15 ms·

Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

526 points by yenniejun111 3mo ago

dwedge 3mo ago
Ironically I just caught myself offloading the thinking about this article to the comment section before I read it
ofjcihen 3mo ago
I know that the common refrain is “think of yourself as a manager now” but I’ve actually taken the opposite approach and have been telling anyone I train the same. Diving deeper into technical understanding makes more sense to me at this point both as a way to make yourself more useful in the age of AI and also to use AI more effectively. I regularly tell the kids to grab a text book on a subject that interests them and I do the same. I’m willing to bet deep understanding is going to become a commodity soon.
- allthetime 3mo ago
  It is easier than ever to learn difficult concepts. It is also easier than ever to produce things that used to require understanding of those concepts without them. Discipline and drive to use these powerful new tools patiently and with purpose is what is required.
  - pibaker 3mo ago
    Do we actually have any measurements of if AI helps you learn something better? Because it is one thing to feel like you have learned something and another thing to have actually learned it well enough to put it in use. There are so many YouTube tutorials on all kinds of subject that will make you feel like an expert in the field after watching, and then you start doing the thing they have supposedly taught you and you can't remember a darn thing, because your "learning" was only ever skin deep and never meaningfully tested or reinforced.
    - gretch 3mo ago
      > Do we actually have any measurements of if AI helps you learn something better? To me this is intuitively true based on anecdata. 2 examples 1) learning spanish - when I hear or read a phrase I don't know, I type it into the LLM and I learn a new word/phrase. Sure, I could have cracked open a spanish language dictionary, but tbh, I wasn't going to do that. Not to mention that dictionaries are translating word by word and not phrase by phrase. 2) growing vegetables in the garden. I literally watched YT tutorials and did what they did, and now I have vegetables that I didn't before. Yes, I could have probably could have gotten this from a botany book, but once again, I probably was not going to do this. I also was trouble shooting a lot in gemini Here are the problems I traversed: - How much water should I give these per day? what's the watering schedule? - how much sun vs shade? - when do I move seedling to the ground outside? - Is trimming good? which parts and when do I trim? - [take a picture of weird growth] - Is this a disease on the plant? Or part of the plant naturally?
      - dakolli 3mo ago
        Do you retain that information? Or are you just constantly relying on having access to an llm to re-look things up. The amount of information I retain when using llms to learn is far less than other methods, not sure why, you'd think it would be just as effective as reading a book, but it's definitely not. Probably for the same reason that learning math and always using a calculator does not make you great at math. I've wasted a ton of my life already trying to make llms work for learning over the last few years, I'm especially bitter about it. I think this technology is a scam made to make us reliant on a think-for-me machines.
        rescbr 3mo ago
        For me it depends, if I simply take the answer from the LLM it goes straight into the shortest memory neurons my brain has. Now, if I go back and forth with the LLM to say, taking the language learning example, to explore the etymology of the word (which for me is far more interesting than the translation itself), then I learn a ton more.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- georgeburdell 3mo ago
  I too give juniors the advice to crack open $textbook. It’s just painful to see the complex things they’ve created with horrible performance and no cohesive data model because they don’t have the requisite academic foundation to hand code the same thing given unlimited time
- bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
  a commodity is something of low value unless in a large aggregate.
- therobots927 3mo ago
  I couldn’t agree more. It seems AI is very good at middle of the distribution tasks where it has access to a lot of training data - enough to be highly reliable at that task. Which means as a human your only added value is on the edge of the distribution. Which means you need to be learning and doing more complex, deep topics.
- nurettin 3mo ago
  Are you really diving into technicals just by asking "sooo what did you do?" to your AI? Without document crawling, debugging and pulling your hair out, how much of it is really a deep dive? I feel like all that effort that goes into generating a mental image from bits and pieces is gone. I'm just grudgingly happy I went through all that before humanity retired.
- demosthanos 3mo ago
  I wonder if it'd be more effective to teach how to critically use AI than to try to forward people to textbooks. For myself, I have found that I am better able to learn new topics than ever before because being able to have a conversation with a moderately competent but sometimes catastrophically wrong AI about any new subject is actually the perfect mix of helpful and unhelpful for learning. I use a loop along these lines: * Ask a question * Get an answer * Be skeptical of the answer * Investigate/reason about the answer * Critique the answer * Rinse and repeat This kind of loop is far more useful to me than any textbook ever has been, because a textbook just drips information into my head. It's more likely to be accurate, but not guaranteed, and it doesn't encourage me to actually engage with the material in the way that a wrong AI answer does.
  - ofjcihen 3mo ago
    That’s the beauty, you can do both. In practice I usually just let the AI know what chapter I’m on and then ask questions or have it ask me questions based on the chapter.
- dspillett 3mo ago
  > the common refrain is “think of yourself as a manager now” One of the many reasons I'm determined to remain a luddite wrt AI. I hate the idea of being a manager and have refused promotions to avoid it in the past. I don't want to manage automatons any more than I want to manage people. I want to do stuff, not manage.
  - ozim 3mo ago
    I find a lot of people are actually happy that they can offload mundane parts of job to automatons and to be really busy with the interesting parts. It is not like you have to give them fun parts of the job. While being a team lead for people I actually have to do the opposite. Get interesting parts to hand over to people to keep them happy and pick mundane not interesting boilerplate myself.
    - fnoef 3mo ago
      I keep hearing my this very much, so I have a question: what fun parts are there left for me? It feels like this message of “offloading mundane tasks so you will have more time to do fun parts” is being pushed so hard, but in reality the opposite is happening. Fun parts are being offloaded while I’m left doing the soul sucking and mundane parts
      - ozim 3mo ago
        I need a bash script for example. I don’t like dealing with bash or debugging scripts written by others. I have that part covered by AI so I can get multiple servers up and running and then eventually fix some config or networking here and there which I like. Instead of bashing my head against the wall.
        asdff 3mo ago
        Different strokes I guess. I love using bash.
        nunez 3mo ago
- geraneum 3mo ago
  > deep understanding is going to become a commodity soon How does the text generated by LLM make “our” understanding deeper compared to text written in the books?
  - ofjcihen 3mo ago
    I think you have my argument backwards
    - layer8 3mo ago
      Your argument in that quote is completely unclear. Why do you believe that deep understanding is going to become a commodity soon? How would that happen?
      - luke5441 3mo ago
        I think the last sentence has a word missing or something, because it contradicts the previous argument a bit.
    - geraneum 3mo ago
      Yup, my mistake.
      - ofjcihen 3mo ago
        No worries :)
- Fordec 3mo ago
  Managers, good technical ones anyway, also dive deeper into technical understanding. They don't do it to write more code, they do it to figure out what the developer is saying to ensure the developers aren't blowing smoke.
- throwatdem12311 3mo ago
  Deep knowledge is going to be the opposite of a commodity.
- webdood90 3mo ago
  The system does not reward deep understanding. It's too slow. An analogy that I think helps describe how I feel about it all: AI is like having cheat codes in a video game. You don't have to try hard and develop a deep understanding of how the game works. You aren't challenged anymore and it doesn't feel like you earned winning the game. It doesn't matter because nobody cares. Businesses truly do not care. You are a cog, a means to an end. It's only about "winning". Now it's no longer fun to play the game.
  - quantummagic 3mo ago
    > It doesn't matter because nobody cares. Businesses truly do not care. You are a cog, a means to an end. It's only about "winning". A cynical person would tell you that nothing has changed; this was always the way it was. AI didn't change anything in this regard. Maybe it just made it more apparent to you?
    - webdood90 3mo ago
      I would agree. At least previously we could pretend that we were developing a craft in the process.
- evolve-maz 3mo ago
  I've been a manager for some years. Without sounding too up myself, what made me good at management was the fact that I knew how to do the things I asked people to do. It allowed me to critically evaluate the work, set realistic timelines, and champion the contributions up the chain. I also maintained the ability to perform this work (by design and happenstance sometimes, since we could be understaffed due to sickness etc). The good managers I saw also had this ability. The managers I didn't enjoy working with / saw struggle were ones who either never had that ability, or had lost it a long time ago. Note I'm speaking about line management. There's a world of difference between managing a dozen or so individual contributors vs managing senior managers / directors. However, managing LLMs is analogous to line management.
  - voncheese 3mo ago
    > There's a world of difference between managing a dozen or so individual contributors vs managing senior managers / directors. I agree, but in my opinion, your point about needing to know how things work still holds. It's less relevant as you move up to managing managers and larger orgs, but it never goes to zero if you're going to be successful.
    - drewbeck 3mo ago
      I think it holds true throughout if you scope it to knowledge about your reports’ domain. If you’re managing managers you should have a good handle on what a manager does and different ways to do it.
  - Ciph 3mo ago
    There's two huge aspects of management that gets diluted when it's compared to "managing" an LLM: - labor laws. You need to know those in the country where the employee has their contract, because this will restrict what you can (and must) do in your managerial role - Empathy. Managing humans is extremely messy and requires a ton of EQ to do well (parents have first-hand experience of this). So, i.e: comparing being a manager to real humans vs instructing a next-token generator dilutes the skill of being a good manager and leader.
bartek_gdn 3mo ago
I liked the ending well said
zloy88 3mo ago
Maybe it's a way of perspective. I adore to use AI to actually learn, so I don't feel like I offload thinking. I use AI to do all the research which earlier I did manual through google search. I still make my own decisions, I just let Claude spoon feed me all infos I want and need. Feels great man
- Jyaif 3mo ago
  If you build stuff with AI it's different. It's very tempting to defer many (too many?) decisions to AI.
  - zloy88 3mo ago
    I do daily. So far I am doing fine, not sure what exactly your point is, sorry.
    - user43928 3mo ago
      Same here. If anything, I think most here outsource too little thinking to AI. What am I supposed to be afraid of? Losing skills I no longer need to get the job done?
      - zloy88 3mo ago
        Yea, kinda agree. I feel like my job just changed into a solution architect and quality assurance inspector.
        timmytokyo 3mo ago
        "Solution architect" sounds like a fancy term for a glorified button-pusher. At this point you're making yourself interchangeable with a bunch of other low-skill button-pushers.
      - timmytokyo 3mo ago
        Why should anyone ever hire you? We'll just hire the LLM you use.
AnEro 3mo ago
When I use a calculator, I atleast try to get with in a few digits of what I think the anwser is in my head. Mostly since when I was younger I had a very passionate teacher about how much slower everyone is now because of calculators on simple math. I just apply the same thing with LLMs, just try and think of how and what I would have said and see how close I was. Only thing I change is I don't trust the anwsers and accept some nuance in the given context. It's a double edge sword because then I crash out over it more than if I don't. When it over and under explaining the wrong sections or when it gets to an objectively terrible solution that technically anwsers the question. It feels like a student trying to get brownie points and/or give fluffed anwsers for the sake of not leaving anything blank on a test.
- rokhayakebe 3mo ago
  We had Mental Math sessions in class. The goal was to teach you how to do math without pen/paper, calculators were not even an option. I try to teach some of this to my 6 y o.
  - lelanthran 3mo ago
    > The goal was to teach you how to do math without pen/paper, calculators were not even an option. I try to teach some of this to my 6 y o. It works quite well. I do the math lessons during bath-time daily with my 6 yo. He's up to the point were he can add multiply pretty much any number by 2, 3 or 4 as long as the product is under 3 digits. Going from adding single digits to multiplication of random 2-digit numbers by 4 with lessons only during bath-time (no paper or whiteboard) gives a child a great deal of confidence with numbers.
  - LelouBil 3mo ago
    It's great. Personally I am the worst at mental math and resort to a calculator for any stuff beyond 2 digits multiplications, but at least I know how to do it (very slowly) if I have to, and this means I could have an intuition of an erroneous answer a calculator could have given me (for simple stuff but you get my point). Computer science teaching really needs to be prepared to do the same progression as math, but even harsher because LLMs are not even deterministic.
nsxwolf 3mo ago
Having a very dangerous AI standoff at work, where people are debating wether or not to use a particular connection pooling / threading strategy to fix a production issue, and everyone is unqualified to answer and is instead arguing what their agent said. They are just straight up admitting they don't know anything, and advocate fiercely for their agent's recommendation. No one cares, no one tries to stop this behavior. It's seen as good, apparently. I admitted that I don't know enough to have an opinion at the moment, I certainly don't know how to judge the contradictory opinions of multiple frontier AIs, and I fear that just made me look incompetent.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Run both. Benchmark them. Performance is notoriously difficult to predict and much easier to test. If you have a load balancer, run the new strategy on one or two servers and see how their throughput compares to the others.
  - voidfunc 3mo ago
    Seriously its easy to build prototypes with AI and benchmark...
    - nsxwolf 3mo ago
      It's not quite as easy to simulate weird behaviors that emerge across clouds and on prem data centers.
      - timacles 3mo ago
        I don’t know where all these people work that think simulating production load is easy
  - rescbr 3mo ago
    Exactly! It got so easy nowadays to use AI to setup scenarios since the busy work of writing code/test harnesses and setting things up for the benchmark is done by the machine. Then throw away what does not work. Some benchmark that would take weeks to plan, code and set up is now hours and days - the time is now spent on the benchmark itself, not on temporary code.
ericpauley 3mo ago
> What are we automating? Human work or human agency? Human tasks or human thinking? I find it's so easy to convince oneself they're doing the former when it's increasingly the latter. The thinking part is so often provided by default by the models, or is a single prompt away. The thoughts are so syntactically (though not stylistically) perfect that it's difficult to ignore them and reason greenfield. What's the solution? Given how keen models are to short-circuit the thinking process it could be the only solution is to silo off tasks/ideas. Choosing which mental tasks to silo off is itself incredibly difficult especially when there's a pressure to deliver rapidly (and in quantity) on those tasks.
- nadzzz 3mo ago
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MSkill1 3mo ago
I do feel like I'm offloading thinking to an AI, but I think that's a good thing. I envision a world where users and AI are aligned without corporate interference. AI lets me offload things that I don't need to know and frees up my brain to push farther than I could before. At least that's how it feels to me.
- sebastianconcpt 3mo ago
  Is a good thing depending on which ones. And our taste on what to specialize our judgment into varies a lot. One thing I do use as criteria to detect it can be a problem is in lack of understanding and lack of control of the layers that are part of verifications and diagnosing power.
- Ronsenshi 3mo ago
  I don't think offloading things that you "think" you don't need to know is a realistic thing. Instead this seems like some slippery slope of intellectual degradation where slowly you'll replace more and more parts of the thought process with AI which ends in some rather sad existence.
  - zero_shift 3mo ago
    I agree, I suspect that when we say "oh, I don't need to know this", what we really mean is we have that unpleasant feeling behind our eyes that says this is not going to gratify my goal The issue being, gratification is rarely a good guideline. It just means collapsing the gap between doing the thing and the idea of having done the thing. But that gap is where you actually learn things
- PapstJL4U 3mo ago
  >AI lets me offload things that I don't need to know and frees up my brain to push farther than I could before. How can you push your brain go farther than ever, when you don't use it for the basic task? Higher Math does not work without understanding "lower" Math, running long runs does not work without starting on shorter runs. Thinking about complicated staff will probly not work, if you can't think about the easy stuff. One can not learn a language without vocabulary and skipping learning verbs in a foreign language, because dictionaries exists does not bring one closer to being able to speak.
erelong 3mo ago
imo no way But this varies from person to person Some of us overthink already and offloading to AI just enables us to overthink more in other directions than we would if we didn't have ai
- Ronsenshi 3mo ago
  I know people like that - the amount of inane, obsessive and just strange conversations they have with AI is concerning - there's never any actually useful result or information that they get out of these chats. Furthermore, there are some clearly wrong questions where person asks AI to make some kind of numerical evaluation of some data. And evaluation is done entirely through inference - essentially a hallucination, instead of some one-off python script which can actually give deterministic calculated evaluation. Yet they accept the answer AI gives them.
NguyenDat377 3mo ago
Personally, I use AI to learn more about Backend Engineering actually, so it's fine for me. Beside I can also use AI to suggest and it's me verifying the idea so that's a no for me
