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I feel this depends entirely on how you use it. Using it as a rubber duck to talk through ideas? doubt my brain activity is lower because of that. Using it to s

I feel this depends entirely on how you use it. Using it as a rubber duck to talk through ideas? doubt my brain activity is lower because of that. Using it to stub out boiler plate code? I'm glad my brain activity is lower for that. I won't use AI for emails or creative content, but I'll for sure use it as a sounding board and as a trivial task completer. I bet my brain activity is lower using a calculator. Nuance does not make for a flashy article title.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
I think the calculator example is apt, but flawed Is it safe to say that people are generally much worse at mental math nowadays due to calculators being ready available on every smartphone? I think it is reasonable to assume that's true. Math is more accessible thanks to tools now, but people are worse at it in general? If that's true, that we became worse at mental math thanks to readily available tools, then what does it suggest about a readily available tool that "thinks" for us? The same way we used to caution devs not to just copy and paste from Stack Overflow, we now have to repeat with AI... Except AI is being pushed to literally take over that whole workflow! At least with Stack Overflow you had to identify where in the code to paste it! Edit: A further thought in Math. I suppose there is a difference between "Math" and "Calculation". Likely due to modern education people do know (at least vaguely) more about Math than before. Maybe the skill of actually performing calculations is not that valuable as long as you have some baseline understanding of the underlying Math Still the problem with AI tools is they promise to do the Calculation and also understand the Math for you. To calculate an angle you need to know enough Trig to figure out which sides you need to measure and which function you need to use on the Calculator. With AI, in theory, you just ask it what it needs to calculate that angle, it tells you, you measure, input the numbers, and it gives you the angle back. No Human understanding of anything required. A total loss imo You can view it as freeing our cognitive abilities for other things I view it as never developing cognitive abilities because we never had to actually use them
- cgriswald 1y ago
  Why would that be reasonable to assume? Even ignoring that calculators were ubiquitous long before smart phones existed, a google search can give you actual facts. A quick search suggests otherwise but I’ll let you do your own. People can still do math in their head (and on paper) despite the existence of calculators. They can still dig holes by hand despite the existence of shovels. And they can still write a for loop despite the existence of AI.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > People can still do math in their head (and on paper) despite the existence of calculators Because in the past we recognized the value of teaching people that way first I don't know about you but when I was growing up we were not allowed to use calculators in class or on tests for years until we started to need them for functions like trig and graphing
    - cgriswald 1y ago
      If there are people out there teaching calculator math to first graders there ought to be data on how that is working out. But it shouldn’t be a surprise that an unlearned skill remains unlearned. The question is whether a learned skill is “much worse” in the presence of a tool. You seem to be agreeing that it isn’t (or at least doesn’t have to be), but that danger lies in just never learning the skill.
      - bluefirebrand 1y ago
        > but that danger lies in just never learning the skill Yes, which is what I think AI contributes to Especially with reckless ideas like "vibe coding" going around
        cgriswald 1y ago
        We don't really see that with calculators, though. We see that people who already don't do mental math are enabled to do more math. Those of us who can do mental math can benefit from calculators but don't lose the skill we've learned. As far as I know (which could easily be out of date), arithmetic is still taught sans calculators in most places. "Vibe coding" is primarily being done by people who already weren't learning to program. If programming was taught as ubiquitously and early as arithmetic, they either wouldn't be vibe coding or they were never going to program in the first place because for whatever reason they were unable or unwilling to develop the skill. So you could see this as a loss of potential, but I suspect it is far more of a democratization of programming. If we're looking at parallels, we should be looking at WYSIWYG webpage creation tools rather than calculators. Did that destroy knowledge of HTML and CSS?
- wwweston 1y ago
  Calculation develops your intuition for some things. I wouldn’t want to always have to do arithmetic by hand, but I’m sure glad I’ve had the practice doing it. Turns out AI could put us in a chinese room.
  - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    > Turns out AI could put us in a chinese room. Well, that's one of the more terrifying things I've heard this week...
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      Isn't The Matrix kind of an example of "AI put humans in a Chinese Room"? :) Trapping us all in a simulation does seem like the same general idea
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Yeah, I'm really conflicted here I don't think that we should not use tools to offload tedious work However there must be tradeoffs, right? Take physical fitness for an example. We built machines to automate a ton of physical labour for us. Many of us no longer work long hours in hard labour jobs. A single excavator driver can move more earth faster than a team of people with shovels could even hope to How's our physical fitness as a society these days? Yes part of that problem is that we eat terrible foods, but still. The sedentary lifestyle plays its part in the obesity epidemic too I think it's reasonable to speculate that "we no longer need to think much, just pilot the AI" will similarly decrease our mental capabilities
- spwa4 1y ago
  > Is it safe to say that people are generally much worse at mental math nowadays due to calculators being ready available on every smartphone? I think it is reasonable to assume that's true. Math is more accessible thanks to tools now, but people are worse at it in general? Nope. The answer is government and money. As someone who had a father that taught students and now has kids (that I teach myself, and help them go to school) I know the direct answer: teachers. Also: mental math did not drop off a cliff when calculators appeared, nor when they were accepted. It slowly slid downward. More than that: it peaked. It's not like the people who fought in WW2 were good at mental math either. So between 1960 and 2000 something happened to greatly push mental math ... and now to destroy that ability. A long-term perspective on the teacher profession also taught me why. In the 70s few people were educated. Why would you? And worse: we were all working in industry. That's where the money was ... but not if you were educated (which, let's be honest, tends to instill less willingness to do repetitive manual labor). The limiting factor of growing industry was: geometry, calculus and fast mental math. That's what you require to make good plans and good use of factories to turn metal into products. A lot of smart, or at least educated, people were lured into government positions in the 70s by the previous economic crisis, and the new growth market of industry were pushing and pushing and pushing to teach math, from as young as possible. They taught themselves math because they started teaching careers and the money in these was hard to beat. Industry paid for advanced math courses for teachers. In the 70s teaching positions easily matched industry wages, except you mostly worked at a desk, and especially the pension plans were sweet. Teachers got free math course, paid for by industry, to teach themselves math because that got you better positions, making a bit more per month. Of course, the government lied. Here's the HUGE caveat in a government contract: A government can simply vote in a law or even regulation that "overrides the contract", an therefore cannot be counted on to keep long-term promises even when there is a signature on a paper. And while unions help slow the destruction, they cannot stop the slide. So starting after the crisis at the end of the 1980s governments lowered teacher pay, even for existing people (which is where government power comes in: private sector firms are not allowed to do this). Which then also meant they accepted a much lower quality of people into the teaching profession, as they couldn't compete anymore, the government simply did not care, and existing teachers got discouraged. Now, mind you, "quality" refers to their academic ability, as certainly a part of teacher pay was (and is) that you work all day in a position where you socially dominate everyone around you, which of course led to abuses of that position as well. And since it's not like lower academic quality people are not abusing their positions as teachers, that part has stayed (just look up developmental psychology papers: almost all child abuse happens in schools, and what has the government done about that? Well: CPS was legally forbidden from investigating schools, or teachers. Only parents get investigated and even blamed for school problems (that's in theory, in practice of course it's mostly the least powerful that CPS really attacks: the kids themselves))
coffeefirst 1y ago
Right. And this may be the problem. The tool-makers really try to sell this as a service to use as a crutch rather than a tool. There's a huge mental gap between "use the LM to research some stuff I'm writing an email about, and cite sources" and "write the email for me."

