30 ms·

The world is going to become stupider because it’s easier. This will be most dramatic for the youth in both school learning as well as in the field. Unfortunate

The world is going to become stupider because it’s easier. This will be most dramatic for the youth in both school learning as well as in the field. Unfortunately I don’t realistically see another path in any reasonable time unless the world takes a radical turn away from AI (extremely unlikely).

knowaveragejoe 2y ago
On the other hand, a motivated person can now pursue their interest in a subject of their choosing, at their pace, as much as they want. LLMs are great tutors if you use them in this manner.
echelon 2y ago
Old people say this about young people all the time.
- cudgy 2y ago
  And they’re usually right.
  - snoman 2y ago
    The data (re: the Flynn effect) suggests otherwise.
    - cudgy 2y ago
      There are explanations to the Flynn effect that go beyond isolated intelligence. How does one isolate intelligence test when society, nutrition, religions, educational systems, and the very IQ standard itself has changed?
      - snoman 2y ago
        I get it, there’s work to be done to flush this out but it’s interesting to me that actual scientific enquiry gets more push back than “but old guy said so.”
        cudgy 2y ago
        Surely it holds more merit than “young dude with no experience who read about it in latest reddit group / social media app said so”.
- azinman2 2y ago
  Old people have never entered a world of GenAI before.
  - kelseyfrog 2y ago
    Old people have a terrible track record. Their base rate is nil. It would take quite a bit of evidence for me to update my prior.
Klaster_1 2y ago
In your opinion, what's the key difference that makes AI lead to world becoming stupider compared to other technologies that lead to more widespread knowledge, such as writing, book printing, calculators, computers and Internet?
- azinman2 2y ago
  Because all your writing is being done for you. All your homework is done for you. You go to start coding as an engineer, you just copy/paste from an AI until it runs. No need to think, no need to try to figure it out for yourself, no need to learn anything.
  - yunwal 2y ago
    Great, go get yourself 4 phds and a 600k/year job if ai can do everything for you! Meanwhile the rest of us in the real world will continue understanding the limits of the tools we use.
    - azinman2 2y ago
      1 PhD was enough for me. I think you’re vastly overestimating the amount of work people either want to do or pay for. A worse version that’s nearly free or instant will win regardless of limitations the majority of the time.
    - marcus_holmes 2y ago
      Both those things (PhD and high salary) require human interaction to achieve, not knowledge or tool use. There are many examples of people achieving both/either whilst being ignorant and/or unintelligent. The comment was about "you're not going to know anything because the LLM is doing it for you" which is easily obviously true. This won't stop anyone from getting a PhD or a high salary. It will just stop them from knowing things, and possibly being able to build cool stuff (specifically in the example of software dev), though even then you could argue that a good working knowledge of how to prompt an LLM is roughly as performant as a good working knowledge of a software language.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
They probably said the same thing when the printing press came out. “How can you really know the book if you didn’t copy it down yourself during a reading?” But the printing press won out in the end.
- azinman2 2y ago