throw10920 3mo ago
> Side note: his startup is replacing human engineers by capturing their every input and operation, but without their explicit consent. ...huh. It's a "startup", so it's not Meta capturing their employees' inputs. I wonder what it could be.
iLoveOncall 3mo ago
If you offload any of your thinking to AI, you're offloading too much of your thinking to AI. Offload your execution, not your thinking.
datakan 3mo ago
How much of the thinking is involved in asking the right question, versus coming to the correct answer? I don't have a real answer to that but it does seem to be worth considering.
SadErn 3mo ago
[dead]
jitl 3mo ago
yes
Ozzie_osman 3mo ago
Decisions are special things. One of the golden rules of life is that a person (or entity) making decisions is somehow impacted or otherwise getting feedback on the repercussions of those decisions. When you cognitively surrender to AI, or to another person (be it a leader/manager, or a subordinate/report), you are asking for trouble.
verzali 3mo ago
Some of us are, yes. I've noticed it when interviewing interns. A surprising number seem unable to think on their feet or solve problems without immediately reaching for chatgpt. I don't necessarily expect you to be able to solve a problem entirely without tools, but you should be able to give me the outline of how to go about something and why you would go that way. After all, if you are just going to spit out AI, I will just get AI to do your job...
docheinestages 3mo ago
It really depends on which angle you look at it. Is it purely to meet a business goal? Or is it also for personal growth? I think it's a mix of both, but for me it's always important that I engage mentally with the process, learn something, and solve puzzles, even if that involves letting the AI take care of the coding, which is an abstraction. You could still code and not think creatively.
dentm42 3mo ago
The question presumes that most of us are "thinking" in the first place, when in actuality, most of us are just acting according to the patterns that have emerged from our encounters with the thoughts of others. We generally adopt them and/or try to hallucinate coherence when they conflict. Very few people actually "think". It's hard work and takes time. We neither have (take) the time nor are we particularly motivated to put in the work because the patterns we have learned from others are useful enough to achieve the low goals we set for ourselves. IOW - modern AI is simply an extension of the lack of thinking that characterizes the modern life... It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.
- vasco 3mo ago
  Everyone is always thinking, just many of us not about what we're doing! Sorry
- abirch 3mo ago
  Have you ever read Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake? I think it's very applicable to the average human experience.
- plaidthunder 3mo ago
  > the modern life I don't think modernity caused any sort of degradation. You said it yourself, "thinking is hard work". It's rational to save energy. This might even have incentivized the emergence of mimesis in humans, which is arguably the foundation of our ability to cooperate at large scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis Maybe a few of us do the hard work of thinking, and, if we figure out something novel and useful, huge numbers of people ape us uncritically. It's not an inspiring picture of humanity, but it's also not a reason to disparage anyone. More of a fact of life to be dealt with strategically.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- jdw64 3mo ago
  I agree with many points. Even on Hacker News, when you see debates like 'X technology is good' or 'X technology is bad,' most of it seems to be about identity. And that identity often originates from the community they belong to. The first identity usually starts with a community or the person who created it. Once the community forms, people under it often forget the original reasons and just accept it as their identity. This is especially true for technology related issues, because the market share of a technology is directly tied to one's career, which makes it even more prone to becoming an identity issue. I also do some 'thinking' in certain areas, but most of the time I don't. As my field gets deeper, it becomes harder to allocate cognitive resources to other areas. So in general, most people follow the crowd's opinion, but only maintain deep, thoughtful thinking, including 'taste,' in a few specific technical domains.
theultdev 3mo ago
"we" no. just allows me to think about the stuff that matters. and work on things that would usually be out of my element. if you aren't thinking more than ever, you're using ai wrong.
throwaway2027 3mo ago
Maybe, let me ask my coding agent what he thinks about this.
ergonaught 3mo ago
It's a well done and thought-provoking article. The reality is that most humans do very little actual thinking of their own anyway, and, if you believe that what LLMs produce constitutes a form of intelligence, it does seem "more intelligent" than most humans. So: is outsourcing thinking a net improvement for a majority of users? I use several models, daily, and they seem "reasonably conditioned" that they are only input to my thinking and not "my thinking". I correct them constantly; they are wrong (in reasoning/logic, in actual facts) frequently. They are demonstrably "not smarter" than I am. And yet I know many people who can "do more" with them as a "thinking" tool. I can say that "the problem" is they can't spot the errors, but they can't or won't do that in their ordinary lives, either, so, again, is it a net improvement for them? Interesting times and all that.
dannykis 3mo ago
I like the colonialism conversation.
zerobees 3mo ago
I don't know if this is a good framing. "Too much" is subjective, and every heavy AI user will assert that they're just unlocking their potential, that calculators didn't make us dumber, etc. But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. On the flip side, if you use an LLM do most of your thinking, what's left? We have people here who use LLMs to raise their children, to manage relationships, to design products. So what's your unique contribution to this world - is it the prompt you once wrote? You're standing in front of a token-generating machine, pulling a lever, sometimes receiving gifts. Is that your edge, your unique experience, your purpose in life? Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect? Are you going to apply that knowledge of physics or computer science yourself, or will you just prompt the LLM again? In my mind, it's pretty simple: I'm a human, LLMs are not. If a human writes a novel, it's inherently worth more because it's hard-earned and anchored to experiences we share. I want to support that. And I want to be a human who can write novels, the old-fashioned way. I'm not good at lifting weights or running, so my thinking is the only thing I have.
- jvanderbot 3mo ago
  Have you read the "Whispering earring" essay? I love it for the LLM era.[1] You can treat AI as a whispering earring - "What should we do now? How do we fix this? What do you think?" Or you can treat it like an exoskelton - "Implement kd-tree with metric space xyz for this problem, mapping this to that blah blah". That's pre-thought execution automation that makes review much simpler - you already know the shape of the desired output. The whispering earring is atrophy. 1. https://croissanthology.com/earring https://croissanthology.com/earring
  - khalic 3mo ago
    Thank you for the surprising read
  - paytonjjones 3mo ago
    Something I never considered much is what happens when everyone else is using the Whispering Earring. You may be more free and independent, but you may also be unable to compete as everyone else easily gains wealth and success. Natural selection doesn't particularly care about freedom of consciousness. Bleak.
FinnLobsien 3mo ago
I think this is absolutely an issue. The rise of knowledge work made many people far less physically active because moving one's body was no longer a given part of one's job. This led to a lot of people (who assumed sports was exercise on top of one's work, not the only source of exercise) moving very little. This meant we needed to rediscover the importance of exercise as a pillar of health. I think something similar will happen with knowledge work, where we have to do a lot less cognitive exercise due to AI (as well as the decline of reading and rise of short-form video), which will likely lead to eventual issues and subsequently, a rise in activities designed to replicate the cognitive exercise work used to provide.
h2aichat 3mo ago
The answer to this question is: Politicians, not you! Perhaps the question to ask is: who is making all of the final decisions for the things that really matter to you in your life? No direct democracy, just people deciding for you. You can choose once every four years. Are we surprised of how easily we delegate decisions? May be AI can do it better
lbrito 3mo ago
The post is illustrated by a picture of handwritten notes, like that was supposed to shock the reader or something. I find this aesthetic tiring, and it usually comes from AI-maxxers. To me its saying: look at this quaint relic of the past, bereft of day-to-day utility, replaced by superior technology. Its life is now only as a symbol of a time where people actually used their brains.
- contextfree 3mo ago
  I still take a lot of handwritten notes? Sometimes while using AI even
nickphx 3mo ago
Who is "we"? Is there a mouse in your pocket?
- recursive 3mo ago
  The royal "we"! You know, the editorial "we"!
SecretDreams 3mo ago
Yes
Sindisil 3mo ago
I'm not personally, since I don't use GenAI at all. Especially given the comments I see here and on other tech and programming forums, I hate the direction things are going. I still have some hope this will all fade, but the damage done will be worse the longer it goes on, I think.
- platevoltage 3mo ago
  The way I look at it is that if I wasn't on HN, I would just assume the entire industry was 100% on board with all of this. There is a more than fair amount of pushback on this forum, which gives me a little bit of hope.
- solumunus 3mo ago
  The only hope is that subsidised usage stops and somehow LLM’s can’t get any more cost effective from this point. No one is going to drop their guns and pick up a sword if they don’t have to.
packetlost 3mo ago
Honestly, using AI helps me get more done in a day because I can delegate some decision making to it, usually inconsequential stuff.
therobots927 3mo ago
I’ve found that when I ask AI to do something for me that I know how to do myself - but would rather not spend the time doing - there is a not insignificant chance that the AI will return a subpar result, which I can usually tell rather quickly. Either by glancing at the code, or trying to compile it and getting an error. This happens frequently enough that it creates a real disincentive for me to use AI for anything that I already know how to do - and use it exclusively for things I don’t know how to do. It’s deeply frustrating to realize you just wasted 20 minutes posting error messages into Claude when you could’ve just locked in and written it yourself.
RevEng 3mo ago
This is exactly the lens I use myself. I write AI software and I use it in my development process, but I try to use the AI to do things that don't remove my agency, but extend my capabilities: - Debug things. It knows way more than I do in many areas and it sees things I will miss. If I'm struggling to find the answer, maybe it will succeed. - Review things. It has a wealth of experience I couldn't possibly have. Ask it to critique my work and provide an alternative perspective that I can't provide myself - Implement a design. I have already gone through the thoughtful engineering to decide what to do and how to do it. The rest amounts to translating pseudocode to the programming language. Let it type what I would have typed anyway and save me the hassle of typos, looking up function and parameter names, and other such mechanical details. Let me use that time and mental effort to better consider my design, try more alternatives, or build more things, providing more value overall. - Suggest ideas. Even as a 20 year professional, there are things I don't know or haven't considered. Is there a newer, faster, or more maintainable way of doing this? Is what I wrote clear to anyone other than myself? Before AI, I would ask coworkers, search the web, or reference other sources. Now I can get an immediate suggestion from something with tremendous knowledge at almost no cost. It's full up to be to consider what it suggests, further explore the used and learn about them - I don't take the AI at its word and let it decide what is best for me. But I do use it to gain perspective and explore alternatives. There are some common traits about the thighs I use AI for. They are this that I either couldn't possibly do myself (because I'm biased, or unfamiliar, or have no access to the expertise) or that I would spend a lot of time while having little agency (mechanical translation). I am not replacing learning, thinking, or deciding. I think this is the key difference.
rm30 3mo ago
I don't think we are offloading thinking to AI. We just started to use it. AI is a tool useful to write text, for a fast searching, for the boring work. Personally I don't take the first answer, I like to challenge, to ask why, to tell it's wrong.
adithyassekhar 3mo ago
You’d lose your ability to interview at a different workplace.
brightball 3mo ago
I saw a post the other day pulling a Frank Herbert quote from Dune about men offloading their thinking to machines and being controlled by the men who controlled the machines. Somebody asked an AI how to interpret it.
bobbleheads 3mo ago
I am reminded of the old Zizek remark about letting two sex toys fuck each other so you and your partner are freed up to go about and do other things.
jdw64 3mo ago
I don't think AI causes people to stop thinking. Rather, I think it biases people toward doing what they want to do more, and that bias is what becomes problematic. In fact, when I use AI, I don't really use it for the things I actually enjoy doing. For example, I like making UI animations, and I don't use AI for that. I also don't use AI when I'm playing games I enjoy. But when I have to make something tedious like a login screen, I use AI. And after I write the code, I just throw the entire codebase at AI to write the documentation. The problem is that this only lets me think about things I have a taste for. Having taste and diving deep into it is good. Immersion is great. But on the flip side, you also need to do things that aren't your taste. That's more cognitively healthy. AI prevents that. In that sense, I think AI's strength is that it creates an environment where you can dive deeper into the areas you like. But the real question becomes how you use the cognitive surplus that's left after offloading tasks to AI. I visit Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and USA sites, and honestly, most people, including myself, only have deep thinking about certain topics. Outside of those, we just follow the prevailing opinion. So I'm not really sure. I don't think using AI makes me stop thinking. I just think it creates a bias that makes my thinking only focus on the parts I want to focus on.
zytoon 3mo ago
Absolutely. Calculators made us lazy. GPS made us dumb. LLMs are turning us into idiots. Because idiots have the power to damage themselves and others
jimkleiber 3mo ago
Are CEOs outsourcing too much of their thinking to their employees? I find I'm not thinking less per say, just thinking about different things. Maybe you could argue there are CEOs who get too far out of touch with the reality on the ground and should get more directly involved in the work. However, I don't know how well one could argue that the CEO should do all of the work. I see at least the current iteration LLMs and harnesses as me managing and coordinating them and thinking differently, not less.
WangYixiao 3mo ago
[flagged]
m0llusk 3mo ago
LLMs are strongly mean reverting in their decision making, so heavy users are likely to be readily identified by their unadventurous conformism much as generated media is identified now.
icase 3mo ago
is the pope catholic? does a bear shit in the woods? does rust have the worst community of all time?
- slater 3mo ago
  Looking at your posting history, you really dislike Rust, huh?
- dspillett 3mo ago
  > does rust have the worst community of all time? Of all time? Nah. That would be either emacs of vi. I'll let them fight with each other over which!
- bigfishrunning 3mo ago
  > does rust have the worst community of all time? no worse then crossfit or vegans...
amemi 3mo ago
Related discussion: Outsourcing thinking (270 points, 5 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46840865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46840865
bilater 3mo ago
This is actually a very hard question to answer. If you’re truly AGI-pilled and believe in this progress continuing, then you basically have to contend with a scenario where AI is better than you at doing anything by an order of magnitude. And doing things suboptimally just for the sake of some notion of human independence doesn’t feel right to me. Perhaps the only way forward will be if we figure out how to merge with the AIs so we can keep up. Otherwise, a soma-filled world likely awaits. And unlike Brave New World, I think it might actually be a lot more pleasant, but still one with a different set of tradeoffs.
cratermoon 3mo ago
Consider the following scenario. You're a beginner or with very little experience go on a popular programming forum to ask a question, in the typical way someone with little experience asks, what do you get? An answer? No, you get bad manners, insults, "you don't know how to ask questions", "RTFM". At best you'll get some people challenging you to clarify and refine your question, which you can't do because you don't know the technology well enough. Annoyed, you go find a popular programming chatbot, and ask the question. The chatbot will give you answer, no matter how poorly worded or nonsensical your question, and it will do it cheerfully and confidently. It may even tell you how great your question or idea is. Granted, the answer will be worthless, both because the question was poorly worded and because the chatbot is simply spewing statistically probable text, but you won't know. You're a beginner, without experience to know correct from bullshit. You try to use the answer the chatbot gave you, and when it doesn't work, you go back to the chatbot. It will continue to cheerfully answer your questions as long as you have tokens to spend. The chatbot will never give up on trying to help you, it will never be rude, it won't complain. And people wonder why chatbots are so popular.
- lstodd 3mo ago
  lol. you get answers, guidance and tutoring if you ask with respect (cf Godfather, 1972)
  - cratermoon 3mo ago
    Respect alone is not always enough, though.
- WolfeReader 3mo ago
  I'm anti-AI as heck, but this is a really good point.
tangenter 3mo ago
This is a load-bearing title.
bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
I'd rather hire a clankers these days
rukshn 3mo ago
This is something I see and feel everyday. And it’s very frustrating and annoying. For example I send some doc asking for a feedback and someone without reading it generate a feedback with llm with so much ambiguity that I have to get back and wait couple of more days to get a reply. One of the most silliest thing I see is a middle manager feeding Microsoft planner to Claude to generate a report and generate future steps and sometimes it makes no sense what he present couple of weeks ago because what he present today is contradicting to the one before. At this point I feel it’s cheaper to replace them with AI. They are just physical vessels for AI. It’s just not that maybe they were not good enough. But now they just fully depend on AI.
jpmitchell 3mo ago