bluefirebrand 1y ago

I think the calculator example is apt, but flawed Is it safe to say that people are generally much worse at mental math nowadays due to calculators being ready available on every smartphone? I think it is reasonable to assume that's true. Math is more accessible thanks to tools now, but people are worse at it in general? If that's true, that we became worse at mental math thanks to readily available tools, then what does it suggest about a readily available tool that "thinks" for us? The same way we used to caution devs not to just copy and paste from Stack Overflow, we now have to repeat with AI... Except AI is being pushed to literally take over that whole workflow! At least with Stack Overflow you had to identify where in the code to paste it! Edit: A further thought in Math. I suppose there is a difference between "Math" and "Calculation". Likely due to modern education people do know (at least vaguely) more about Math than before. Maybe the skill of actually performing calculations is not that valuable as long as you have some baseline understanding of the underlying Math Still the problem with AI tools is they promise to do the Calculation and also understand the Math for you. To calculate an angle you need to know enough Trig to figure out which sides you need to measure and which function you need to use on the Calculator. With AI, in theory, you just ask it what it needs to calculate that angle, it tells you, you measure, input the numbers, and it gives you the angle back. No Human understanding of anything required. A total loss imo You can view it as freeing our cognitive abilities for other things I view it as never developing cognitive abilities because we never had to actually use them

