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I think more parallels should be drawn with what we were doing before: Googling it. Perhaps it's because ChatGPT seemed to happen much more suddenly than Googl

I think more parallels should be drawn with what we were doing before: Googling it. Perhaps it's because ChatGPT seemed to happen much more suddenly than Google became a programming resource, but we're using them in much the same way. Asking for pre-made solutions, explanations, troubleshooting tips etc. ChatGPT just does the job way better. But no-one was worried Google would put knowledge workers out of a job.

tgv 4y ago
My (sales-y) colleagues are already writing marketing emails with ChatGPT. Saves a little bit of work, but it might result in the loss of being able to write such emails yourself. This can extend to other jobs, which will have some effects. Use in education worries me more. If schools don't change their lazy group-projects and "write an essay on" strategies now, coming generations will have put less effort in than previous, leading to a further drop in levels.
- donkeyd 4y ago
  > coming generations will have put less effort in than previous This has been happening since the inception of school. Calculators made math easier. Sparknotes made book reports easier. Wikipedia made essays easier. > leading to a further drop in levels Did levels drop because stuff got easier? Were there other causes over the past years, like dopamine dependency form infinitely scrolling algorithmic attention grabbing apps, among others? Maybe from schools becoming political battle grounds? Or from education spending being gutted leading to lower quality? Was it lack of decent education due to Covid? Also, is there an actual drop in levels? I can't seem to find a source that has decent data on this. And the only stuff I can find says 'IQ' has been rising over time. So please share it with me. Lastly, I'm personally not convinced any of this will lead to a net negative per se. It'll change the required knowledge and increase the over all capabilities of people. The calculator caused people to stop learning mental arithmetic and start learning more complicated math and how to use a calculator for it. Google caused people to memorize less and become adept at finding information through Google. Welding robots caused less people to learn how to weld and more how to program welding robots. In the end it gives people the ability to do less of a simple thing and more of a complicated thing. Writing marketing e-mails and multiple titles for A/B testing isn't a skill, it's a trick and so is writing SEO stuff. Not having to do that opens up time to think about product-market fit, marketing strategies, improving advertising return on investment measurements. Which might be more valuable and interesting than writing emails.
  - Sol- 4y ago
    > This has been happening since the inception of school. Calculators made math easier. Sparknotes made book reports easier. Wikipedia made essays easier. And advance of LLM will make general thinking and cognition easier, relegating humans to assistants of a higher intelligence. Obviously this will make people anxious. The trajectory also indicates that the human component will likely not even be necessary anymore in the mid-term. So what's left? Consuming AI-generated content optimized to hack our reward system.
  - tgv 4y ago