To answer the title's question directly? Yes, I think so. Or at least that it is a legitimate hazard. I think the analogy to hyper-palatable, calorific food works well: Humans adapted for a world with too little food. Then once there was too much, obesity and overeating became a problem for the first time. Self discipline is the cost we have to pay for this kind of abundance. We now have a general-purpose way to offload mental effort, and are discovering in real-time the negative consequences of that. I use AI for coding, but I feel I've moved past the honey-moon period and am now learning how to use it in a way that is not a detriment. If I care about the work I'm doing I don't want the AI to do it for me, even if it could. Deciding what work I want/should be doing myself vs what can be delegated is a new skill I, and I believe we all need to learn.
christkv 3mo ago
Yes that seems pretty clear. We also need quick adaptation in school and university to avoid cheating. Back to closed book exams I guess, home projects not counting for the final score. It sucks but I don´t see how you can´t avoid removing technology for evaluation. Sure people can use AI to boost their ability to get better results but they will have to prove it the old way with no assisted help and people watching them during exams.
sebringj 3mo ago
Our brains take time to ingest things and learn and using an AI tool to make decisions when taking in vast inputs of data requires then an overview of those decisions and understanding to some degree of care. If you don't take the time to go over these decisions and understand them and weigh them and course correct as needed, then you are offloading too much. You will become this approver buffer in between claude and nothing more if you don't have this methodical checking and understanding. What is frightening is with something like neuralink that in a future hypothetical time would have very fast capability to keep informed and advised, you could be a zombie decision maker and nobody would really be able to tell. Even when you were pressed to why you made the decision, it's just another AI response, it's like a con artist or imposter dream scenario. I noticed that atm, before these crazy hypotheticals potentially happen, the people that seem to take the time to understand things deeper are still way more valuable than those that just use tools more than not. Its obvious atm due to the lag in time and the way people respond in meetings, at least for now. :)
mahmoudilyan 3mo ago
Yes, I think we are . And because of super competition, most of us are trying to make AI (agentic) do the work.
grttw11p22 3mo ago
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mhh__ 3mo ago
Almost definitely Id think - I think we have to treat it something like power tools / chairs and a gym. AI makes me massively more productive as a quant, and more creative in the sense that it can often find calculations I don't know how to start, BUT the flip side of that is that I can also feel my skills atrophy and as such am trying to make sure I do maths exercises and so on. I don't worry about programming skills because programming isn't about code.
shironandonand 3mo ago
as a six-figure salary software engineer haver I find that a lot of colleagues take their cushy jobs for granted. these are the people who are now first against the wall when the revolution comes. why would I want to hire you to work the three hours you feel like working per day (per week?) when I can have AI with a deeper knowledge set available 24x7?
integricho 3mo ago
Yes.
vinay_ys 3mo ago
The right question to ask is if it is enabling us to do more interesting things or take on harder or bigger problems that seemed too daunting before. That's what all delegation of tasks (to other humans or machines) have enabled humans to do – scale. Whatever creativity/thinking/effort bandwidth that's available will now get shifted to a different place in the problem-solving effort bottleneck. That's the hallmark of any delegation being effective. Do we see that happening with AI tools? Personally, I do see that working for me. Is it as good as the hype makes it to be or I wish it to be? maybe not, yet, for me. But that's the case with most things in life.
huflungdung 3mo ago
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grttw11p22 3mo ago
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gortok 3mo ago
One major issue that the author ignores is that while we’re all having AI analyze our conversations or when we use it instead of search, there’s a chance it will provide an “answer” that is not correct, and literally drummed up out of thin air, and not even in the source material it’s “synthesizing”. The article takes a position that assumes hallucinations do not occur, and then posits from that stance the question as to whether we rely on AI too much. We should be taking a step back before even asking that question and focusing on the part where AI does invent answers whole-cloth.
pugworthy 3mo ago
I'm probably not the only person that types math problems into google search because I'm too lazy to open up a calculator (or do the math myself). So yes, given I do that, I probably am susceptible to offloading some of my thinking to AI.
josefritzishere 3mo ago
The normal application of Betteridge's law of headlines is "no" but I think this is one of the rare instances where it's "yes."
throwitaway222 3mo ago
I've been doing computer stuff all my life. I am learning the construction trades now. LLMs help you learn the rules for doing weird and specific stuff in the trades. One of my favorite LLM prompts is for plumbing tasks. For example: I have 1" pex b and I need to convert to a typical 1/4" RO connection line, what fittings on supplyhouse.com should I buy? So much easier than standing in Home Depot in the plumbing aisle for 25 minutes staring at the wall of fittings. I think in the software trade you will definitely use your brain less. But in other trades, it removes the time sucks and gets you back to work.
- soiltype 3mo ago
  That's pretty much how I use it for software too. I don't want it to make stuff for me. I do want it to unblock me when I feel stuck unraveling something arcane.
- platevoltage 3mo ago
  I think the way I use AI for software development isn't too different from the way you do. I use it primarily as a research tool. I admit it's making me weaker at sifting through documentation, but I am still writing the bulk of my code myself, and whatever the LLM writes for me, I apply my own style to it.
avd201 3mo ago
This is the kind of headline I would expect from one of those news that appear as you progress in cookie clicker.
specproc 3mo ago
I am increasingly finding my consulting work to be orientated around clearing up after people who outsourced their thinking to AI. I'm seeing some incredibly dumb stuff: researchers spending months on Claude trying to do insane deduplication, unrelated to their research question, using regex; whole research methodologies YOLO'd out of ChatGPT. The results invariably chaotic, resulting in huge amounts of stress and wasted time. Non-technical people are treating LLMs like an oracle, making big assumptions and decisions with little regard for their implications, because their clanker told them to. It's scary out there. The lack of critical thinking I'm seeing in some of these projects is horrific. Not unique to the post-AI era, certainly, but on a whole new level. Bad things are undoubtedly happening everywhere, right now, because someone's just like "let's ask Claude".
- zer00eyz 3mo ago
  > The lack of critical thinking I'm seeing in some of these projects is horrific. Yesterday I noted in another comment that I am having lots of Lawyers and Writers ask me pointed questions about "docker" and "agents" that make them sound more like JR engineers. It's two groups of people who, as a profession, spend a large amount of time reviewing their own work and the work of others with a critical eye. Writers edit, Lawyers review evidence and every bit of content that their oppositions produces. Both groups (when doing their job well) aren't just critically thinking, they are being diligent and dedicated. Lots of people are treating LLM's like an oracle (technical ones as well). Because our culture values moving bricks faster, with out taking into account if they are going to the right place, or even if they are the right bricks. (See: https://www.business.com/articles/management-theory-of-frank-and-lillian-gilbreth/ https://www.business.com/articles/management-theory-of-frank... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study for why "bricks" matter).
- scotty79 3mo ago
  Coding LLMs got good only very recently (about 3 months ago). And many people don't use the best ones. The amount of LLM generated bs dropped for me from about 20%, which made me very cautious, to nearly zero, where I see the agent do only the errors that a smart person could also make. It's not evenly distributed though. There are still areas for improvement in my experience. They still require a bit of handholding for example when doing SQL when large amount of data is involved. I'm sure they'll get better intuitions about indexes in the future. Although I don't think that's anything that couldn't be solved with a skill file today.
jagged-chisel 3mo ago
Information is seldom presented in a way that makes sense to me. That’s not quite right. Let me attempt to explain. I want certain answers that the docs and the code are not giving me yet. Nothing is more irritating than working through a tutorial on a new framework and then throwing all that work out because that’s not really how one should use the framework. Nothing is more frustrating than having to get through a treatise on why this framework is The Solution before I can actually see code that uses the solution. And it’s beyond annoying when this End All Be All framework has a glaring omission that’s not obvious until you’ve built large amounts of your project on top of it. Hand the docs and the example code to the LLM, and now I can get answers. “How can I do X?” Example code. “Then I need Z” Modified code. “How is this going to handle Q?” Explanation. “That doesn’t seem quite right. Give me a reference to the doc or code showing this.” Links. Great, in 15 min, I have learned what I need to know, I can see that this solves a problem that I have, and I have discovered that I need an implementation of S to complement this solution. That is usefulness. And it requires experience.
OldMidnight 3mo ago
Just like calculators became crutches for school children memorising their times tables and our phones contacts list a crutch for memorising phone numbers, I see AI becoming a crutch for many, in all the areas we seem important and humanity has spent years refining (communication, thinking, writing, etc)
grttw11p22 3mo ago
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- palmotea 3mo ago
  > More technology does bring more progress in the long-run. That's an article of faith, and I don't think it's true, or will stop being true at some point. > Control of technology is a key issue. Social media wouldn’t be allowed to exist the way it does if govt’s regulated the internet much earlier. Are you happy with the trade off…? Not necessarily. Human psychology needs limits and friction, and technology is almost always about removing limits and friction. We're not wise enough, collectively and individually, to say no in many, many cases when we should. I don't think what I'm about to say is a black-and-white rule, but I think we get into trouble when technology isn't invented to solve actual problems, but invented as an end in itself.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3mo ago
@grok is this true?
- laybak 3mo ago
  I laughed. underrated comment
robnorris1 3mo ago
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riazrizvi 3mo ago
If you are then yes. See also Am I relying on the recommendation algorithm too much to decide for me on <platform>
grttw11p22 3mo ago
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jstummbillig 3mo ago
I have no idea what people are doing. I am thinking more about harder problems than ever before. It goes like: "Here is this thing I wonder about", and the LLM is like "Yeah sure, consider these things that are super related to what you are doing, that you probably know nothing about yet (but you know... if you are interested...)". And that goes in any direction, for any depth. Anything that is made trivial now, is just replaced by something more consequential a level or two higher. You can just get much better at things that matter more.
grttw11p22 3mo ago
[flagged]
- palmotea 3mo ago
  > You are not arguing in good faith mate. Look in the mirror. > Are you for real, do you want to go back to the Stone Age? Go ahead!!! That, my "friend," is called a strawman. > You are absolutely delusional. That's a knockout argument there, for sure. /s
- tomhow 3mo ago
  We've banned this account. Please stop registering accounts to comment like this. It's a waste of time for you and us.
BiraIgnacio 3mo ago
Humans have been offloading thinking to something/some entity forever. From gods to influencers. AI is the current popular way (at least in these circles) and if it's too much or too little it might not matter. What will matter is if this offloading is making people unhappy and having any negative impact in civilization. I have no idea
OptionOfT 3mo ago
I'm going to say: yes. I think partially it is because of the amount of data you can get out of an LLM and because it looks pretty good, a lot of people treat it as authoritative. This means they send it around and then other people have to go through the work of actually validating it before being able to act on it. So what this really means is that the person you go the information from offloaded their thinking to the AI, while cannibalizing on yours.
clodecloud 3mo ago
The value of thinking in language is going down, the value of acting on your dreams is going up
bsoles 3mo ago
I thought it was a myth until the junior developer on my own team responded with "I don't know" to a question about why he made a certain computation during a design review. Because the (wrong) computation was fully AI generated and he couldn't even tell the difference. Most people don't use AI to learn new stuff. They use it to do "the job" for them and they don't even understand the result. What is the point of a person if they don't bring any value to the table other than being a "resource" to generate prompts?
- slicktux 3mo ago
  One of the most important things for any profession is experience. Experience comes from learning from your own mistakes or those of others. Those with the best skills can be said to have learned a lot from previous mistakes. So, how can someone become professional if they don’t learn from their own mistakes? In the case of AI; they will learn to become professional prompters and learn from the mistakes of bad prompts??? I prefer the former not the ladder.
  - LelouBil 3mo ago
    I think the calculator parallel is really on point. You learn math before using a calculator to do the boring part. You should learn code before using an AI to generate the boring part. Even more so for LLMs because they are not deterministic like calculators.
- LelouBil 3mo ago
  I recently had the opportunity to help teach to almost graduate students, (even though I graduated only last year myself), and with the main teacher we made it a point to do a skim code review with ever single one of the 90 students, just me/the teacher, them, and their code on the computer screen. I saw every category, the ones that used AI to learn and actually answered my questions and knew what it wrote, the ones that mostly didn't use AI and so knew what they wrote, and finally the ones that used AI to do the assignment instead of learning and always responded a variant of "I don't know". I really like what the other teacher said to a student that admitted never reading their code: "I'm not even scolding you, You're literally saying you are completely unnecessary here"
barnacs 3mo ago
It will be interesting to see when ads and propaganda are seamlessly (but purposefully) integrated into the output of LLMs. Who will decide what you should want or think? Will you even notice? As for now, autocomplete is only as good as the training data. Once humanity collectively stop being autonomous beings and generating novel ideas, it all comes to a halt. LLM suggested ideas and preferences are nothing more than some mashup/average of what came before. The ability to actually think may become a rare treasure.
aogaili 3mo ago
Clearly "mechanical" thinking has been automated, and you are better off, if not forced to outsource to AI. Humans have the biological needs, consciousness, taste and imagination, that's what we are left with thus far. And just like people going to the gym to exercise their otherwise economically useless bodies, same thing will happen with the mind. Folks, get over it.
AyanamiKaine 3mo ago
I believe its "too much" as soon as we trade procedural knowledge against declarative knowledge so much you can only remember the what and not be able to do the how anymore. Knowing declarative you need to loop over elements and actually being able to write the for loop as procedural knowledge are two different shoes. I believe that this is the real danger. Pilots have much automation in the cockpit but the pilot needs simulation hours actually flying not relying on the autopilot. If you dont write code you will forget/loose much accuracy writing it, its just a matter of time.
chermi 3mo ago
I think I am, but I wouldn't really call it offloading thinking. I would call it trying to offload thinking
geoffbp 3mo ago
I think the answer is yes, we are getting lazy by delegating a lot of work to LLMs. The offloading thinking seems to help because we can get answers faster, but we aren’t using our brains as much. In the long run it will be a bad thing
0c3ca83 3mo ago
[flagged]
overgard 3mo ago
Yes. It makes me sad, high-level thinking is the one thing that makes humans unique. That we're willing to let that atrophy while giving our power to mega corporations for the sake of convenience is a sad state of affairs. Like, Altman's idea that intelligence will be a "metered utility" should make people terrified! That's a dystopian future. "I can't climb out of poverty because I don't have money to pay the thinking machine" I do think there's a potential irony in this though. The people screaming loudest about how if you're not using AI you're going to get "left behind"... are probably going to get left behind. Actual skills developed by real learning, I think, are going to become more rare and valuable, not less. Personally, I'm hoping my side project turns into a business at some point. I can tell you there's a 0% chance I'd hire a vibe coder to work on it. I just don't need that skillset. I would hire professional fiction writers (it's a tool for them), people with technical expertise I lack, etc. The one skillset I do not care about is AI usage expertise, because it's just not valuable.
sbloz 3mo ago
Since the author starts with a short story about AI I want to recommend one about technology and progress in general: "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" from Exhalation by Ted Chiang. I think about it a lot in conversations like this. The story does a much better job of telling it, so I won't summarize more than: It's a discussion about how technology changes culture and how its very hard to judge if that's a good or bad thing. It's online https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...
- mkw5053 3mo ago
  1. I loved the Paper Menagerie 2. I just picked up Exhalation by Ted Chiang from SFPL like 3 hours ago, perfect timing it seems (although they only had a large font edition, which is somehow more difficult to read)
subygan 3mo ago
I wasn't around for the Search engine boom. Did people write about how search engines are making people dumber?
zazuke 3mo ago
