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A retort you often hear is that prior technologies, like writing or the printing press, may have stunted our calligraphy or rhetorical skills, but they did not
by biophysboy 1y ago
A retort you often hear is that prior technologies, like writing or the printing press, may have stunted our calligraphy or rhetorical skills, but they did not stunt our capacity to think. If anything, they magnified it! Basically, the whole Steve Jobs' bicycle-for-the-mind idea.
My issue with applying this reasoning to AI is that prior technologies addressed bottlenecks in distribution, whereas this more directly attacks the creative process itself. Stratechery has a great post on this, where he argues that AI is attempting to remove the "substantiation" bottleneck in idea generation.
Doing this for creative tasks is fine ONLY IF it does not inhibit your own creative development. Humans only have so much self-control/self-awareness
- arscan 1y agoI’ve been thinking of LLMs a bit like a credit-card-for-the-mind, it reduces friction to accessing and enabling your own expertise. But if you don’t have that expertise already, be careful, eventually it’ll catch up to you and a big bill will be due.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoUnfortunately a lot of people are basically just hoping that by the time the big bill is due, they have cashed out and left the bill on someone else I also think that even with expertise, people relying too much on AI are going to erode their expertise If you can lift heavy weights, but start to use machines to lift instead, your muscles will shrink and you won't be able to lift as much The brain is a muscle it must be exercised to keep it strong too
- danielbln 1y agoWe are in the business of automation, this is also automation. What good is doing the manual work if automation provides good enough results. I increasingly consider the code an implementation detail and spend most of my thinking one abstraction level higher. It's not always there yet but it's really often good enough to great, given the right oversight.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoCode is not just an implementation detail, I wish people would knock it off with that idea It would be like saying "roofs are just an implementation detail of building a house". Fine, but you build the roof wrong your house is going to suck
- danielbln 1y agoI'm tasking a contractor to lay the roof tiles and just give them my specifications. How they lay the tiles, I don't care, as long as it passes inspection afterwards and conforms to my spec.
- saltcured 1y agoI think this phrase is beautiful assuming you were referencing "bicycle for the mind"
- croes 1y agoBut AI also does the thinking. So if the printing press stunted our writing what will the thinking press stunt. https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-study-finds-relying-on-ai-kills-your-critical-thinking-skills-2000561788 https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-study-finds-relying-on-ai-kill...
- justlikereddit 1y agoWorst promise of AI isn't subverting thinking of those who try to think. It's being an executor for those who doesn't think but can make up rules and laws.
- margalabargala 1y agoI still don't think that's true. It's just the medium that changes here. A better analogy than the printing press, would be synthesizers. Did their existence kill classical music? Does modern electronic music have less creativity put into it than pre-synth music? Or did it simply open up a new world for more people to express their creativity in new and different ways? "Code" isn't the form our thinking must take. To say that we all will stunt our thinking by using natural language to write code, is to say we already stunted our thinking by using code and compilers to write assembly.
- biophysboy 1y agoThat's why I made a caveat that AI is only bad if it limits your creative development. Eno took synthesizers to places music never went. I'd love for people to do the same with LLMs. I do think they have more danger than synthesizers had for music, specifically because of their flexibility and competence.
- miltonlost 1y agoAI for writing is not like a synthesizer. It's a player piano, and people act as if they're musicians now.
- margalabargala 1y agoI totally disagree. Importing an external library into your code is like using a player piano. Heck, writing in a language you didn't personally invent is like using a player piano. Using AI doesn't make someone "not a programmer" in any new way that hasn't already been goalpost-moved around before.
- caconym_ 1y ago> Heck, writing in a language you didn't personally invent is like using a player piano. Do you actually believe that any arbitrary act of writing is necessarily equivalent in creative terms to flipping a switch on a machine you didn't build and listening to it play music you didn't write? Because that's frankly insane.
- cess11 1y agoBad examples. Computer keyboards killed handwriting, the Internet killed rhetoric.
- emehex 1y agoCounter-counter-point: handwriting > typing for remembering things (https://www.glamour.com/story/typing-memory https://www.glamour.com/story/typing-memory)