    > Did levels drop because stuff got easier? Where did I say that that's the reason? You're coming up with developments that made school "easier" without any further similarity to ChatGPT, and don't consider adaptations in the curriculum or testing following those developments. I specifically mention that schools will have to get rid of (some of) their lazy evaluation processes. > Also, is there an actual drop in levels? I can't seem to find a source that has decent data on this. And the only stuff I can find says 'IQ' has been rising over time. So please share it with me. 1. The Norwegian IQ study: https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores-falling-in-worrying-reversal-20th-century-intelligence-boom-flynn-effect-intelligence https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores-falling-in-worrying-r... 2. A comparison of exams in Dutch secondary education: https://nos.nl/artikel/2465434-eindexamens-wis-en-natuurkunde-steeds-makkelijker https://nos.nl/artikel/2465434-eindexamens-wis-en-natuurkund... That trend has been observed everywhere, but has rarely been investigated for uncomfortable reasons. The Flynn effect wasn't actually believed, not even by Flynn himself. > Lastly, I'm personally not convinced any of this will lead to a net negative per se. That's such a bad basis to mess with the foundation of modern society. > The calculator caused people to stop learning mental arithmetic Agree. > and start learning more complicated math Doubt it. Mind you: I mean arithmetic, which is what calculators do, not maths. People rarely do arithmetic, even with a calculator, let alone more complicated calculations. Engineers, ok, they benefit from calculators, but the calculator has not engaged other people in more complicated arithmetics, I think. > Which might be more valuable and interesting than writing emails. I don't disagree, but it will still have unforeseen effects, and doesn't alleviate my worries about education levels.
giuscri 4y ago
In the last days I'm using ChatGPT as my first choice when searching for something and then googling if I'm not sure GPT is not hallucinating. Are they able to sustain the load?
- jalapenos 4y ago
  I imagine Microsoft is giving them any & all infra they need.
mjburgess 4y ago
Everything I've used ChatGPT for so far I could, more-or-less, have written or searched for myself in the time it took to get it out of chatgpt correctly. And I've often just had to rewrite it completely. If you're an expert (writer, programmer, etc.) it's often faster to type it as-needed than modify chatgpt's output. If you're not then either it's not reliable enough, since you do not have the expertise to modify; or the task is quite menial and you dont need reliability. So it seems to me people are reacting to this based on wild assumptions about how it works and what "other people's jobs are". It don't see it being much more than a button in a few apps that makes some menial tasks 50% shorter. People seem to be forgetting that in the vast majority of cases the thing ChatGPT is giving you is also available on stackoverflow, github, wikipeida, or 101 other high quality online sources.
- bob1029 4y ago
  > People seem to be forgetting that in the vast majority of cases the thing ChatGPT is giving you is also available on stackoverflow, github, wikipeida, or 101 other high quality online sources. No one is forgetting anything over here. With StackOverflow, I have to scroll through ~2 pages of bing/google trash to even begin looking at a potential solution. This is only the beginning of the process. 99% of the time, the code sample I find has some simple-yet-annoying adjustments I'd like to make (i.e. unroll the inner loop & use SIMD). Certainly, I could spend half my afternoon massaging that method on my own. Or, I could reach for the circular saw and rip through this board in a few seconds. Sure - it leaves a bit of a rough edge most of the time, but it gets you a lot closer a lot faster than anything else in my experience.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    Sure, but is turning 90min of googling into 5min + 30min of rewriting, "revolutionary" ? When you're googling and reading, you're doing the work of building your understanding. That's shifted in the GPT case to afterwards. It's an advance; it's not nothing. Does it reduce the need to actually understand what you're writing -- no. That's most of the time anyway
    - 4y ago