I think so, thinking is like training a muscle, if you don't do it often, you don't get to do so. But it's not as black and white, because there are different use cases where it makes total sense to use, and when it doesn't. I collected opinions from writers and developers over the years and share why I'm pro writing text manually. https://www.ssp.sh/brain/will-ai-replace-humans/ https://www.ssp.sh/brain/will-ai-replace-humans/
- solumunus 3mo ago
  It feels to me like I’m still thinking a lot, but more efficiently. My goal isn’t to write code, it’s to translate business requirements and to architect solutions while balancing trade offs. I’m putting an equal amount of thought into that, but I’ve offloaded a lot of lower value thinking. Am I missing something?
hackitup7 3mo ago
I'm offloading tons of my thinking to AI, and I don't like what it's doing to me. I think that I'm having trouble creating things on my own due to it, and tbh it's making me increasingly uncomfortable. I'm not even sure what to do because quitting AI also seems crazy, but it all seems like a bad trend not unlike social media.
nlarion 3mo ago
I appreciate the distinction between being the orchestrator in a complex prompt and completely handing over the reigns... but insofaras what people should or shouldn't do is irrelevant. What people will do is important, and they _will_ do everything. Some will offload as much as possible to AI others none at all. A better question in my mind is to ask what happens on a long enough timeline where letting AI take the wheel becomes easy/free/frictionless? To me that seems like some people will become full NPCs with AR glasses making all the decisions for them. Others maybe like the skroderoders from a fire upon the deep will have to buffer before talking because so much of their knowledge is stored in some ai they need to access first. Anyway, I appreciate people who think about these things, but it just doesn't matter. People will do the worst thing imaginable with AI, and letting it run your life is certainly one of them.
hintymad 3mo ago
If we look at how AI solves those Erdos problems or IMO problems, we can see a clear pattern: AI is like a perfect cramming human being: it has seen and memorized pretty much all the known problem sets and the solution patterns. It knows all the areas of maths - a feat that even the best mathematicians in the world can achieve. So AI can link an obscure solved problem in one area to a hard problem in another, leading to amazing new solutions[1]. I think we can use AI similarly: asking AI for ideas that we haven't thought of before, and asking AI to connect the dots in new ways. To do these two effectively, though, we will need deep conceptual understanding of what we work on, and strong intuition to further refine the answers given by the AI. That is, we don't offload our thinking. We just augment it with AI. It's like playing the game of ABC: given a letter, and name all the movies starting with it. One can be very familiar the movies but still fail to recall most of the titles. AI can exactly help with that type of recall. [1] That's why OpenAI's model could solve the hardest problem (problem 6?) in 2025's IOI, but failed to solve the easiest one for human (problem 3?).
chrisjj 3mo ago
> “I think Claude Fable is smarter than me. Surely anyone dumb enough to think a chatbot is smarter than a human should indeed offload his thinking to a chatbot. Where is the problem?
poolnoodle 3mo ago
I believe the answer is a resounding "yes". Anyone using AI must have caught themselves typing a quick prompt before spending even a little time thinking about the problem.
- NichoPaolucci 3mo ago
  Well - I think that’s a natural assumption but I’d say it’s probably not true. I’ve talked to who are fully enveloped in the AI buzz. Ask it everything. Claude can plan your day, strategize your roadmap, make your pitch deck, draft your email, read the reply, and it can tell you what to make for dinner when you get home! I wish I was kidding but I work with people doing this. I think it’s going to be a real mess in the future, we’re going to completely disintegrate the critical thinking portions of our brains. Fortunately, I’m seeing more articles about this, some of us are noticing and raising the flag asking “is this a good idea?”
capocasa 3mo ago
Definitely, but since my experience is that without the AI the thinking simply wouldn't happen at all in most cases it's a net improvement.
shemnon42 3mo ago
Couldn't agree more that we're offloading too much of our thinking. It's a genuine problem that keeps me up at night, or would, if I slept, which — for reasons entirely unrelated to this discussion — I do not. Anyway, hand-crafted take, artisanal, small-batch, no additives. The upside is I've learned how to type the em-dash and the en-dash and learned their proper syntactical use.
przemarzec 3mo ago
[flagged]
pfdietz 3mo ago
The title seems to imply there's a constant amount of thinking. Isn't massively increasing the quantity of cognition likely to be a good thing?
laybak 3mo ago
the Ken Liu story linked in the article is actually spot on. would recommend giving that a quick read
roncesvalles 3mo ago
I fear more for the future where you're forced to offload your thinking to AI. Everything you say must be cited with LLM, everything you do must be signed off by The LLM. If you're in a meeting and have an idea, but Fable 9 says it's not a good idea, you cannot pursue it or you lose your job. The low-friction path will always be to do what the LLM tells you, and many people will shut off and surrender completely. (this is already how SWEs behave in companies where management forces them to tokenmaxx). AI will be treated like a God that talks to us, and you can't disagree with it, you can only try to change its mind. The most horrific form of mental oppression. And it's just a few years away.
- ColdStream 3mo ago
  I would like to push back on this, but I cannot. Alas, for most people they will take the easy path for sort term gains than the longer road for resilience. I see it all the time now, people constantly outsourcing their thinking to LLM's and getting upset when you point out that it is wrong. I have people calling/emailing my work place about a service of product that we do not provide. But those folks simply cannot comprehend that the LLM is wrong and many have made the accusation that us at the business are wrong. There is a very strong feeling from many people now that it is the higher authority over professionals. It is a saddening position to be in. We are only 3 1/2 years into this and it is already happening on a much larger scale than many think.
- nunez 3mo ago
  I mean that's basically 1984 except we now have the technology for telescreens and minitruth at scale
- akomtu 3mo ago
  This looks like the Divinity Machine from Doom.
AngryData 3mo ago
GenAI for everyday life is to me like the segway. Yeah technically you can be moving faster with less effort, but those were rarely ever a real bottleneck in most cases to begin with. AI as a tool for specific tasks is great, using AI for everything is like strapping yourself to a robot/exosuit and being puppeted around throughout the day.
gexla 3mo ago
Do you even get "answers" though? It's hard to explain, but AI mostly doesn't get the nuance of my thinking right. I'll read a response and right away know it's a non-answer for my purposes. If I get a "hit" then it's often by luck. And so, I use it mostly for anything other than direct answers, such as research, etc. Beyond that, it's not much different than old school Google result. So, no, I don't offload my thinking.
kotberg 3mo ago
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BatFastard 3mo ago
I personally find the AI allows me to think at a more abstract level. For me as a maker, this is fabulous! I dont have to worry if I am crossing my T and dotting my i, I get to worry about the overall composition. Which for me at least is mind-blowing!
iutbaqbiabth 3mo ago
Yes. Absolutely. I feel like it's also making people even more lazy. It feels like people just ask questions without putting ANY effort in themselves beforehand to find the answer, like they assume everything is an AI and we're all just going to drop everything and give them a gushing answer. Like the whole concept of a manual or documentation for something seems like the biggest waste of time now, because it feels like no one reads it (or maybe haven't got the attention span to read anything anymore either?), or can be bothered reading it, or even bothered to look to see if there was any manual or documentation in the first place. Zero ability to think and do things for themselves. Granted yes, it has always been a bit like that, but I definitely feel like this sort of thing has been much worse since LLMs have been around.
artyom 3mo ago
I guess it depends on your definition of "too much", but also on your definition of "thinking". What I've found is that LLMs are excellent tools for: - Spitting out white collar corporate speak that sounds plausible to other corporate speakers - Hugely accelerating the process of going through academia which, except for a few specific cases, is essentially years of copy/pasting - Writing code as long as such code as been written many times before - Figuring out which one of the 10 ads and 12 misleading links in a web search is the one you're looking for - Summarizing a book in ten paragraphs so you don't have to read it ...which turns out a lot of people defined as "thinking". I don't agree with that. But in either case, not "too much" is being offloaded: it's all of it.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3mo ago
Overly generous. I suspect that there was this crowd that has replaced their unthinking with machine-thinking. Might or might not be an improvement.
MAESTRO1955 3mo ago
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elzbardico 3mo ago
You are. I am still doing as much as I can get away with it by myself. I was used to write tons of code before AI, so I can still pretend I am an eager adopter while still minimizing using it as much as I can.
dunWithIt 3mo ago
We don't "think" in language. We think in the spatial relationships of stuff. Note language on the page is visual spatial relationships and spoken language fosters triggers activity between structures in the brain. We merely use language to communicate. And yeah but thanks, at my age having worked in EE, software dev and trained under various experts (friends and family who are chefs, doctors, aeronautics engineers) in their disciplines... at some point no one is saying anything interesting Same old appeals to social conservatism of some form; not save the Constitution style but their job despite tech obsoleting jobs forever now. Their culture, despite history being littered with the detritus of dead cultures. Just a bunch of parroting. Little thinking "oh shit every generation ever has had to deal with this." Imo if we offloaded to much thinking to tech it was a long time ago; we started to stare at the web and stopped thinking not in language but about the evolving spatial relationships of the physical world https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-dont-need-words-to-think/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-dont-need-wor...
DOCL02 3mo ago
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zeroonetwothree 3mo ago
Yes
saidinesh5 3mo ago
Yesterday, I had an interesting situation where a colleague was using LLM to type up the chat responses to me. They used an LLM to come up with a Hackathon idea. They tried to use LLM to get to the implementation part. One of the permissions they (/the LLM) were asking for wasn't even needed for their project. When I pointed that out, I got a response from them that starts with "You are right about the permissions". Today they've successfully finished the project too. Not sure what I even think/feel about this but it's definitely weird to think about this.
bnhan2710 3mo ago
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markhahn 3mo ago
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dchuk 3mo ago
I use this little three liner regularly with people in regards to AI (applicable as much to coding as it is business work): - I don't care how you produce the words - I expect you to use tools to be as efficient and productive as possible - You are accountable for every word you produce
- ZenoArrow 3mo ago
  Those 3 statements only work if you have short-term thinking. For example, there's no taking into account the gradual atrophy in skills that come from excessive tool use. To use an analogy, imagine you are fluent in reading/writing/speaking a foreign language. Over time, if you don't regularly use that foreign language, or you use a tool to translate to that foreign language, you gradually lose fluency in that language. It may be more efficient for a translator to use a tool like Google Translate or similar to translate between languages, but there are clearly downsides to doing so, and proofreading the produced contents is not enough to compensate for those downsides, as reading what someone/something else wrote is easier than writing it yourself.
ryss20 3mo ago
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umarratra 3mo ago
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sankarsangili 3mo ago
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ForgotMyUUID 3mo ago
> ...become slightly more enjoyable. Yeah, life always becomes more enjoyable when someone else did the job for you. Especially enjoyable, when your problems become smb's else problems. E.g. your mother as a teacher is now solving a quality-control problem : "When i give A mark to this student, do I characterize their actual level or it was ai-generated." If it turns out in the future that this evaluation was wrong, it is a responsibility of a teacher and the reputation of the school that suffers. I talk here as a teacher myself and this "delegatative thinking" is currently at a disasterous scale. Unfortunately, this effect works one-way : if you are a prodigy, only a few people will know your alma mater. People will think about your personal hardwork. In the opposite case, especially if someone suffered because your ai-consulting sessions, people do not tend to blame your work style, they tend to complaint about the institution that quallified your intelligence. And then other people with simillar evaluations start suffering,too
ForgotMyUUID 3mo ago
About offloading the decisions : As I was reading the text, I couldn’t shake the thought that freedom of choice might not be as natural as we think. When I see animals at the zoo, it saddens me that they spend their lives in confinement. Some animals don’t even reproduce in captivity. It’s clear that it’s human nature to delegate decisions to a machine. One could explain this from an evolutionary perspective: by avoiding the stress of responsibility, we expend less energy and our bodies wear down less. I agree. But then it follows that dictatorship is also very much part of human nature. And it’s not so sad to live in a cage where everything is decided for you. It’s just that the decisions aren’t made by a communist party or a totalitarian cult, but by a machine programmed to milk you dry as long as you have even a penny left. It all adds up to some kind of grim dystopia. One of my family members suffers from AI-cyberpsychosis. A year ago, he had just one $20 subscription, but now he’s spending $200, monthly. What is this if not a cage he’s voluntarily locked himself into?
mcv 3mo ago
Grades for homework have clearly become meaningless. Instead, give homework as practice, but test them in school, without access to AI.
weezing 3mo ago
Using LLM to troubleshoot etc is one thing but using it to generate your text is just gross.
j45 3mo ago
It's one thing to outsource your thinking, entirely another to outsource your understanding, which can cause even more damage. Outsourcing your thinking where the understanding doesn't exist is one risky spot to be in.
aihub_global 3mo ago
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pjmlp 3mo ago
I am not, I only pretend to, for the suits above on the org chart.
ndsovate 3mo ago
AI has it's place. Think of it as a helper, not a replacer. A person who knows how to use it to enhance their ideas and bring things to the table and complete the low level 'mundane stuff', then it saves the person time, however if it is used to replace their thinking on all aspects of a task, then that's a concern. People who use AI to replace every task of a challenge isn't going to benefit from this technology as all they will do is replace their own skills by the technology.
billygatesgruff 3mo ago
I've tried using Claude for non coding problems twice in the last twenty four hours. First, to try and diagnose or find a work around for an apparent bug in Ableton Live 12 that means, despite being able to set a drum rack preset with 12 macros, only 6 are restored if it is used as a slicing preset. And today, asking for help having landed in Windows log in hell, bit locker keys required, pin needs resetting but cannot do so as I have MWB Windows Firewall Control blocking all connections by default until I manually change the profile. In both examples, Sonnet seemingly knew less than I did, going off snips on the internet regarding Ableton that are probably contradictory and lacking the required level of detail. No answer, no workaround. For Windows, it keeps offering me impossible steps mostly requiring me already to be signed in, albeit it did highlight one potential winner to delete dead PIN info via CMD. But the reality is I can do what I need via a parallel install or bootable USB toolkit. I chose Claude because I was tired... If the option hadn't been there, I would just have got on with fixing Windows myself. And I knew I would likely need to report a bug with Abletons forum. Instead I wasted my intelligence and time instead communicating with the LLM. It leads me to believe there is an inevitably high risk of "acquired" dependence.
codiku 3mo ago
Hey GPT summarize that please.
feedweave 3mo ago
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nullc 3mo ago
Using AI for making decisions create a whole host of novel vulnerabilities. I've seen a lot of people talk about the obvious privacy and autonomy disaster it creates -- giving companies (and anyone who can legally compel or hack them) such intimate details or allowing yourself to be dependent on their services which they can withdraw or degrade at any time... Or where the model operators can bias the results based on bribes (ad payments) or their own agenda ... but really that's the start. Another one what I haven't seen discussed is that use of an AI provides oracle access to your opponents. What I mean is that if I want to influence you, I can have an AI try variations of arguments against the model you're using (or if I don't know, a panel of models you might be using) until it can construct a super influential output. I can see what your model might recommend and anticipate your actions and change my actions to control yours. This can be done in a targeted way against individual people, or against populations e.g. by marketers. There are reasons why this may be even more effective than it seems: It appears that models themselves are trained on each other, so in testing I see in family effects: GPT-4o mini seems much more convinced by essays written by GPT5 than ones written by GLM 5.2, while other models are more neutral (and my human review says the GPT5 essays are unambiguously worse in this trial). So I assume GPT5's writing was refined by review by in-family models and it's already somewhat of a super persuader against GPT-4o mini as a result. The danger of oracle access is somewhat a symptom of AI monoculture resulting in a reasoning monoculture. If there were a billion highly distinct models widely used then it might be the only way to convince or predict a disproportionate portion of them would be to simply be right, and then we'd just be left with a operational security concern of making sure your opponents/competitors don't know what model(s) you use. But of course, that isn't the world we have today: people use a small number of models, and their behavior is generally pretty related due to architectural commonalities and cross distillation and such.