cgriswald 1y ago
Why would that be reasonable to assume? Even ignoring that calculators were ubiquitous long before smart phones existed, a google search can give you actual facts. A quick search suggests otherwise but I’ll let you do your own. People can still do math in their head (and on paper) despite the existence of calculators. They can still dig holes by hand despite the existence of shovels. And they can still write a for loop despite the existence of AI.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > People can still do math in their head (and on paper) despite the existence of calculators Because in the past we recognized the value of teaching people that way first I don't know about you but when I was growing up we were not allowed to use calculators in class or on tests for years until we started to need them for functions like trig and graphing
  - cgriswald 1y ago
    If there are people out there teaching calculator math to first graders there ought to be data on how that is working out. But it shouldn’t be a surprise that an unlearned skill remains unlearned. The question is whether a learned skill is “much worse” in the presence of a tool. You seem to be agreeing that it isn’t (or at least doesn’t have to be), but that danger lies in just never learning the skill.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      > but that danger lies in just never learning the skill Yes, which is what I think AI contributes to Especially with reckless ideas like "vibe coding" going around
      - cgriswald 1y ago
        We don't really see that with calculators, though. We see that people who already don't do mental math are enabled to do more math. Those of us who can do mental math can benefit from calculators but don't lose the skill we've learned. As far as I know (which could easily be out of date), arithmetic is still taught sans calculators in most places. "Vibe coding" is primarily being done by people who already weren't learning to program. If programming was taught as ubiquitously and early as arithmetic, they either wouldn't be vibe coding or they were never going to program in the first place because for whatever reason they were unable or unwilling to develop the skill. So you could see this as a loss of potential, but I suspect it is far more of a democratization of programming. If we're looking at parallels, we should be looking at WYSIWYG webpage creation tools rather than calculators. Did that destroy knowledge of HTML and CSS?
wwweston 1y ago
Calculation develops your intuition for some things. I wouldn’t want to always have to do arithmetic by hand, but I’m sure glad I’ve had the practice doing it. Turns out AI could put us in a chinese room.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  > Turns out AI could put us in a chinese room. Well, that's one of the more terrifying things I've heard this week...
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Isn't The Matrix kind of an example of "AI put humans in a Chinese Room"? :) Trapping us all in a simulation does seem like the same general idea
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Yeah, I'm really conflicted here I don't think that we should not use tools to offload tedious work However there must be tradeoffs, right? Take physical fitness for an example. We built machines to automate a ton of physical labour for us. Many of us no longer work long hours in hard labour jobs. A single excavator driver can move more earth faster than a team of people with shovels could even hope to How's our physical fitness as a society these days? Yes part of that problem is that we eat terrible foods, but still. The sedentary lifestyle plays its part in the obesity epidemic too I think it's reasonable to speculate that "we no longer need to think much, just pilot the AI" will similarly decrease our mental capabilities
spwa4 1y ago
> Is it safe to say that people are generally much worse at mental math nowadays due to calculators being ready available on every smartphone? I think it is reasonable to assume that's true. Math is more accessible thanks to tools now, but people are worse at it in general? Nope. The answer is government and money. As someone who had a father that taught students and now has kids (that I teach myself, and help them go to school) I know the direct answer: teachers. Also: mental math did not drop off a cliff when calculators appeared, nor when they were accepted. It slowly slid downward. More than that: it peaked. It's not like the people who fought in WW2 were good at mental math either. So between 1960 and 2000 something happened to greatly push mental math ... and now to destroy that ability. A long-term perspective on the teacher profession also taught me why. In the 70s few people were educated. Why would you? And worse: we were all working in industry. That's where the money was ... but not if you were educated (which, let's be honest, tends to instill less willingness to do repetitive manual labor). The limiting factor of growing industry was: geometry, calculus and fast mental math. That's what you require to make good plans and good use of factories to turn metal into products. A lot of smart, or at least educated, people were lured into government positions in the 70s by the previous economic crisis, and the new growth market of industry were pushing and pushing and pushing to teach math, from as young as possible. They taught themselves math because they started teaching careers and the money in these was hard to beat. Industry paid for advanced math courses for teachers. In the 70s teaching positions easily matched industry wages, except you mostly worked at a desk, and especially the pension plans were sweet. Teachers got free math course, paid for by industry, to teach themselves math because that got you better positions, making a bit more per month. Of course, the government lied. Here's the HUGE caveat in a government contract: A government can simply vote in a law or even regulation that "overrides the contract", an therefore cannot be counted on to keep long-term promises even when there is a signature on a paper. And while unions help slow the destruction, they cannot stop the slide. So starting after the crisis at the end of the 1980s governments lowered teacher pay, even for existing people (which is where government power comes in: private sector firms are not allowed to do this). Which then also meant they accepted a much lower quality of people into the teaching profession, as they couldn't compete anymore, the government simply did not care, and existing teachers got discouraged. Now, mind you, "quality" refers to their academic ability, as certainly a part of teacher pay was (and is) that you work all day in a position where you socially dominate everyone around you, which of course led to abuses of that position as well. And since it's not like lower academic quality people are not abusing their positions as teachers, that part has stayed (just look up developmental psychology papers: almost all child abuse happens in schools, and what has the government done about that? Well: CPS was legally forbidden from investigating schools, or teachers. Only parents get investigated and even blamed for school problems (that's in theory, in practice of course it's mostly the least powerful that CPS really attacks: the kids themselves))

coffeefirst 1y ago

Right. And this may be the problem. The tool-makers really try to sell this as a service to use as a crutch rather than a tool. There's a huge mental gap between "use the LM to research some stuff I'm writing an email about, and cite sources" and "write the email for me."