tgv 4y ago

My (sales-y) colleagues are already writing marketing emails with ChatGPT. Saves a little bit of work, but it might result in the loss of being able to write such emails yourself. This can extend to other jobs, which will have some effects. Use in education worries me more. If schools don't change their lazy group-projects and "write an essay on" strategies now, coming generations will have put less effort in than previous, leading to a further drop in levels.

donkeyd 4y ago
> coming generations will have put less effort in than previous This has been happening since the inception of school. Calculators made math easier. Sparknotes made book reports easier. Wikipedia made essays easier. > leading to a further drop in levels Did levels drop because stuff got easier? Were there other causes over the past years, like dopamine dependency form infinitely scrolling algorithmic attention grabbing apps, among others? Maybe from schools becoming political battle grounds? Or from education spending being gutted leading to lower quality? Was it lack of decent education due to Covid? Also, is there an actual drop in levels? I can't seem to find a source that has decent data on this. And the only stuff I can find says 'IQ' has been rising over time. So please share it with me. Lastly, I'm personally not convinced any of this will lead to a net negative per se. It'll change the required knowledge and increase the over all capabilities of people. The calculator caused people to stop learning mental arithmetic and start learning more complicated math and how to use a calculator for it. Google caused people to memorize less and become adept at finding information through Google. Welding robots caused less people to learn how to weld and more how to program welding robots. In the end it gives people the ability to do less of a simple thing and more of a complicated thing. Writing marketing e-mails and multiple titles for A/B testing isn't a skill, it's a trick and so is writing SEO stuff. Not having to do that opens up time to think about product-market fit, marketing strategies, improving advertising return on investment measurements. Which might be more valuable and interesting than writing emails.
- Sol- 4y ago
  > This has been happening since the inception of school. Calculators made math easier. Sparknotes made book reports easier. Wikipedia made essays easier. And advance of LLM will make general thinking and cognition easier, relegating humans to assistants of a higher intelligence. Obviously this will make people anxious. The trajectory also indicates that the human component will likely not even be necessary anymore in the mid-term. So what's left? Consuming AI-generated content optimized to hack our reward system.
- tgv 4y ago
  > Did levels drop because stuff got easier? Where did I say that that's the reason? You're coming up with developments that made school "easier" without any further similarity to ChatGPT, and don't consider adaptations in the curriculum or testing following those developments. I specifically mention that schools will have to get rid of (some of) their lazy evaluation processes. > Also, is there an actual drop in levels? I can't seem to find a source that has decent data on this. And the only stuff I can find says 'IQ' has been rising over time. So please share it with me. 1. The Norwegian IQ study: https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores-falling-in-worrying-reversal-20th-century-intelligence-boom-flynn-effect-intelligence https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores-falling-in-worrying-r... 2. A comparison of exams in Dutch secondary education: https://nos.nl/artikel/2465434-eindexamens-wis-en-natuurkunde-steeds-makkelijker https://nos.nl/artikel/2465434-eindexamens-wis-en-natuurkund... That trend has been observed everywhere, but has rarely been investigated for uncomfortable reasons. The Flynn effect wasn't actually believed, not even by Flynn himself. > Lastly, I'm personally not convinced any of this will lead to a net negative per se. That's such a bad basis to mess with the foundation of modern society. > The calculator caused people to stop learning mental arithmetic Agree. > and start learning more complicated math Doubt it. Mind you: I mean arithmetic, which is what calculators do, not maths. People rarely do arithmetic, even with a calculator, let alone more complicated calculations. Engineers, ok, they benefit from calculators, but the calculator has not engaged other people in more complicated arithmetics, I think. > Which might be more valuable and interesting than writing emails. I don't disagree, but it will still have unforeseen effects, and doesn't alleviate my worries about education levels.

giuscri 4y ago

In the last days I'm using ChatGPT as my first choice when searching for something and then googling if I'm not sure GPT is not hallucinating. Are they able to sustain the load?

jalapenos 4y ago
I imagine Microsoft is giving them any & all infra they need.

mjburgess 4y ago

Everything I've used ChatGPT for so far I could, more-or-less, have written or searched for myself in the time it took to get it out of chatgpt correctly. And I've often just had to rewrite it completely. If you're an expert (writer, programmer, etc.) it's often faster to type it as-needed than modify chatgpt's output. If you're not then either it's not reliable enough, since you do not have the expertise to modify; or the task is quite menial and you dont need reliability. So it seems to me people are reacting to this based on wild assumptions about how it works and what "other people's jobs are". It don't see it being much more than a button in a few apps that makes some menial tasks 50% shorter. People seem to be forgetting that in the vast majority of cases the thing ChatGPT is giving you is also available on stackoverflow, github, wikipeida, or 101 other high quality online sources.

bob1029 4y ago
> People seem to be forgetting that in the vast majority of cases the thing ChatGPT is giving you is also available on stackoverflow, github, wikipeida, or 101 other high quality online sources. No one is forgetting anything over here. With StackOverflow, I have to scroll through ~2 pages of bing/google trash to even begin looking at a potential solution. This is only the beginning of the process. 99% of the time, the code sample I find has some simple-yet-annoying adjustments I'd like to make (i.e. unroll the inner loop & use SIMD). Certainly, I could spend half my afternoon massaging that method on my own. Or, I could reach for the circular saw and rip through this board in a few seconds. Sure - it leaves a bit of a rough edge most of the time, but it gets you a lot closer a lot faster than anything else in my experience.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Sure, but is turning 90min of googling into 5min + 30min of rewriting, "revolutionary" ? When you're googling and reading, you're doing the work of building your understanding. That's shifted in the GPT case to afterwards. It's an advance; it's not nothing. Does it reduce the need to actually understand what you're writing -- no. That's most of the time anyway
  - 4y ago