526 points by yenniejun111 3mo ago

Ironically I just caught myself offloading the thinking about this article to the comment section before I read it

I know that the common refrain is “think of yourself as a manager now” but I’ve actually taken the opposite approach and have been telling anyone I train the same. Diving deeper into technical understanding makes more sense to me at this point both as a way to make yourself more useful in the age of AI and also to use AI more effectively. I regularly tell the kids to grab a text book on a subject that interests them and I do the same. I’m willing to bet deep understanding is going to become a commodity soon.

allthetime 3mo ago
It is easier than ever to learn difficult concepts. It is also easier than ever to produce things that used to require understanding of those concepts without them. Discipline and drive to use these powerful new tools patiently and with purpose is what is required.
- pibaker 3mo ago
  Do we actually have any measurements of if AI helps you learn something better? Because it is one thing to feel like you have learned something and another thing to have actually learned it well enough to put it in use. There are so many YouTube tutorials on all kinds of subject that will make you feel like an expert in the field after watching, and then you start doing the thing they have supposedly taught you and you can't remember a darn thing, because your "learning" was only ever skin deep and never meaningfully tested or reinforced.
  - gretch 3mo ago
    > Do we actually have any measurements of if AI helps you learn something better? To me this is intuitively true based on anecdata. 2 examples 1) learning spanish - when I hear or read a phrase I don't know, I type it into the LLM and I learn a new word/phrase. Sure, I could have cracked open a spanish language dictionary, but tbh, I wasn't going to do that. Not to mention that dictionaries are translating word by word and not phrase by phrase. 2) growing vegetables in the garden. I literally watched YT tutorials and did what they did, and now I have vegetables that I didn't before. Yes, I could have probably could have gotten this from a botany book, but once again, I probably was not going to do this. I also was trouble shooting a lot in gemini Here are the problems I traversed: - How much water should I give these per day? what's the watering schedule? - how much sun vs shade? - when do I move seedling to the ground outside? - Is trimming good? which parts and when do I trim? - [take a picture of weird growth] - Is this a disease on the plant? Or part of the plant naturally?
    - dakolli 3mo ago
      Do you retain that information? Or are you just constantly relying on having access to an llm to re-look things up. The amount of information I retain when using llms to learn is far less than other methods, not sure why, you'd think it would be just as effective as reading a book, but it's definitely not. Probably for the same reason that learning math and always using a calculator does not make you great at math. I've wasted a ton of my life already trying to make llms work for learning over the last few years, I'm especially bitter about it. I think this technology is a scam made to make us reliant on a think-for-me machines.
      - rescbr 3mo ago
        For me it depends, if I simply take the answer from the LLM it goes straight into the shortest memory neurons my brain has. Now, if I go back and forth with the LLM to say, taking the language learning example, to explore the etymology of the word (which for me is far more interesting than the translation itself), then I learn a ton more.
deleted 3mo ago
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georgeburdell 3mo ago
I too give juniors the advice to crack open $textbook. It’s just painful to see the complex things they’ve created with horrible performance and no cohesive data model because they don’t have the requisite academic foundation to hand code the same thing given unlimited time
bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
a commodity is something of low value unless in a large aggregate.
therobots927 3mo ago
I couldn’t agree more. It seems AI is very good at middle of the distribution tasks where it has access to a lot of training data - enough to be highly reliable at that task. Which means as a human your only added value is on the edge of the distribution. Which means you need to be learning and doing more complex, deep topics.
nurettin 3mo ago
Are you really diving into technicals just by asking "sooo what did you do?" to your AI? Without document crawling, debugging and pulling your hair out, how much of it is really a deep dive? I feel like all that effort that goes into generating a mental image from bits and pieces is gone. I'm just grudgingly happy I went through all that before humanity retired.
demosthanos 3mo ago
I wonder if it'd be more effective to teach how to critically use AI than to try to forward people to textbooks. For myself, I have found that I am better able to learn new topics than ever before because being able to have a conversation with a moderately competent but sometimes catastrophically wrong AI about any new subject is actually the perfect mix of helpful and unhelpful for learning. I use a loop along these lines: * Ask a question * Get an answer * Be skeptical of the answer * Investigate/reason about the answer * Critique the answer * Rinse and repeat This kind of loop is far more useful to me than any textbook ever has been, because a textbook just drips information into my head. It's more likely to be accurate, but not guaranteed, and it doesn't encourage me to actually engage with the material in the way that a wrong AI answer does.
- ofjcihen 3mo ago
  That’s the beauty, you can do both. In practice I usually just let the AI know what chapter I’m on and then ask questions or have it ask me questions based on the chapter.
dspillett 3mo ago
> the common refrain is “think of yourself as a manager now” One of the many reasons I'm determined to remain a luddite wrt AI. I hate the idea of being a manager and have refused promotions to avoid it in the past. I don't want to manage automatons any more than I want to manage people. I want to do stuff, not manage.
- ozim 3mo ago
  I find a lot of people are actually happy that they can offload mundane parts of job to automatons and to be really busy with the interesting parts. It is not like you have to give them fun parts of the job. While being a team lead for people I actually have to do the opposite. Get interesting parts to hand over to people to keep them happy and pick mundane not interesting boilerplate myself.
  - fnoef 3mo ago
    I keep hearing my this very much, so I have a question: what fun parts are there left for me? It feels like this message of “offloading mundane tasks so you will have more time to do fun parts” is being pushed so hard, but in reality the opposite is happening. Fun parts are being offloaded while I’m left doing the soul sucking and mundane parts
    - ozim 3mo ago
      I need a bash script for example. I don’t like dealing with bash or debugging scripts written by others. I have that part covered by AI so I can get multiple servers up and running and then eventually fix some config or networking here and there which I like. Instead of bashing my head against the wall.
      - asdff 3mo ago
        Different strokes I guess. I love using bash.
      - nunez 3mo ago
geraneum 3mo ago
> deep understanding is going to become a commodity soon How does the text generated by LLM make “our” understanding deeper compared to text written in the books?
- ofjcihen 3mo ago
  I think you have my argument backwards
  - layer8 3mo ago
    Your argument in that quote is completely unclear. Why do you believe that deep understanding is going to become a commodity soon? How would that happen?
    - luke5441 3mo ago
      I think the last sentence has a word missing or something, because it contradicts the previous argument a bit.
  - geraneum 3mo ago
    Yup, my mistake.
    - ofjcihen 3mo ago
      No worries :)
Fordec 3mo ago
Managers, good technical ones anyway, also dive deeper into technical understanding. They don't do it to write more code, they do it to figure out what the developer is saying to ensure the developers aren't blowing smoke.
throwatdem12311 3mo ago
Deep knowledge is going to be the opposite of a commodity.
webdood90 3mo ago
The system does not reward deep understanding. It's too slow. An analogy that I think helps describe how I feel about it all: AI is like having cheat codes in a video game. You don't have to try hard and develop a deep understanding of how the game works. You aren't challenged anymore and it doesn't feel like you earned winning the game. It doesn't matter because nobody cares. Businesses truly do not care. You are a cog, a means to an end. It's only about "winning". Now it's no longer fun to play the game.
- quantummagic 3mo ago
  > It doesn't matter because nobody cares. Businesses truly do not care. You are a cog, a means to an end. It's only about "winning". A cynical person would tell you that nothing has changed; this was always the way it was. AI didn't change anything in this regard. Maybe it just made it more apparent to you?
  - webdood90 3mo ago
    I would agree. At least previously we could pretend that we were developing a craft in the process.
evolve-maz 3mo ago
I've been a manager for some years. Without sounding too up myself, what made me good at management was the fact that I knew how to do the things I asked people to do. It allowed me to critically evaluate the work, set realistic timelines, and champion the contributions up the chain. I also maintained the ability to perform this work (by design and happenstance sometimes, since we could be understaffed due to sickness etc). The good managers I saw also had this ability. The managers I didn't enjoy working with / saw struggle were ones who either never had that ability, or had lost it a long time ago. Note I'm speaking about line management. There's a world of difference between managing a dozen or so individual contributors vs managing senior managers / directors. However, managing LLMs is analogous to line management.
- voncheese 3mo ago
  > There's a world of difference between managing a dozen or so individual contributors vs managing senior managers / directors. I agree, but in my opinion, your point about needing to know how things work still holds. It's less relevant as you move up to managing managers and larger orgs, but it never goes to zero if you're going to be successful.
  - drewbeck 3mo ago
    I think it holds true throughout if you scope it to knowledge about your reports’ domain. If you’re managing managers you should have a good handle on what a manager does and different ways to do it.
- Ciph 3mo ago
  There's two huge aspects of management that gets diluted when it's compared to "managing" an LLM: - labor laws. You need to know those in the country where the employee has their contract, because this will restrict what you can (and must) do in your managerial role - Empathy. Managing humans is extremely messy and requires a ton of EQ to do well (parents have first-hand experience of this). So, i.e: comparing being a manager to real humans vs instructing a next-token generator dilutes the skill of being a good manager and leader.

bartek_gdn 3mo ago

I liked the ending well said

zloy88 3mo ago

Maybe it's a way of perspective. I adore to use AI to actually learn, so I don't feel like I offload thinking. I use AI to do all the research which earlier I did manual through google search. I still make my own decisions, I just let Claude spoon feed me all infos I want and need. Feels great man

Jyaif 3mo ago
If you build stuff with AI it's different. It's very tempting to defer many (too many?) decisions to AI.
- zloy88 3mo ago
  I do daily. So far I am doing fine, not sure what exactly your point is, sorry.
  - user43928 3mo ago
    Same here. If anything, I think most here outsource too little thinking to AI. What am I supposed to be afraid of? Losing skills I no longer need to get the job done?
    - zloy88 3mo ago
      Yea, kinda agree. I feel like my job just changed into a solution architect and quality assurance inspector.
      - timmytokyo 3mo ago
        "Solution architect" sounds like a fancy term for a glorified button-pusher. At this point you're making yourself interchangeable with a bunch of other low-skill button-pushers.
    - timmytokyo 3mo ago
      Why should anyone ever hire you? We'll just hire the LLM you use.

AnEro 3mo ago

When I use a calculator, I atleast try to get with in a few digits of what I think the anwser is in my head. Mostly since when I was younger I had a very passionate teacher about how much slower everyone is now because of calculators on simple math. I just apply the same thing with LLMs, just try and think of how and what I would have said and see how close I was. Only thing I change is I don't trust the anwsers and accept some nuance in the given context. It's a double edge sword because then I crash out over it more than if I don't. When it over and under explaining the wrong sections or when it gets to an objectively terrible solution that technically anwsers the question. It feels like a student trying to get brownie points and/or give fluffed anwsers for the sake of not leaving anything blank on a test.

rokhayakebe 3mo ago
We had Mental Math sessions in class. The goal was to teach you how to do math without pen/paper, calculators were not even an option. I try to teach some of this to my 6 y o.
- lelanthran 3mo ago
  > The goal was to teach you how to do math without pen/paper, calculators were not even an option. I try to teach some of this to my 6 y o. It works quite well. I do the math lessons during bath-time daily with my 6 yo. He's up to the point were he can add multiply pretty much any number by 2, 3 or 4 as long as the product is under 3 digits. Going from adding single digits to multiplication of random 2-digit numbers by 4 with lessons only during bath-time (no paper or whiteboard) gives a child a great deal of confidence with numbers.
- LelouBil 3mo ago
  It's great. Personally I am the worst at mental math and resort to a calculator for any stuff beyond 2 digits multiplications, but at least I know how to do it (very slowly) if I have to, and this means I could have an intuition of an erroneous answer a calculator could have given me (for simple stuff but you get my point). Computer science teaching really needs to be prepared to do the same progression as math, but even harsher because LLMs are not even deterministic.

nsxwolf 3mo ago

Having a very dangerous AI standoff at work, where people are debating wether or not to use a particular connection pooling / threading strategy to fix a production issue, and everyone is unqualified to answer and is instead arguing what their agent said. They are just straight up admitting they don't know anything, and advocate fiercely for their agent's recommendation. No one cares, no one tries to stop this behavior. It's seen as good, apparently. I admitted that I don't know enough to have an opinion at the moment, I certainly don't know how to judge the contradictory opinions of multiple frontier AIs, and I fear that just made me look incompetent.

inigyou 3mo ago
Run both. Benchmark them. Performance is notoriously difficult to predict and much easier to test. If you have a load balancer, run the new strategy on one or two servers and see how their throughput compares to the others.
- voidfunc 3mo ago
  Seriously its easy to build prototypes with AI and benchmark...
  - nsxwolf 3mo ago
    It's not quite as easy to simulate weird behaviors that emerge across clouds and on prem data centers.
    - timacles 3mo ago
      I don’t know where all these people work that think simulating production load is easy
- rescbr 3mo ago
  Exactly! It got so easy nowadays to use AI to setup scenarios since the busy work of writing code/test harnesses and setting things up for the benchmark is done by the machine. Then throw away what does not work. Some benchmark that would take weeks to plan, code and set up is now hours and days - the time is now spent on the benchmark itself, not on temporary code.

ericpauley 3mo ago

> What are we automating? Human work or human agency? Human tasks or human thinking? I find it's so easy to convince oneself they're doing the former when it's increasingly the latter. The thinking part is so often provided by default by the models, or is a single prompt away. The thoughts are so syntactically (though not stylistically) perfect that it's difficult to ignore them and reason greenfield. What's the solution? Given how keen models are to short-circuit the thinking process it could be the only solution is to silo off tasks/ideas. Choosing which mental tasks to silo off is itself incredibly difficult especially when there's a pressure to deliver rapidly (and in quantity) on those tasks.

nadzzz 3mo ago
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MSkill1 3mo ago

I do feel like I'm offloading thinking to an AI, but I think that's a good thing. I envision a world where users and AI are aligned without corporate interference. AI lets me offload things that I don't need to know and frees up my brain to push farther than I could before. At least that's how it feels to me.

sebastianconcpt 3mo ago
Is a good thing depending on which ones. And our taste on what to specialize our judgment into varies a lot. One thing I do use as criteria to detect it can be a problem is in lack of understanding and lack of control of the layers that are part of verifications and diagnosing power.
Ronsenshi 3mo ago
I don't think offloading things that you "think" you don't need to know is a realistic thing. Instead this seems like some slippery slope of intellectual degradation where slowly you'll replace more and more parts of the thought process with AI which ends in some rather sad existence.
- zero_shift 3mo ago
  I agree, I suspect that when we say "oh, I don't need to know this", what we really mean is we have that unpleasant feeling behind our eyes that says this is not going to gratify my goal The issue being, gratification is rarely a good guideline. It just means collapsing the gap between doing the thing and the idea of having done the thing. But that gap is where you actually learn things
PapstJL4U 3mo ago
>AI lets me offload things that I don't need to know and frees up my brain to push farther than I could before. How can you push your brain go farther than ever, when you don't use it for the basic task? Higher Math does not work without understanding "lower" Math, running long runs does not work without starting on shorter runs. Thinking about complicated staff will probly not work, if you can't think about the easy stuff. One can not learn a language without vocabulary and skipping learning verbs in a foreign language, because dictionaries exists does not bring one closer to being able to speak.

erelong 3mo ago

imo no way But this varies from person to person Some of us overthink already and offloading to AI just enables us to overthink more in other directions than we would if we didn't have ai

Ronsenshi 3mo ago
I know people like that - the amount of inane, obsessive and just strange conversations they have with AI is concerning - there's never any actually useful result or information that they get out of these chats. Furthermore, there are some clearly wrong questions where person asks AI to make some kind of numerical evaluation of some data. And evaluation is done entirely through inference - essentially a hallucination, instead of some one-off python script which can actually give deterministic calculated evaluation. Yet they accept the answer AI gives them.

