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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,

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.
    - yunwal 2y ago
      > you're not going to know anything because the LLM is doing it for you" which is easily obviously true Not obviously true to me. LLMs don’t know everything, so they can’t solve all problems. You can try and give it the proper context but you still need to understand the context is necessary, which requires knowledge. Kids who grow up today will understand and intuit that synthesizing 3 facts from an article doesn’t constitute “work” any more than multiplying 4-digit numbers. Adults will eventually pick up on this as well.
      - marcus_holmes 2y ago
        yeah, one of the problems we're seeing with using LLMs at the moment is that they don't really work for beginners, because you need to have a certain level of knowledge in order to be able to spot the hallucinations and understand the context. I've seen this in coding, where as an experienced coder I can spot where the LLM is doing bad things, but if I try using it in a language or environment I'm not familiar with, I get lots of errors that I don't understand how to fix and all I can do is feed back the errors to the LLM and hope it does better next time. So I guess my point is that if we end up using LLMs for everything then we have a chicken & egg problem - LLMs don't work for beginners, but beginners don't learn anything while they're using LLMs because they can't get past basic errors. Your point about multiplying 4-digit numbers would be valid if calculators often made basic maths mistakes, and you can only really use them if you already know the approximate answer so you can detect when they've made a mistake.
birdfood 2y ago
With having internet in our pocket we no longer value being able to recall information. There is no need when anything is a query away. I suspect a similar thing will happen with our ability to think. What is the value in being able think through and solve a problem when you can just get your phone to do it instead? And I would argue in reality most people won't care if the results aren't correct so long as they are plausible and fast.

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.
  - yunwal 2y ago
    > you're not going to know anything because the LLM is doing it for you" which is easily obviously true Not obviously true to me. LLMs don’t know everything, so they can’t solve all problems. You can try and give it the proper context but you still need to understand the context is necessary, which requires knowledge. Kids who grow up today will understand and intuit that synthesizing 3 facts from an article doesn’t constitute “work” any more than multiplying 4-digit numbers. Adults will eventually pick up on this as well.
    - marcus_holmes 2y ago
      yeah, one of the problems we're seeing with using LLMs at the moment is that they don't really work for beginners, because you need to have a certain level of knowledge in order to be able to spot the hallucinations and understand the context. I've seen this in coding, where as an experienced coder I can spot where the LLM is doing bad things, but if I try using it in a language or environment I'm not familiar with, I get lots of errors that I don't understand how to fix and all I can do is feed back the errors to the LLM and hope it does better next time. So I guess my point is that if we end up using LLMs for everything then we have a chicken & egg problem - LLMs don't work for beginners, but beginners don't learn anything while they're using LLMs because they can't get past basic errors. Your point about multiplying 4-digit numbers would be valid if calculators often made basic maths mistakes, and you can only really use them if you already know the approximate answer so you can detect when they've made a mistake.

birdfood 2y ago

With having internet in our pocket we no longer value being able to recall information. There is no need when anything is a query away. I suspect a similar thing will happen with our ability to think. What is the value in being able think through and solve a problem when you can just get your phone to do it instead? And I would argue in reality most people won't care if the results aren't correct so long as they are plausible and fast.