5 ms·
It is a quirky article but the author, instead of engaging with information sources to understand what important thoughts people have had about these topics, fe
by svnt 6mo ago
It is a quirky article but the author, instead of engaging with information sources to understand what important thoughts people have had about these topics, feels the best thing to do is introduce new terms that other terms already exist for. This is basically just inductive bias plus the AI homogenization idea producing a distribution shift.
This is what happens in thought-isolation. It isn’t better than educating yourself, whether that education involves AI or not.
Phillip Kitcher is known for epistemic monoculture, Dawkins and then Henrich popularized collective intelligence and cultural evolution.
The thing about these fear pieces is concepts like the hollowed mind are reductive and that reductionism is based on a reductive view of (usually other) people.
But what actually happens is we have formalized processes and can externalize them. This is a benefit if you can use your newfound capacity and free time for something better, which I think most people ultimately will.
- Forgeties79 6mo ago>This is a benefit if you can use your newfound capacity and free time for something better, which I think most people ultimately will. I think for a lot of of us the problem is that this is not a given. It’s often promised and rarely occurs, especially in the modern era. Increased productivity usually just means increased demands in the workplace.
- svnt 6mo agoYeah I can’t disagree I think it is really disruptive in a corporate-job-expectation setting where you don’t have the same level of agency.
- le-mark 6mo agoSimilar to What people were saying about television. They imagined it would bring Shakespeare to the masses, but what ultimately ended up happening is television met people where they are hence we got reality TV. There’s no reason to believe AI won’t be similar.
- vlunkr 6mo agoIf you want to watch Shakespeare on your TV you are welcome to. But also I don't think that's the point at all. If it's my job to hammer 100 nails a day, and then my boss gives me a hammer that is 10x more effective. I don't get to go home early, I'm just expected to hammer 1000 nails now. Maybe the work becomes more pleasant, maybe it doesn't. But either way it definitely benefits the boss and the person who makes the hammer.
- superxpro12 6mo agoI think we're excluding from this analysis the probability that these "AI" products will remain truly unbiased and free from external (corporate) influences. When AI gains true marketshare in the "think-space", I have zero trust that the corporate overlords controlling these machines will use them in the fairest interests of humanity.
- rpcope1 6mo agoYou're absolutely right! But Brawndo has what plants crave!
- antonvs 6mo agoWhen I read pieces like this all I think is, resistance to change is a helluva drug. I've been working on a project and using LLMs heavily to inform my design decisions. There's already a long list of cases where it has taught me things I wasn't familiar with, alerted me to possibilities I didn't consider, shown me how to do things that I was struggling with. In those cases I ask for references, and it delivers. This is not "endangering human development". If anything, it's the exact opposite - allowing human knowledge to be transmitted to other humans in an accessible way that otherwise, usually simply would not have happened. Of course, this all depends on using AI to enhance cognition and access to knowledge, as opposed to just letting a machine write all your code for you without review, Yegge-style. I'm not saying there isn't a moral dimension to all this, and areas of serious concern. But the one about "endangering human development" is wholly in our individual hands. You can use AI to help you learn, or to replace the need to learn. The former will be better for human development. One real lesson from this is perhaps that we need to teach people how to use AI in ways that benefit their development, not just their output.
- nathan_compton 6mo agoI think it depends on the person. As a teacher, I see this. Some kids (the gifted ones) use AI to multiply their efforts. Most kids use to just get by and are actually coming out of the class with less knowledge than they would have without one.
- antonvs 6mo agoHence my final sentence: > One real lesson from this is perhaps that we need to teach people how to use AI in ways that benefit their development, not just their output.
- Forgeties79 6mo agoAs I see it, LLM’s require far more self-discipline and introspection than people expect or generally engage in. It’s a corner cutting machine that allows people to shift the burden of their work on to others either in the form of more slop we have to wade through OR more work we have to correct because they couldn’t bother to vet the results. It’s like writing a paper, running spellcheck, then sending it to some less to look over for you without ever taking a pass yourself. It’s selfish.
- Yokohiii 6mo agoIt's possible I miss something, but are you saying that the author should relax and she should leaves this to smarter people?
- svnt 6mo agoRereading my comment I don’t see anything about the author’s intelligence or anxiety level.
- Yokohiii 6mo agoI take that non response as a yes.
- svnt 6mo agoI call the author out for not being widely read in areas where they are attempting to coin neologisms. If that seems like insulting someone’s intelligence and telling them to calm down to you then I’m not sure this will be a productive conversation. Coining new terms for established ideas is not intellectual contribution — it is, in Wiredu’s language, the opposite of conceptual decolonization. The topic does not need new vocabulary. The author needs to read more widely, cite more justly, and recognize that the scholars they overlook understood these problems first, understood them more deeply, and in some cases paid significant professional costs for doing so.
- imoverclocked 6mo ago> But what actually happens is we have formalized processes and can externalize them. Even if I believe that is what happens in 10% of uses of AI, it doesn't excuse what happens with the rest. Many people can not do mental math anymore and still more question why we need to learn math at all in the first place when we have simple calculators. "When will I ever use XYZ?" is a common refrain. AI is currently developed and owned by billionaires who also happen to own news sources. If that correlation doesn't spark questions about why we shouldn't externalize processes to AI, you have likely been using AI too much already.
- soco 6mo agoI argue that those people didn't forget mental maths in the last 1-2 years. They never managed them, as a consequence of flawed education, lack of practice, and so. Could AI be blamed for many things? Yes of course. But the plain ole boring enshittification and the general dumbing down definitely did not start with chatgpt.
- imoverclocked 6mo agoTrue, it’s just further enabled by it; We need to stop enabling it.