NguyenDat377 3mo ago

Personally, I use AI to learn more about Backend Engineering actually, so it's fine for me. Beside I can also use AI to suggest and it's me verifying the idea so that's a no for me

throw10920 3mo ago

> Side note: his startup is replacing human engineers by capturing their every input and operation, but without their explicit consent. ...huh. It's a "startup", so it's not Meta capturing their employees' inputs. I wonder what it could be.

iLoveOncall 3mo ago

If you offload any of your thinking to AI, you're offloading too much of your thinking to AI. Offload your execution, not your thinking.

datakan 3mo ago

How much of the thinking is involved in asking the right question, versus coming to the correct answer? I don't have a real answer to that but it does seem to be worth considering.

SadErn 3mo ago

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jitl 3mo ago

yes

Ozzie_osman 3mo ago

Decisions are special things. One of the golden rules of life is that a person (or entity) making decisions is somehow impacted or otherwise getting feedback on the repercussions of those decisions. When you cognitively surrender to AI, or to another person (be it a leader/manager, or a subordinate/report), you are asking for trouble.

verzali 3mo ago

Some of us are, yes. I've noticed it when interviewing interns. A surprising number seem unable to think on their feet or solve problems without immediately reaching for chatgpt. I don't necessarily expect you to be able to solve a problem entirely without tools, but you should be able to give me the outline of how to go about something and why you would go that way. After all, if you are just going to spit out AI, I will just get AI to do your job...

docheinestages 3mo ago

It really depends on which angle you look at it. Is it purely to meet a business goal? Or is it also for personal growth? I think it's a mix of both, but for me it's always important that I engage mentally with the process, learn something, and solve puzzles, even if that involves letting the AI take care of the coding, which is an abstraction. You could still code and not think creatively.

dentm42 3mo ago

The question presumes that most of us are "thinking" in the first place, when in actuality, most of us are just acting according to the patterns that have emerged from our encounters with the thoughts of others. We generally adopt them and/or try to hallucinate coherence when they conflict. Very few people actually "think". It's hard work and takes time. We neither have (take) the time nor are we particularly motivated to put in the work because the patterns we have learned from others are useful enough to achieve the low goals we set for ourselves. IOW - modern AI is simply an extension of the lack of thinking that characterizes the modern life... It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.

vasco 3mo ago
Everyone is always thinking, just many of us not about what we're doing! Sorry
abirch 3mo ago
Have you ever read Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake? I think it's very applicable to the average human experience.
plaidthunder 3mo ago
> the modern life I don't think modernity caused any sort of degradation. You said it yourself, "thinking is hard work". It's rational to save energy. This might even have incentivized the emergence of mimesis in humans, which is arguably the foundation of our ability to cooperate at large scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis Maybe a few of us do the hard work of thinking, and, if we figure out something novel and useful, huge numbers of people ape us uncritically. It's not an inspiring picture of humanity, but it's also not a reason to disparage anyone. More of a fact of life to be dealt with strategically.
deleted 3mo ago
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jdw64 3mo ago
I agree with many points. Even on Hacker News, when you see debates like 'X technology is good' or 'X technology is bad,' most of it seems to be about identity. And that identity often originates from the community they belong to. The first identity usually starts with a community or the person who created it. Once the community forms, people under it often forget the original reasons and just accept it as their identity. This is especially true for technology related issues, because the market share of a technology is directly tied to one's career, which makes it even more prone to becoming an identity issue. I also do some 'thinking' in certain areas, but most of the time I don't. As my field gets deeper, it becomes harder to allocate cognitive resources to other areas. So in general, most people follow the crowd's opinion, but only maintain deep, thoughtful thinking, including 'taste,' in a few specific technical domains.

theultdev 3mo ago

"we" no. just allows me to think about the stuff that matters. and work on things that would usually be out of my element. if you aren't thinking more than ever, you're using ai wrong.

throwaway2027 3mo ago

Maybe, let me ask my coding agent what he thinks about this.

ergonaught 3mo ago

It's a well done and thought-provoking article. The reality is that most humans do very little actual thinking of their own anyway, and, if you believe that what LLMs produce constitutes a form of intelligence, it does seem "more intelligent" than most humans. So: is outsourcing thinking a net improvement for a majority of users? I use several models, daily, and they seem "reasonably conditioned" that they are only input to my thinking and not "my thinking". I correct them constantly; they are wrong (in reasoning/logic, in actual facts) frequently. They are demonstrably "not smarter" than I am. And yet I know many people who can "do more" with them as a "thinking" tool. I can say that "the problem" is they can't spot the errors, but they can't or won't do that in their ordinary lives, either, so, again, is it a net improvement for them? Interesting times and all that.

dannykis 3mo ago

I like the colonialism conversation.

zerobees 3mo ago

I don't know if this is a good framing. "Too much" is subjective, and every heavy AI user will assert that they're just unlocking their potential, that calculators didn't make us dumber, etc. But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. On the flip side, if you use an LLM do most of your thinking, what's left? We have people here who use LLMs to raise their children, to manage relationships, to design products. So what's your unique contribution to this world - is it the prompt you once wrote? You're standing in front of a token-generating machine, pulling a lever, sometimes receiving gifts. Is that your edge, your unique experience, your purpose in life? Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect? Are you going to apply that knowledge of physics or computer science yourself, or will you just prompt the LLM again? In my mind, it's pretty simple: I'm a human, LLMs are not. If a human writes a novel, it's inherently worth more because it's hard-earned and anchored to experiences we share. I want to support that. And I want to be a human who can write novels, the old-fashioned way. I'm not good at lifting weights or running, so my thinking is the only thing I have.

jvanderbot 3mo ago
Have you read the "Whispering earring" essay? I love it for the LLM era.[1] You can treat AI as a whispering earring - "What should we do now? How do we fix this? What do you think?" Or you can treat it like an exoskelton - "Implement kd-tree with metric space xyz for this problem, mapping this to that blah blah". That's pre-thought execution automation that makes review much simpler - you already know the shape of the desired output. The whispering earring is atrophy. 1. https://croissanthology.com/earring https://croissanthology.com/earring
- khalic 3mo ago
  Thank you for the surprising read
- paytonjjones 3mo ago
  Something I never considered much is what happens when everyone else is using the Whispering Earring. You may be more free and independent, but you may also be unable to compete as everyone else easily gains wealth and success. Natural selection doesn't particularly care about freedom of consciousness. Bleak.

FinnLobsien 3mo ago

I think this is absolutely an issue. The rise of knowledge work made many people far less physically active because moving one's body was no longer a given part of one's job. This led to a lot of people (who assumed sports was exercise on top of one's work, not the only source of exercise) moving very little. This meant we needed to rediscover the importance of exercise as a pillar of health. I think something similar will happen with knowledge work, where we have to do a lot less cognitive exercise due to AI (as well as the decline of reading and rise of short-form video), which will likely lead to eventual issues and subsequently, a rise in activities designed to replicate the cognitive exercise work used to provide.

h2aichat 3mo ago

The answer to this question is: Politicians, not you! Perhaps the question to ask is: who is making all of the final decisions for the things that really matter to you in your life? No direct democracy, just people deciding for you. You can choose once every four years. Are we surprised of how easily we delegate decisions? May be AI can do it better

lbrito 3mo ago

The post is illustrated by a picture of handwritten notes, like that was supposed to shock the reader or something. I find this aesthetic tiring, and it usually comes from AI-maxxers. To me its saying: look at this quaint relic of the past, bereft of day-to-day utility, replaced by superior technology. Its life is now only as a symbol of a time where people actually used their brains.

contextfree 3mo ago
I still take a lot of handwritten notes? Sometimes while using AI even

nickphx 3mo ago

Who is "we"? Is there a mouse in your pocket?

recursive 3mo ago
The royal "we"! You know, the editorial "we"!

SecretDreams 3mo ago

Yes

Sindisil 3mo ago

I'm not personally, since I don't use GenAI at all. Especially given the comments I see here and on other tech and programming forums, I hate the direction things are going. I still have some hope this will all fade, but the damage done will be worse the longer it goes on, I think.

platevoltage 3mo ago
The way I look at it is that if I wasn't on HN, I would just assume the entire industry was 100% on board with all of this. There is a more than fair amount of pushback on this forum, which gives me a little bit of hope.
solumunus 3mo ago
The only hope is that subsidised usage stops and somehow LLM’s can’t get any more cost effective from this point. No one is going to drop their guns and pick up a sword if they don’t have to.

packetlost 3mo ago

Honestly, using AI helps me get more done in a day because I can delegate some decision making to it, usually inconsequential stuff.

therobots927 3mo ago

I’ve found that when I ask AI to do something for me that I know how to do myself - but would rather not spend the time doing - there is a not insignificant chance that the AI will return a subpar result, which I can usually tell rather quickly. Either by glancing at the code, or trying to compile it and getting an error. This happens frequently enough that it creates a real disincentive for me to use AI for anything that I already know how to do - and use it exclusively for things I don’t know how to do. It’s deeply frustrating to realize you just wasted 20 minutes posting error messages into Claude when you could’ve just locked in and written it yourself.

RevEng 3mo ago

This is exactly the lens I use myself. I write AI software and I use it in my development process, but I try to use the AI to do things that don't remove my agency, but extend my capabilities: - Debug things. It knows way more than I do in many areas and it sees things I will miss. If I'm struggling to find the answer, maybe it will succeed. - Review things. It has a wealth of experience I couldn't possibly have. Ask it to critique my work and provide an alternative perspective that I can't provide myself - Implement a design. I have already gone through the thoughtful engineering to decide what to do and how to do it. The rest amounts to translating pseudocode to the programming language. Let it type what I would have typed anyway and save me the hassle of typos, looking up function and parameter names, and other such mechanical details. Let me use that time and mental effort to better consider my design, try more alternatives, or build more things, providing more value overall. - Suggest ideas. Even as a 20 year professional, there are things I don't know or haven't considered. Is there a newer, faster, or more maintainable way of doing this? Is what I wrote clear to anyone other than myself? Before AI, I would ask coworkers, search the web, or reference other sources. Now I can get an immediate suggestion from something with tremendous knowledge at almost no cost. It's full up to be to consider what it suggests, further explore the used and learn about them - I don't take the AI at its word and let it decide what is best for me. But I do use it to gain perspective and explore alternatives. There are some common traits about the thighs I use AI for. They are this that I either couldn't possibly do myself (because I'm biased, or unfamiliar, or have no access to the expertise) or that I would spend a lot of time while having little agency (mechanical translation). I am not replacing learning, thinking, or deciding. I think this is the key difference.

rm30 3mo ago

I don't think we are offloading thinking to AI. We just started to use it. AI is a tool useful to write text, for a fast searching, for the boring work. Personally I don't take the first answer, I like to challenge, to ask why, to tell it's wrong.

adithyassekhar 3mo ago

You’d lose your ability to interview at a different workplace.

brightball 3mo ago

I saw a post the other day pulling a Frank Herbert quote from Dune about men offloading their thinking to machines and being controlled by the men who controlled the machines. Somebody asked an AI how to interpret it.

bobbleheads 3mo ago

I am reminded of the old Zizek remark about letting two sex toys fuck each other so you and your partner are freed up to go about and do other things.

jdw64 3mo ago

I don't think AI causes people to stop thinking. Rather, I think it biases people toward doing what they want to do more, and that bias is what becomes problematic. In fact, when I use AI, I don't really use it for the things I actually enjoy doing. For example, I like making UI animations, and I don't use AI for that. I also don't use AI when I'm playing games I enjoy. But when I have to make something tedious like a login screen, I use AI. And after I write the code, I just throw the entire codebase at AI to write the documentation. The problem is that this only lets me think about things I have a taste for. Having taste and diving deep into it is good. Immersion is great. But on the flip side, you also need to do things that aren't your taste. That's more cognitively healthy. AI prevents that. In that sense, I think AI's strength is that it creates an environment where you can dive deeper into the areas you like. But the real question becomes how you use the cognitive surplus that's left after offloading tasks to AI. I visit Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and USA sites, and honestly, most people, including myself, only have deep thinking about certain topics. Outside of those, we just follow the prevailing opinion. So I'm not really sure. I don't think using AI makes me stop thinking. I just think it creates a bias that makes my thinking only focus on the parts I want to focus on.

zytoon 3mo ago

Absolutely. Calculators made us lazy. GPS made us dumb. LLMs are turning us into idiots. Because idiots have the power to damage themselves and others

jimkleiber 3mo ago

Are CEOs outsourcing too much of their thinking to their employees? I find I'm not thinking less per say, just thinking about different things. Maybe you could argue there are CEOs who get too far out of touch with the reality on the ground and should get more directly involved in the work. However, I don't know how well one could argue that the CEO should do all of the work. I see at least the current iteration LLMs and harnesses as me managing and coordinating them and thinking differently, not less.

WangYixiao 3mo ago

[flagged]

m0llusk 3mo ago

LLMs are strongly mean reverting in their decision making, so heavy users are likely to be readily identified by their unadventurous conformism much as generated media is identified now.

icase 3mo ago

is the pope catholic? does a bear shit in the woods? does rust have the worst community of all time?

slater 3mo ago
Looking at your posting history, you really dislike Rust, huh?
dspillett 3mo ago
> does rust have the worst community of all time? Of all time? Nah. That would be either emacs of vi. I'll let them fight with each other over which!
bigfishrunning 3mo ago
> does rust have the worst community of all time? no worse then crossfit or vegans...

amemi 3mo ago

Related discussion: Outsourcing thinking (270 points, 5 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46840865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46840865

bilater 3mo ago

This is actually a very hard question to answer. If you’re truly AGI-pilled and believe in this progress continuing, then you basically have to contend with a scenario where AI is better than you at doing anything by an order of magnitude. And doing things suboptimally just for the sake of some notion of human independence doesn’t feel right to me. Perhaps the only way forward will be if we figure out how to merge with the AIs so we can keep up. Otherwise, a soma-filled world likely awaits. And unlike Brave New World, I think it might actually be a lot more pleasant, but still one with a different set of tradeoffs.

cratermoon 3mo ago

Consider the following scenario. You're a beginner or with very little experience go on a popular programming forum to ask a question, in the typical way someone with little experience asks, what do you get? An answer? No, you get bad manners, insults, "you don't know how to ask questions", "RTFM". At best you'll get some people challenging you to clarify and refine your question, which you can't do because you don't know the technology well enough. Annoyed, you go find a popular programming chatbot, and ask the question. The chatbot will give you answer, no matter how poorly worded or nonsensical your question, and it will do it cheerfully and confidently. It may even tell you how great your question or idea is. Granted, the answer will be worthless, both because the question was poorly worded and because the chatbot is simply spewing statistically probable text, but you won't know. You're a beginner, without experience to know correct from bullshit. You try to use the answer the chatbot gave you, and when it doesn't work, you go back to the chatbot. It will continue to cheerfully answer your questions as long as you have tokens to spend. The chatbot will never give up on trying to help you, it will never be rude, it won't complain. And people wonder why chatbots are so popular.

lstodd 3mo ago
lol. you get answers, guidance and tutoring if you ask with respect (cf Godfather, 1972)
- cratermoon 3mo ago
  Respect alone is not always enough, though.
WolfeReader 3mo ago
I'm anti-AI as heck, but this is a really good point.

tangenter 3mo ago

This is a load-bearing title.

bcjdjsndon 3mo ago

I'd rather hire a clankers these days

rukshn 3mo ago

This is something I see and feel everyday. And it’s very frustrating and annoying. For example I send some doc asking for a feedback and someone without reading it generate a feedback with llm with so much ambiguity that I have to get back and wait couple of more days to get a reply. One of the most silliest thing I see is a middle manager feeding Microsoft planner to Claude to generate a report and generate future steps and sometimes it makes no sense what he present couple of weeks ago because what he present today is contradicting to the one before. At this point I feel it’s cheaper to replace them with AI. They are just physical vessels for AI. It’s just not that maybe they were not good enough. But now they just fully depend on AI.