  The printing press takes your ideas that you already wrote and increases distribution. Deep research is writing the text for you. That’s completely different.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    I disagree, it’s just another step in the automation of knowledge distribution that’s been going on for a long long time. Every step someone has lamented that we lost something, maybe starting with speech itself, and the invention of writing taking away from oral tradition, scrolls, books, the printing press, the World Wide Web, etc… I was just wowing to myself the other day that a local 70b 4q 40GB model on my Mac basically replaces Wikipedia for me and can be used offline in an airplane. A whole library can be replaced with a cube of knowledge that is just a wrapper around an LLM. Of course there is going to be resistance to any move up, there has never not been resistance.
    - beeflet 2y ago
      It's like wikipedia except it spits out incorrect information at an alarming rate and has no references. Still, impressive that it only weighs 10s of GB when wikipedia alone is on the order of ~100GB
      - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        Wikipedia isn’t a completely reliable source either. The LLM also includes a search engine. It’s weird since before I started playing around with it I thought it was just a fancy search engine and was grabbing sources from somewhere to shove into its context … but no, it’s all built in (although as deep research shows, it can do a lot better when it stuffs its context via research).
Workaccount2 2y ago
The models that exist right now would still be considered alpha LLMs. Even a half decent video game takes longer to make than the time since GPT3.5 launched. If they still are at this level in 2-3 years, then yeah, it will likely cause a bunch of bad downstream effects. But at least recognize that it is still a few years too early to judge.
- azinman2 2y ago
  Students are already using it for their homework, now.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    Good.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- cratermoon 2y ago
  Allow me to introduce The First Step Fallacy. https://thebullshitmachines.com/lesson-16-the-first-step-fallacy/index.html https://thebullshitmachines.com/lesson-16-the-first-step-fal...
  - casey2 2y ago
    It's an inductive claim yes, nevertheless it's based on mountains of evidence. Nobody is claiming to have logically deduced that AI progress is inevitable, we might all drop dead tomorrow or stop working on it, but the trends are clear
    - cratermoon 2y ago
      > mountains of evidence Yes? For very small values of 'mountain'.
visarga 2y ago
> The world is going to become stupider because it’s easier. Wasn't the same thing when we switched from books to web? We lost the ability for long reads, and instead just search and click directly to specific information, losing the larger context. And we adapted, we have a whole search culture, reputation systems, new patterns of interaction with information.
- azinman2 2y ago
  Web didn’t really replace long reads. You didn’t have a searchable question that you’d previously read hundreds of pages for. More and more short form content started coming out, then social media, all of which both replaced books as entertainment while simultaneously reducing attention span. But it’s not just online media - look at modern tv/film and watch old… the cuts were so much slower previously. That’s probably caused by the changes from web/social media, more than the other way around. However the extent that the web could replace your work is very minimal because you’d be copy/pasting some existing untailored source. Now, we can take your tailored question / task and have it just completed for you. Doing is a huge part of learning, and if you don’t do, you won’t learn.
qingcharles 2y ago
> "SHE PROCEEDS TO ASK CHATGPT TO ANSWER EVERY SINGLE QUESTION IN HER 2 PAGE MATH HOMEWORK and these include VERY SIMPLE QUESTIONS like how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours" https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1hun3e4/my_little_sisters_use_of_chatgpt_for_homework_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1hun3e4/my_little_...
- azinman2 2y ago
  Exactly

