outmatch you in that.

I tried drawing analogies with Chess, but it doesn't work. Shall I ask AI to do that for me?

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If we think that machines that recombine and interpolate our prior out are intelligent then yes we have probably peaked as a species. Anyway evolution is not telological. It may surprise HN posters but people were as intelligent if not more so as present thousands of years ago. When a problem is solved is more a question of attention, reward, available knowledge base, etc. intelligence is an adaptation to solve the problems of biological life. It would be hard to argue that solving this cypher would have increased anyone's reproductive fitness that much hence it was unsolved. Unsolved problems are often so less because of intrinsic difficulty but lack of conditions that impell their resolution. It is not at all surprising that llms with the full human knowledge base at their disposal, ample computational resources, and the programmed reward of finding the best completion are solving unsolved problems nobody needed to solve anyway. This however is not intelligence in the human sense. Humans solve problems for biological advantage in a dynamic landscape. Llms solve problems to optimize a completion function in a fixed pre trained one.

> The question for me is where it leaves innovation. Have we really peaked as a species that we so easily want to give up on the young and hand them over a tool that would substitute reasoning?

This is a crucial question but I'm afraid the ship has sailed. We should focus on how to prevent atrophy and cultivate our skills in spite of LLMs. For me and many others this means doing thins the old way with occasional assistance from LLMs that actually increase our understanding. Occassional because if you do it often, you get intellectual atrophy because you stop even trying.

This is all valid and I am with you here. However I can totally imagine kids in 10 years viewing writing code by hand same as we view making fire using flint and steel: yes can be useful, but why bother?

Except in this case I fear we're losing something very important as opposed to the above example.

If you are going out camping in some form of wilderness (harder and harder every year due to the crowds), it can be very useful. I think of LLM use as the same- we'll just have different problems to solve for. Now we have to think about lighter fluid and know how a lighter works. I really don't think we've lost anything by not using flint and steel- anyone can learn how to do it in a couple minutes.

They cannot yet outmatch humans in critical thinking. Heck, they cannot outmatch a mediocre person like me yet. How many times have we awen "You are right...." Even on sota models?

They are great tools for research and tasks as of now.

I think they can match a human in critical thinking, but they can't match a human in coherence and meta-thinking. You can prompt an LLM to critically think of any idea you want and it's often able to do so, but it's rarely going to do that by itself.

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