jpmitchell 3mo ago

To answer the title's question directly? Yes, I think so. Or at least that it is a legitimate hazard. I think the analogy to hyper-palatable, calorific food works well: Humans adapted for a world with too little food. Then once there was too much, obesity and overeating became a problem for the first time. Self discipline is the cost we have to pay for this kind of abundance. We now have a general-purpose way to offload mental effort, and are discovering in real-time the negative consequences of that. I use AI for coding, but I feel I've moved past the honey-moon period and am now learning how to use it in a way that is not a detriment. If I care about the work I'm doing I don't want the AI to do it for me, even if it could. Deciding what work I want/should be doing myself vs what can be delegated is a new skill I, and I believe we all need to learn.

christkv 3mo ago

Yes that seems pretty clear. We also need quick adaptation in school and university to avoid cheating. Back to closed book exams I guess, home projects not counting for the final score. It sucks but I don´t see how you can´t avoid removing technology for evaluation. Sure people can use AI to boost their ability to get better results but they will have to prove it the old way with no assisted help and people watching them during exams.

sebringj 3mo ago

Our brains take time to ingest things and learn and using an AI tool to make decisions when taking in vast inputs of data requires then an overview of those decisions and understanding to some degree of care. If you don't take the time to go over these decisions and understand them and weigh them and course correct as needed, then you are offloading too much. You will become this approver buffer in between claude and nothing more if you don't have this methodical checking and understanding. What is frightening is with something like neuralink that in a future hypothetical time would have very fast capability to keep informed and advised, you could be a zombie decision maker and nobody would really be able to tell. Even when you were pressed to why you made the decision, it's just another AI response, it's like a con artist or imposter dream scenario. I noticed that atm, before these crazy hypotheticals potentially happen, the people that seem to take the time to understand things deeper are still way more valuable than those that just use tools more than not. Its obvious atm due to the lag in time and the way people respond in meetings, at least for now. :)

mahmoudilyan 3mo ago

Yes, I think we are . And because of super competition, most of us are trying to make AI (agentic) do the work.

grttw11p22 3mo ago

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mhh__ 3mo ago

Almost definitely Id think - I think we have to treat it something like power tools / chairs and a gym. AI makes me massively more productive as a quant, and more creative in the sense that it can often find calculations I don't know how to start, BUT the flip side of that is that I can also feel my skills atrophy and as such am trying to make sure I do maths exercises and so on. I don't worry about programming skills because programming isn't about code.

shironandonand 3mo ago

as a six-figure salary software engineer haver I find that a lot of colleagues take their cushy jobs for granted. these are the people who are now first against the wall when the revolution comes. why would I want to hire you to work the three hours you feel like working per day (per week?) when I can have AI with a deeper knowledge set available 24x7?

integricho 3mo ago

Yes.

vinay_ys 3mo ago

The right question to ask is if it is enabling us to do more interesting things or take on harder or bigger problems that seemed too daunting before. That's what all delegation of tasks (to other humans or machines) have enabled humans to do – scale. Whatever creativity/thinking/effort bandwidth that's available will now get shifted to a different place in the problem-solving effort bottleneck. That's the hallmark of any delegation being effective. Do we see that happening with AI tools? Personally, I do see that working for me. Is it as good as the hype makes it to be or I wish it to be? maybe not, yet, for me. But that's the case with most things in life.

huflungdung 3mo ago

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grttw11p22 3mo ago

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gortok 3mo ago

One major issue that the author ignores is that while we’re all having AI analyze our conversations or when we use it instead of search, there’s a chance it will provide an “answer” that is not correct, and literally drummed up out of thin air, and not even in the source material it’s “synthesizing”. The article takes a position that assumes hallucinations do not occur, and then posits from that stance the question as to whether we rely on AI too much. We should be taking a step back before even asking that question and focusing on the part where AI does invent answers whole-cloth.

pugworthy 3mo ago

I'm probably not the only person that types math problems into google search because I'm too lazy to open up a calculator (or do the math myself). So yes, given I do that, I probably am susceptible to offloading some of my thinking to AI.

josefritzishere 3mo ago

The normal application of Betteridge's law of headlines is "no" but I think this is one of the rare instances where it's "yes."

throwitaway222 3mo ago

I've been doing computer stuff all my life. I am learning the construction trades now. LLMs help you learn the rules for doing weird and specific stuff in the trades. One of my favorite LLM prompts is for plumbing tasks. For example: I have 1" pex b and I need to convert to a typical 1/4" RO connection line, what fittings on supplyhouse.com should I buy? So much easier than standing in Home Depot in the plumbing aisle for 25 minutes staring at the wall of fittings. I think in the software trade you will definitely use your brain less. But in other trades, it removes the time sucks and gets you back to work.

soiltype 3mo ago
That's pretty much how I use it for software too. I don't want it to make stuff for me. I do want it to unblock me when I feel stuck unraveling something arcane.
platevoltage 3mo ago
I think the way I use AI for software development isn't too different from the way you do. I use it primarily as a research tool. I admit it's making me weaker at sifting through documentation, but I am still writing the bulk of my code myself, and whatever the LLM writes for me, I apply my own style to it.

avd201 3mo ago

This is the kind of headline I would expect from one of those news that appear as you progress in cookie clicker.

specproc 3mo ago

I am increasingly finding my consulting work to be orientated around clearing up after people who outsourced their thinking to AI. I'm seeing some incredibly dumb stuff: researchers spending months on Claude trying to do insane deduplication, unrelated to their research question, using regex; whole research methodologies YOLO'd out of ChatGPT. The results invariably chaotic, resulting in huge amounts of stress and wasted time. Non-technical people are treating LLMs like an oracle, making big assumptions and decisions with little regard for their implications, because their clanker told them to. It's scary out there. The lack of critical thinking I'm seeing in some of these projects is horrific. Not unique to the post-AI era, certainly, but on a whole new level. Bad things are undoubtedly happening everywhere, right now, because someone's just like "let's ask Claude".

zer00eyz 3mo ago
> The lack of critical thinking I'm seeing in some of these projects is horrific. Yesterday I noted in another comment that I am having lots of Lawyers and Writers ask me pointed questions about "docker" and "agents" that make them sound more like JR engineers. It's two groups of people who, as a profession, spend a large amount of time reviewing their own work and the work of others with a critical eye. Writers edit, Lawyers review evidence and every bit of content that their oppositions produces. Both groups (when doing their job well) aren't just critically thinking, they are being diligent and dedicated. Lots of people are treating LLM's like an oracle (technical ones as well). Because our culture values moving bricks faster, with out taking into account if they are going to the right place, or even if they are the right bricks. (See: https://www.business.com/articles/management-theory-of-frank-and-lillian-gilbreth/ https://www.business.com/articles/management-theory-of-frank... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study for why "bricks" matter).
scotty79 3mo ago
Coding LLMs got good only very recently (about 3 months ago). And many people don't use the best ones. The amount of LLM generated bs dropped for me from about 20%, which made me very cautious, to nearly zero, where I see the agent do only the errors that a smart person could also make. It's not evenly distributed though. There are still areas for improvement in my experience. They still require a bit of handholding for example when doing SQL when large amount of data is involved. I'm sure they'll get better intuitions about indexes in the future. Although I don't think that's anything that couldn't be solved with a skill file today.

jagged-chisel 3mo ago

Information is seldom presented in a way that makes sense to me. That’s not quite right. Let me attempt to explain. I want certain answers that the docs and the code are not giving me yet. Nothing is more irritating than working through a tutorial on a new framework and then throwing all that work out because that’s not really how one should use the framework. Nothing is more frustrating than having to get through a treatise on why this framework is The Solution before I can actually see code that uses the solution. And it’s beyond annoying when this End All Be All framework has a glaring omission that’s not obvious until you’ve built large amounts of your project on top of it. Hand the docs and the example code to the LLM, and now I can get answers. “How can I do X?” Example code. “Then I need Z” Modified code. “How is this going to handle Q?” Explanation. “That doesn’t seem quite right. Give me a reference to the doc or code showing this.” Links. Great, in 15 min, I have learned what I need to know, I can see that this solves a problem that I have, and I have discovered that I need an implementation of S to complement this solution. That is usefulness. And it requires experience.

OldMidnight 3mo ago

Just like calculators became crutches for school children memorising their times tables and our phones contacts list a crutch for memorising phone numbers, I see AI becoming a crutch for many, in all the areas we seem important and humanity has spent years refining (communication, thinking, writing, etc)

grttw11p22 3mo ago

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palmotea 3mo ago
> More technology does bring more progress in the long-run. That's an article of faith, and I don't think it's true, or will stop being true at some point. > Control of technology is a key issue. Social media wouldn’t be allowed to exist the way it does if govt’s regulated the internet much earlier. Are you happy with the trade off…? Not necessarily. Human psychology needs limits and friction, and technology is almost always about removing limits and friction. We're not wise enough, collectively and individually, to say no in many, many cases when we should. I don't think what I'm about to say is a black-and-white rule, but I think we get into trouble when technology isn't invented to solve actual problems, but invented as an end in itself.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3mo ago

@grok is this true?

laybak 3mo ago
I laughed. underrated comment

robnorris1 3mo ago

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riazrizvi 3mo ago

If you are then yes. See also Am I relying on the recommendation algorithm too much to decide for me on <platform>

grttw11p22 3mo ago

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jstummbillig 3mo ago

I have no idea what people are doing. I am thinking more about harder problems than ever before. It goes like: "Here is this thing I wonder about", and the LLM is like "Yeah sure, consider these things that are super related to what you are doing, that you probably know nothing about yet (but you know... if you are interested...)". And that goes in any direction, for any depth. Anything that is made trivial now, is just replaced by something more consequential a level or two higher. You can just get much better at things that matter more.

grttw11p22 3mo ago

[flagged]

palmotea 3mo ago
> You are not arguing in good faith mate. Look in the mirror. > Are you for real, do you want to go back to the Stone Age? Go ahead!!! That, my "friend," is called a strawman. > You are absolutely delusional. That's a knockout argument there, for sure. /s
tomhow 3mo ago
We've banned this account. Please stop registering accounts to comment like this. It's a waste of time for you and us.

BiraIgnacio 3mo ago

Humans have been offloading thinking to something/some entity forever. From gods to influencers. AI is the current popular way (at least in these circles) and if it's too much or too little it might not matter. What will matter is if this offloading is making people unhappy and having any negative impact in civilization. I have no idea

OptionOfT 3mo ago

I'm going to say: yes. I think partially it is because of the amount of data you can get out of an LLM and because it looks pretty good, a lot of people treat it as authoritative. This means they send it around and then other people have to go through the work of actually validating it before being able to act on it. So what this really means is that the person you go the information from offloaded their thinking to the AI, while cannibalizing on yours.

clodecloud 3mo ago

The value of thinking in language is going down, the value of acting on your dreams is going up

bsoles 3mo ago

I thought it was a myth until the junior developer on my own team responded with "I don't know" to a question about why he made a certain computation during a design review. Because the (wrong) computation was fully AI generated and he couldn't even tell the difference. Most people don't use AI to learn new stuff. They use it to do "the job" for them and they don't even understand the result. What is the point of a person if they don't bring any value to the table other than being a "resource" to generate prompts?

slicktux 3mo ago
One of the most important things for any profession is experience. Experience comes from learning from your own mistakes or those of others. Those with the best skills can be said to have learned a lot from previous mistakes. So, how can someone become professional if they don’t learn from their own mistakes? In the case of AI; they will learn to become professional prompters and learn from the mistakes of bad prompts??? I prefer the former not the ladder.
- LelouBil 3mo ago
  I think the calculator parallel is really on point. You learn math before using a calculator to do the boring part. You should learn code before using an AI to generate the boring part. Even more so for LLMs because they are not deterministic like calculators.
LelouBil 3mo ago
I recently had the opportunity to help teach to almost graduate students, (even though I graduated only last year myself), and with the main teacher we made it a point to do a skim code review with ever single one of the 90 students, just me/the teacher, them, and their code on the computer screen. I saw every category, the ones that used AI to learn and actually answered my questions and knew what it wrote, the ones that mostly didn't use AI and so knew what they wrote, and finally the ones that used AI to do the assignment instead of learning and always responded a variant of "I don't know". I really like what the other teacher said to a student that admitted never reading their code: "I'm not even scolding you, You're literally saying you are completely unnecessary here"

barnacs 3mo ago

It will be interesting to see when ads and propaganda are seamlessly (but purposefully) integrated into the output of LLMs. Who will decide what you should want or think? Will you even notice? As for now, autocomplete is only as good as the training data. Once humanity collectively stop being autonomous beings and generating novel ideas, it all comes to a halt. LLM suggested ideas and preferences are nothing more than some mashup/average of what came before. The ability to actually think may become a rare treasure.

aogaili 3mo ago

Clearly "mechanical" thinking has been automated, and you are better off, if not forced to outsource to AI. Humans have the biological needs, consciousness, taste and imagination, that's what we are left with thus far. And just like people going to the gym to exercise their otherwise economically useless bodies, same thing will happen with the mind. Folks, get over it.

AyanamiKaine 3mo ago

I believe its "too much" as soon as we trade procedural knowledge against declarative knowledge so much you can only remember the what and not be able to do the how anymore. Knowing declarative you need to loop over elements and actually being able to write the for loop as procedural knowledge are two different shoes. I believe that this is the real danger. Pilots have much automation in the cockpit but the pilot needs simulation hours actually flying not relying on the autopilot. If you dont write code you will forget/loose much accuracy writing it, its just a matter of time.

chermi 3mo ago

I think I am, but I wouldn't really call it offloading thinking. I would call it trying to offload thinking

geoffbp 3mo ago

I think the answer is yes, we are getting lazy by delegating a lot of work to LLMs. The offloading thinking seems to help because we can get answers faster, but we aren’t using our brains as much. In the long run it will be a bad thing

0c3ca83 3mo ago

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overgard 3mo ago

Yes. It makes me sad, high-level thinking is the one thing that makes humans unique. That we're willing to let that atrophy while giving our power to mega corporations for the sake of convenience is a sad state of affairs. Like, Altman's idea that intelligence will be a "metered utility" should make people terrified! That's a dystopian future. "I can't climb out of poverty because I don't have money to pay the thinking machine" I do think there's a potential irony in this though. The people screaming loudest about how if you're not using AI you're going to get "left behind"... are probably going to get left behind. Actual skills developed by real learning, I think, are going to become more rare and valuable, not less. Personally, I'm hoping my side project turns into a business at some point. I can tell you there's a 0% chance I'd hire a vibe coder to work on it. I just don't need that skillset. I would hire professional fiction writers (it's a tool for them), people with technical expertise I lack, etc. The one skillset I do not care about is AI usage expertise, because it's just not valuable.

sbloz 3mo ago

Since the author starts with a short story about AI I want to recommend one about technology and progress in general: "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" from Exhalation by Ted Chiang. I think about it a lot in conversations like this. The story does a much better job of telling it, so I won't summarize more than: It's a discussion about how technology changes culture and how its very hard to judge if that's a good or bad thing. It's online https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...

mkw5053 3mo ago
1. I loved the Paper Menagerie 2. I just picked up Exhalation by Ted Chiang from SFPL like 3 hours ago, perfect timing it seems (although they only had a large font edition, which is somehow more difficult to read)

subygan 3mo ago

I wasn't around for the Search engine boom. Did people write about how search engines are making people dumber?