knowaveragejoe 2y ago

On the other hand, a motivated person can now pursue their interest in a subject of their choosing, at their pace, as much as they want. LLMs are great tutors if you use them in this manner.

echelon 2y ago

Old people say this about young people all the time.

cudgy 2y ago
And they’re usually right.
- snoman 2y ago
  The data (re: the Flynn effect) suggests otherwise.
  - cudgy 2y ago
    There are explanations to the Flynn effect that go beyond isolated intelligence. How does one isolate intelligence test when society, nutrition, religions, educational systems, and the very IQ standard itself has changed?
    - snoman 2y ago
      I get it, there’s work to be done to flush this out but it’s interesting to me that actual scientific enquiry gets more push back than “but old guy said so.”
      - cudgy 2y ago
        Surely it holds more merit than “young dude with no experience who read about it in latest reddit group / social media app said so”.
azinman2 2y ago
Old people have never entered a world of GenAI before.
- kelseyfrog 2y ago
  Old people have a terrible track record. Their base rate is nil. It would take quite a bit of evidence for me to update my prior.

Klaster_1 2y ago

In your opinion, what's the key difference that makes AI lead to world becoming stupider compared to other technologies that lead to more widespread knowledge, such as writing, book printing, calculators, computers and Internet?

azinman2 2y ago
Because all your writing is being done for you. All your homework is done for you. You go to start coding as an engineer, you just copy/paste from an AI until it runs. No need to think, no need to try to figure it out for yourself, no need to learn anything.
- yunwal 2y ago
  Great, go get yourself 4 phds and a 600k/year job if ai can do everything for you! Meanwhile the rest of us in the real world will continue understanding the limits of the tools we use.
  - azinman2 2y ago
    1 PhD was enough for me. I think you’re vastly overestimating the amount of work people either want to do or pay for. A worse version that’s nearly free or instant will win regardless of limitations the majority of the time.
  - marcus_holmes 2y ago
    Both those things (PhD and high salary) require human interaction to achieve, not knowledge or tool use. There are many examples of people achieving both/either whilst being ignorant and/or unintelligent. The comment was about "you're not going to know anything because the LLM is doing it for you" which is easily obviously true. This won't stop anyone from getting a PhD or a high salary. It will just stop them from knowing things, and possibly being able to build cool stuff (specifically in the example of software dev), though even then you could argue that a good working knowledge of how to prompt an LLM is roughly as performant as a good working knowledge of a software language.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago

They probably said the same thing when the printing press came out. “How can you really know the book if you didn’t copy it down yourself during a reading?” But the printing press won out in the end.

azinman2 2y ago
The printing press takes your ideas that you already wrote and increases distribution. Deep research is writing the text for you. That’s completely different.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  I disagree, it’s just another step in the automation of knowledge distribution that’s been going on for a long long time. Every step someone has lamented that we lost something, maybe starting with speech itself, and the invention of writing taking away from oral tradition, scrolls, books, the printing press, the World Wide Web, etc… I was just wowing to myself the other day that a local 70b 4q 40GB model on my Mac basically replaces Wikipedia for me and can be used offline in an airplane. A whole library can be replaced with a cube of knowledge that is just a wrapper around an LLM. Of course there is going to be resistance to any move up, there has never not been resistance.
  - beeflet 2y ago
    It's like wikipedia except it spits out incorrect information at an alarming rate and has no references. Still, impressive that it only weighs 10s of GB when wikipedia alone is on the order of ~100GB
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      Wikipedia isn’t a completely reliable source either. The LLM also includes a search engine. It’s weird since before I started playing around with it I thought it was just a fancy search engine and was grabbing sources from somewhere to shove into its context … but no, it’s all built in (although as deep research shows, it can do a lot better when it stuffs its context via research).

Workaccount2 2y ago

The models that exist right now would still be considered alpha LLMs. Even a half decent video game takes longer to make than the time since GPT3.5 launched. If they still are at this level in 2-3 years, then yeah, it will likely cause a bunch of bad downstream effects. But at least recognize that it is still a few years too early to judge.

azinman2 2y ago
Students are already using it for their homework, now.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Good.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
cratermoon 2y ago
Allow me to introduce The First Step Fallacy. https://thebullshitmachines.com/lesson-16-the-first-step-fallacy/index.html https://thebullshitmachines.com/lesson-16-the-first-step-fal...
- casey2 2y ago
  It's an inductive claim yes, nevertheless it's based on mountains of evidence. Nobody is claiming to have logically deduced that AI progress is inevitable, we might all drop dead tomorrow or stop working on it, but the trends are clear
  - cratermoon 2y ago
    > mountains of evidence Yes? For very small values of 'mountain'.

visarga 2y ago

> The world is going to become stupider because it’s easier. Wasn't the same thing when we switched from books to web? We lost the ability for long reads, and instead just search and click directly to specific information, losing the larger context. And we adapted, we have a whole search culture, reputation systems, new patterns of interaction with information.

azinman2 2y ago
Web didn’t really replace long reads. You didn’t have a searchable question that you’d previously read hundreds of pages for. More and more short form content started coming out, then social media, all of which both replaced books as entertainment while simultaneously reducing attention span. But it’s not just online media - look at modern tv/film and watch old… the cuts were so much slower previously. That’s probably caused by the changes from web/social media, more than the other way around. However the extent that the web could replace your work is very minimal because you’d be copy/pasting some existing untailored source. Now, we can take your tailored question / task and have it just completed for you. Doing is a huge part of learning, and if you don’t do, you won’t learn.

qingcharles 2y ago

> "SHE PROCEEDS TO ASK CHATGPT TO ANSWER EVERY SINGLE QUESTION IN HER 2 PAGE MATH HOMEWORK and these include VERY SIMPLE QUESTIONS like how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours" https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1hun3e4/my_little_sisters_use_of_chatgpt_for_homework_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1hun3e4/my_little_...

azinman2 2y ago
Exactly