2 ms·

I think you're right at the edge of explaining why this "laziness" is a good thing. Everything that we have made is built on what we had before, and abstracts a

I think you're right at the edge of explaining why this "laziness" is a good thing. Everything that we have made is built on what we had before, and abstracts away what we had before. 99% of us don't remember how to make even the simplest Assembly program, and yet we unleash billions of instructions per second on the world. Even outside of math and computers, when was the last time you primed a well pump or filled an oil lamp? All of these tasks have been abstracted away, freeing us to focus on ever-more-specialized pursuits. Those that are useful will too be abstracted away, and for the better.

nottorp 2y ago
> when was the last time you primed a well pump or filled an oil lamp? All of these tasks have been abstracted away They have not been abstracted away, they have been made obsolete. Significant difference. The danger with LLMs is people will never learn tasks that are still needed.
- parsimo2010 2y ago
  Your comment exposes how much metacognitive laziness you have in modern society that you didn't realize that people still do these things, just not you. They aren't obsolete tasks, just done at a layer you don't see. I don't have to prime a well pump any more because my house and workplace are hooked into the municipal water system. I don't have to prime a pump because that task has gotten so abstract as to become turning a faucet handle. But engineers at the municipal water plant do have to know how to do this task. Similarly, filling an oil lamp and lighting it is now abstracted for normal people as flipping a light switch (maybe changing a light bulb is a more appropriate comparison). But I actually have filled an oil lamp when I was a kid because we kept "decorative" hurricane lamps in my house that we used when the power went out. The exact task of filling an oil lamp is not common, but filling a generator with fuel is still needed to keep the lights on in an emergency, although it is usually handled by the maintenance staff of apartment buildings and large office buildings.

nottorp 2y ago

> when was the last time you primed a well pump or filled an oil lamp? All of these tasks have been abstracted away They have not been abstracted away, they have been made obsolete. Significant difference. The danger with LLMs is people will never learn tasks that are still needed.

parsimo2010 2y ago
Your comment exposes how much metacognitive laziness you have in modern society that you didn't realize that people still do these things, just not you. They aren't obsolete tasks, just done at a layer you don't see. I don't have to prime a well pump any more because my house and workplace are hooked into the municipal water system. I don't have to prime a pump because that task has gotten so abstract as to become turning a faucet handle. But engineers at the municipal water plant do have to know how to do this task. Similarly, filling an oil lamp and lighting it is now abstracted for normal people as flipping a light switch (maybe changing a light bulb is a more appropriate comparison). But I actually have filled an oil lamp when I was a kid because we kept "decorative" hurricane lamps in my house that we used when the power went out. The exact task of filling an oil lamp is not common, but filling a generator with fuel is still needed to keep the lights on in an emergency, although it is usually handled by the maintenance staff of apartment buildings and large office buildings.