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I sometimes wonder if the true "digital divide" comes down to those who were able to develop critical thinking skills prior to these last few years. If you had
by l33tbro 1y ago
I sometimes wonder if the true "digital divide" comes down to those who were able to develop critical thinking skills prior to these last few years.
If you had previously developed these skills through widish reading and patient consideration, then tools like LLMs are like somebody handing you the keys to a wave-runner in a choppy sea of information.
But for those now having to learn to critically think, I cannot see how they would endure through the struggle of contemplation without habitually reaching for an LLM. The act of holding ambiguity within yourself, where information is often encoded into knowledge, becomes instantly relieve here.
While I feel lucky to have acquired critically skills prior to 2023, tools like LLMs being unconditionally handed to young people for learning fill me with a kind of dread.
- AppleBananaPie 1y agoI agree with you because young me would have learned nothing for the sake of short term fun
- delfinom 1y agoIdiocracy is coming.
- Incipient 1y agoI'm both making a joke in response, but also believe my response. Mostly viewing life through another highschool teacher (in Australia). Idiocracy is accelerating*
- thisisnotauser 1y agoI think a lot of doomerism over AI making everyone stupid is really overestimating how many people have good critical thinking skills today. I've worked in high skill engineering domains for nearly twenty years now and even well-accomplished people are often pretty unimpressive when it comes to really understanding complex concepts. I anticipate smart people will not suffer some handicap simply because easy answers are now readily available for the vast bulk of people who were never going to think critically in the first place.
- drakonka 1y agoI think I am relatively smart and I can feel myself getting dumber when I over-rely on AI for certain things. I've had to carefully observe the effect and choose what I "allow" myself to use it for. Example: when I use it for prose for fiction or my personal blog, I can feel my own imagination for constructing good sentences and my own vocabulary deteriorate much faster than I would've expected. But when I used it purely for brainstorming plot points _or_ doing a quick proofreading pass on a set of notes I already took myself that I want to post, I feel no sudden negative effects. Feeling that sudden difference in competency is jarring - in a good way. It's very useful information. I wonder whether people growing up with these tools from the beginning won't get that benefit - they won't have a "before AI" and "after AI" brain to "jar" them into awareness and adjustment. Then again... maybe the skills I am trying to preserve will be seen as entirely irrelevant to them regardless.
- me_me_me 1y ago[dead]
- anal_reactor 1y agoDing ding ding. There is this overly optimistic view that average person is intelligent, which is definitely not the case. AI doesn't make people stupid, it just exposes the existing stupidity.
- me_me_me 1y ago[dead]