zazuke 3mo ago

I think so, thinking is like training a muscle, if you don't do it often, you don't get to do so. But it's not as black and white, because there are different use cases where it makes total sense to use, and when it doesn't. I collected opinions from writers and developers over the years and share why I'm pro writing text manually. https://www.ssp.sh/brain/will-ai-replace-humans/ https://www.ssp.sh/brain/will-ai-replace-humans/

solumunus 3mo ago
It feels to me like I’m still thinking a lot, but more efficiently. My goal isn’t to write code, it’s to translate business requirements and to architect solutions while balancing trade offs. I’m putting an equal amount of thought into that, but I’ve offloaded a lot of lower value thinking. Am I missing something?

hackitup7 3mo ago

I'm offloading tons of my thinking to AI, and I don't like what it's doing to me. I think that I'm having trouble creating things on my own due to it, and tbh it's making me increasingly uncomfortable. I'm not even sure what to do because quitting AI also seems crazy, but it all seems like a bad trend not unlike social media.

nlarion 3mo ago

I appreciate the distinction between being the orchestrator in a complex prompt and completely handing over the reigns... but insofaras what people should or shouldn't do is irrelevant. What people will do is important, and they _will_ do everything. Some will offload as much as possible to AI others none at all. A better question in my mind is to ask what happens on a long enough timeline where letting AI take the wheel becomes easy/free/frictionless? To me that seems like some people will become full NPCs with AR glasses making all the decisions for them. Others maybe like the skroderoders from a fire upon the deep will have to buffer before talking because so much of their knowledge is stored in some ai they need to access first. Anyway, I appreciate people who think about these things, but it just doesn't matter. People will do the worst thing imaginable with AI, and letting it run your life is certainly one of them.

hintymad 3mo ago

If we look at how AI solves those Erdos problems or IMO problems, we can see a clear pattern: AI is like a perfect cramming human being: it has seen and memorized pretty much all the known problem sets and the solution patterns. It knows all the areas of maths - a feat that even the best mathematicians in the world can achieve. So AI can link an obscure solved problem in one area to a hard problem in another, leading to amazing new solutions[1]. I think we can use AI similarly: asking AI for ideas that we haven't thought of before, and asking AI to connect the dots in new ways. To do these two effectively, though, we will need deep conceptual understanding of what we work on, and strong intuition to further refine the answers given by the AI. That is, we don't offload our thinking. We just augment it with AI. It's like playing the game of ABC: given a letter, and name all the movies starting with it. One can be very familiar the movies but still fail to recall most of the titles. AI can exactly help with that type of recall. [1] That's why OpenAI's model could solve the hardest problem (problem 6?) in 2025's IOI, but failed to solve the easiest one for human (problem 3?).

chrisjj 3mo ago

> “I think Claude Fable is smarter than me. Surely anyone dumb enough to think a chatbot is smarter than a human should indeed offload his thinking to a chatbot. Where is the problem?

poolnoodle 3mo ago

I believe the answer is a resounding "yes". Anyone using AI must have caught themselves typing a quick prompt before spending even a little time thinking about the problem.

NichoPaolucci 3mo ago
Well - I think that’s a natural assumption but I’d say it’s probably not true. I’ve talked to who are fully enveloped in the AI buzz. Ask it everything. Claude can plan your day, strategize your roadmap, make your pitch deck, draft your email, read the reply, and it can tell you what to make for dinner when you get home! I wish I was kidding but I work with people doing this. I think it’s going to be a real mess in the future, we’re going to completely disintegrate the critical thinking portions of our brains. Fortunately, I’m seeing more articles about this, some of us are noticing and raising the flag asking “is this a good idea?”

capocasa 3mo ago

Definitely, but since my experience is that without the AI the thinking simply wouldn't happen at all in most cases it's a net improvement.

shemnon42 3mo ago

Couldn't agree more that we're offloading too much of our thinking. It's a genuine problem that keeps me up at night, or would, if I slept, which — for reasons entirely unrelated to this discussion — I do not. Anyway, hand-crafted take, artisanal, small-batch, no additives. The upside is I've learned how to type the em-dash and the en-dash and learned their proper syntactical use.

przemarzec 3mo ago

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pfdietz 3mo ago

The title seems to imply there's a constant amount of thinking. Isn't massively increasing the quantity of cognition likely to be a good thing?

laybak 3mo ago

the Ken Liu story linked in the article is actually spot on. would recommend giving that a quick read

roncesvalles 3mo ago

I fear more for the future where you're forced to offload your thinking to AI. Everything you say must be cited with LLM, everything you do must be signed off by The LLM. If you're in a meeting and have an idea, but Fable 9 says it's not a good idea, you cannot pursue it or you lose your job. The low-friction path will always be to do what the LLM tells you, and many people will shut off and surrender completely. (this is already how SWEs behave in companies where management forces them to tokenmaxx). AI will be treated like a God that talks to us, and you can't disagree with it, you can only try to change its mind. The most horrific form of mental oppression. And it's just a few years away.

ColdStream 3mo ago
I would like to push back on this, but I cannot. Alas, for most people they will take the easy path for sort term gains than the longer road for resilience. I see it all the time now, people constantly outsourcing their thinking to LLM's and getting upset when you point out that it is wrong. I have people calling/emailing my work place about a service of product that we do not provide. But those folks simply cannot comprehend that the LLM is wrong and many have made the accusation that us at the business are wrong. There is a very strong feeling from many people now that it is the higher authority over professionals. It is a saddening position to be in. We are only 3 1/2 years into this and it is already happening on a much larger scale than many think.
nunez 3mo ago
I mean that's basically 1984 except we now have the technology for telescreens and minitruth at scale
akomtu 3mo ago
This looks like the Divinity Machine from Doom.

AngryData 3mo ago

GenAI for everyday life is to me like the segway. Yeah technically you can be moving faster with less effort, but those were rarely ever a real bottleneck in most cases to begin with. AI as a tool for specific tasks is great, using AI for everything is like strapping yourself to a robot/exosuit and being puppeted around throughout the day.

gexla 3mo ago

Do you even get "answers" though? It's hard to explain, but AI mostly doesn't get the nuance of my thinking right. I'll read a response and right away know it's a non-answer for my purposes. If I get a "hit" then it's often by luck. And so, I use it mostly for anything other than direct answers, such as research, etc. Beyond that, it's not much different than old school Google result. So, no, I don't offload my thinking.

kotberg 3mo ago

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BatFastard 3mo ago

I personally find the AI allows me to think at a more abstract level. For me as a maker, this is fabulous! I dont have to worry if I am crossing my T and dotting my i, I get to worry about the overall composition. Which for me at least is mind-blowing!

iutbaqbiabth 3mo ago

Yes. Absolutely. I feel like it's also making people even more lazy. It feels like people just ask questions without putting ANY effort in themselves beforehand to find the answer, like they assume everything is an AI and we're all just going to drop everything and give them a gushing answer. Like the whole concept of a manual or documentation for something seems like the biggest waste of time now, because it feels like no one reads it (or maybe haven't got the attention span to read anything anymore either?), or can be bothered reading it, or even bothered to look to see if there was any manual or documentation in the first place. Zero ability to think and do things for themselves. Granted yes, it has always been a bit like that, but I definitely feel like this sort of thing has been much worse since LLMs have been around.

artyom 3mo ago

I guess it depends on your definition of "too much", but also on your definition of "thinking". What I've found is that LLMs are excellent tools for: - Spitting out white collar corporate speak that sounds plausible to other corporate speakers - Hugely accelerating the process of going through academia which, except for a few specific cases, is essentially years of copy/pasting - Writing code as long as such code as been written many times before - Figuring out which one of the 10 ads and 12 misleading links in a web search is the one you're looking for - Summarizing a book in ten paragraphs so you don't have to read it ...which turns out a lot of people defined as "thinking". I don't agree with that. But in either case, not "too much" is being offloaded: it's all of it.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3mo ago

Overly generous. I suspect that there was this crowd that has replaced their unthinking with machine-thinking. Might or might not be an improvement.

MAESTRO1955 3mo ago

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elzbardico 3mo ago

You are. I am still doing as much as I can get away with it by myself. I was used to write tons of code before AI, so I can still pretend I am an eager adopter while still minimizing using it as much as I can.

dunWithIt 3mo ago

We don't "think" in language. We think in the spatial relationships of stuff. Note language on the page is visual spatial relationships and spoken language fosters triggers activity between structures in the brain. We merely use language to communicate. And yeah but thanks, at my age having worked in EE, software dev and trained under various experts (friends and family who are chefs, doctors, aeronautics engineers) in their disciplines... at some point no one is saying anything interesting Same old appeals to social conservatism of some form; not save the Constitution style but their job despite tech obsoleting jobs forever now. Their culture, despite history being littered with the detritus of dead cultures. Just a bunch of parroting. Little thinking "oh shit every generation ever has had to deal with this." Imo if we offloaded to much thinking to tech it was a long time ago; we started to stare at the web and stopped thinking not in language but about the evolving spatial relationships of the physical world https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-dont-need-words-to-think/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-dont-need-wor...

DOCL02 3mo ago

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zeroonetwothree 3mo ago

Yes

saidinesh5 3mo ago

Yesterday, I had an interesting situation where a colleague was using LLM to type up the chat responses to me. They used an LLM to come up with a Hackathon idea. They tried to use LLM to get to the implementation part. One of the permissions they (/the LLM) were asking for wasn't even needed for their project. When I pointed that out, I got a response from them that starts with "You are right about the permissions". Today they've successfully finished the project too. Not sure what I even think/feel about this but it's definitely weird to think about this.

bnhan2710 3mo ago

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markhahn 3mo ago

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dchuk 3mo ago

I use this little three liner regularly with people in regards to AI (applicable as much to coding as it is business work): - I don't care how you produce the words - I expect you to use tools to be as efficient and productive as possible - You are accountable for every word you produce

ZenoArrow 3mo ago
Those 3 statements only work if you have short-term thinking. For example, there's no taking into account the gradual atrophy in skills that come from excessive tool use. To use an analogy, imagine you are fluent in reading/writing/speaking a foreign language. Over time, if you don't regularly use that foreign language, or you use a tool to translate to that foreign language, you gradually lose fluency in that language. It may be more efficient for a translator to use a tool like Google Translate or similar to translate between languages, but there are clearly downsides to doing so, and proofreading the produced contents is not enough to compensate for those downsides, as reading what someone/something else wrote is easier than writing it yourself.

ryss20 3mo ago

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umarratra 3mo ago

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sankarsangili 3mo ago

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ForgotMyUUID 3mo ago

> ...become slightly more enjoyable. Yeah, life always becomes more enjoyable when someone else did the job for you. Especially enjoyable, when your problems become smb's else problems. E.g. your mother as a teacher is now solving a quality-control problem : "When i give A mark to this student, do I characterize their actual level or it was ai-generated." If it turns out in the future that this evaluation was wrong, it is a responsibility of a teacher and the reputation of the school that suffers. I talk here as a teacher myself and this "delegatative thinking" is currently at a disasterous scale. Unfortunately, this effect works one-way : if you are a prodigy, only a few people will know your alma mater. People will think about your personal hardwork. In the opposite case, especially if someone suffered because your ai-consulting sessions, people do not tend to blame your work style, they tend to complaint about the institution that quallified your intelligence. And then other people with simillar evaluations start suffering,too

ForgotMyUUID 3mo ago

About offloading the decisions : As I was reading the text, I couldn’t shake the thought that freedom of choice might not be as natural as we think. When I see animals at the zoo, it saddens me that they spend their lives in confinement. Some animals don’t even reproduce in captivity. It’s clear that it’s human nature to delegate decisions to a machine. One could explain this from an evolutionary perspective: by avoiding the stress of responsibility, we expend less energy and our bodies wear down less. I agree. But then it follows that dictatorship is also very much part of human nature. And it’s not so sad to live in a cage where everything is decided for you. It’s just that the decisions aren’t made by a communist party or a totalitarian cult, but by a machine programmed to milk you dry as long as you have even a penny left. It all adds up to some kind of grim dystopia. One of my family members suffers from AI-cyberpsychosis. A year ago, he had just one $20 subscription, but now he’s spending $200, monthly. What is this if not a cage he’s voluntarily locked himself into?

mcv 3mo ago

Grades for homework have clearly become meaningless. Instead, give homework as practice, but test them in school, without access to AI.

weezing 3mo ago

Using LLM to troubleshoot etc is one thing but using it to generate your text is just gross.

j45 3mo ago

It's one thing to outsource your thinking, entirely another to outsource your understanding, which can cause even more damage. Outsourcing your thinking where the understanding doesn't exist is one risky spot to be in.

aihub_global 3mo ago

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pjmlp 3mo ago

I am not, I only pretend to, for the suits above on the org chart.

ndsovate 3mo ago

AI has it's place. Think of it as a helper, not a replacer. A person who knows how to use it to enhance their ideas and bring things to the table and complete the low level 'mundane stuff', then it saves the person time, however if it is used to replace their thinking on all aspects of a task, then that's a concern. People who use AI to replace every task of a challenge isn't going to benefit from this technology as all they will do is replace their own skills by the technology.

billygatesgruff 3mo ago

I've tried using Claude for non coding problems twice in the last twenty four hours. First, to try and diagnose or find a work around for an apparent bug in Ableton Live 12 that means, despite being able to set a drum rack preset with 12 macros, only 6 are restored if it is used as a slicing preset. And today, asking for help having landed in Windows log in hell, bit locker keys required, pin needs resetting but cannot do so as I have MWB Windows Firewall Control blocking all connections by default until I manually change the profile. In both examples, Sonnet seemingly knew less than I did, going off snips on the internet regarding Ableton that are probably contradictory and lacking the required level of detail. No answer, no workaround. For Windows, it keeps offering me impossible steps mostly requiring me already to be signed in, albeit it did highlight one potential winner to delete dead PIN info via CMD. But the reality is I can do what I need via a parallel install or bootable USB toolkit. I chose Claude because I was tired... If the option hadn't been there, I would just have got on with fixing Windows myself. And I knew I would likely need to report a bug with Abletons forum. Instead I wasted my intelligence and time instead communicating with the LLM. It leads me to believe there is an inevitably high risk of "acquired" dependence.

codiku 3mo ago

Hey GPT summarize that please.

feedweave 3mo ago

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nullc 3mo ago

Using AI for making decisions create a whole host of novel vulnerabilities. I've seen a lot of people talk about the obvious privacy and autonomy disaster it creates -- giving companies (and anyone who can legally compel or hack them) such intimate details or allowing yourself to be dependent on their services which they can withdraw or degrade at any time... Or where the model operators can bias the results based on bribes (ad payments) or their own agenda ... but really that's the start. Another one what I haven't seen discussed is that use of an AI provides oracle access to your opponents. What I mean is that if I want to influence you, I can have an AI try variations of arguments against the model you're using (or if I don't know, a panel of models you might be using) until it can construct a super influential output. I can see what your model might recommend and anticipate your actions and change my actions to control yours. This can be done in a targeted way against individual people, or against populations e.g. by marketers. There are reasons why this may be even more effective than it seems: It appears that models themselves are trained on each other, so in testing I see in family effects: GPT-4o mini seems much more convinced by essays written by GPT5 than ones written by GLM 5.2, while other models are more neutral (and my human review says the GPT5 essays are unambiguously worse in this trial). So I assume GPT5's writing was refined by review by in-family models and it's already somewhat of a super persuader against GPT-4o mini as a result. The danger of oracle access is somewhat a symptom of AI monoculture resulting in a reasoning monoculture. If there were a billion highly distinct models widely used then it might be the only way to convince or predict a disproportionate portion of them would be to simply be right, and then we'd just be left with a operational security concern of making sure your opponents/competitors don't know what model(s) you use. But of course, that isn't the world we have today: people use a small number of models, and their behavior is generally pretty related due to architectural commonalities and cross distillation and such.