My fundamental argument: The way the average person is using AI today is as "Thinking as a Service" and this is going to have absolutely devastating long term consequences, training an entire generation not to think for themselves.
A certain group of people have something wrong with their brain where they can't be "educated" and are forced to learn by studying and such. The protagonist of the story is one of these people and feels ashamed at his disability and how everyone around him effortlessly knows things he has to struggle to learn.
He finds out (SPOILER) that he was actually selected for a "priesthood" of creative/problem solvers, because the education process gives knowledge without the ability to apply it creatively. It allows people to rapidly and easily be trained on some process but not the ability to reason it out.
It is unclear that a human thinking about things is going to be an advantage in 10, 20 years. Might be, might not be. In 50 years people will probably be outraged if a human makes an important decision without deferring to an LLM's opinion. I'm quite excited that we seem to be building scaleable superintelligences that can patiently and empathetically explain why people are making stupid political choices and what policy prescriptions would actually get a good outcome based on reading all the available statistical and theoretical literature. Screw people primarily thinking for themselves on that topic, the public has no idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
That said, I maintain there are huge qualitative differences between using a calculator versus "hey computer guess-solve this mess of inputs for me."
The critical difference between AI and a tool like a calculator, to me, is that a calculator's output is accurate, deterministic and provably true. We don't usually need to worry that a calculator might be giving us the wrong result, or an inferior result. It simply gives us an objective fact. Whereas the output of LLMs can be subjectively considered good or bad - even when it is accurate.
So imagine teaching an architecture student to draw plans for a house, with a calculator that spit out incorrect values 20% of the time, or silently developed an opinion about the height of countertops. You'd not just have a structurally unsound plan, you'd also have a student who'd failed to learn anything useful.
> The critical difference between AI and a tool like a calculator, to me, is that a calculator's output is accurate, deterministic and provably true.
In current situation, by vibing and YOLOing most problems, we are losing the very ability we still need and can't replace with AI or other tools.
I think past successes have led to a category error in the thinking of a lot of people.
For example, the internet, and many constituent parts of the internet, are built on a base of fallible hardware.
But mitigated hardware errors, whether equipment failures, alpha particles, or other, are uncorrelated.
If you had three uncorrelated calculators that each worked 99.99% of the time, and you used them to check each other, you'd be fine.
But three seemingly uncorrelated LLMs? No fucking way.
Can’t say the same for LLM. Our teachers were right with the internet of course as well. If you remember those early internet wild west school days, no one was using the internet to actually look up a good source. No one even knew what that meant. Teachers had to say “cite from these works or references we discussed in class” or they’d get junk back.
The cash register says you owe $16.23, you give the cashier $21.28, and all hell breaks loose.
No one is making cool shit for themselves. Everyone is held hostage ensuring Wall Street growth.
The "cross our fingers and hope for the best" position we find ourselves in politically is entirely due to labor capture.
The US benefited from a social network topology of small businesses. No single business being a lynch pin that would implode everything.
Now the economy is a handful of too big to fails eroding links between human nodes by capturing our agency.
I argued as hard as I could against shipping electronics manufacturing overseas so the next generation would learn real engineering skills. But 20 something me had no idea how far up the political tree the decision was made back then. I helped train a bunch of people's replacements before the telecom focused network hardware manufacturer I worked for then shut down.
American tech workers are now primarily cloud configurators and that's being automated away.
This is a decades long play on the part of aging leadership to ensure Americans feel their only choice is capitulate.
What are we going to do, start our own manufacturing business? Muricans are fish in a barrel.
And some pretty well connected people are hinting at similar sense of what's wrong: https://www.barchart.com/story/news/36862423/weve-done-our-c...
> Surely they know the risks, and surely people will be just as responsible with AI
That's exactly what worries us.
Fermentation was a great way to /preserve/ food, but it can be a bit hit and miss. Pickling can be outright dangerous if not done correctly - botulism is a constant risk.
When canning of foods came along it was a massive game changer, many foods became shelf stable for months or years.
Fermentation and pickling was dropped almost universally (in the West).
Have too many of us outsourced our ability to raise horses for transport?
Surely you're capable of walking all day without break?
Although, congestion pricing is a good counter-example. On the surface it looks like it is designed to benefit users of public transportation. But turns out it also benefits car-owners, because it reduces traffic jams and lets you get to your destination with your own car faster.
Designing everything around cars hurts everyone including car owners. Having no option but to drive everywhere just sucks.
Network/snowball effects are not all good. If local businesses close because everybody drives to WalMart to save a buck, now other people around those local businesses also have to buy a car.
I remember a couple of decades ago when some bus companies in the UK were privatized, and they cut out the "unprofitable" feeder routes.
Guess what? More people in cars, and those people didn't just park and take the bus when they got to the main route, either.
We already saw a softer version of this with web search and GPS: people didn’t suddenly forget how to read maps, but schools and orgs stopped teaching it, and now almost nobody plans a route without a blue dot. I suspect we’ll see the same with writing and judgment: the danger isn’t that nobody thinks, it’s that fewer people remember how.
That said, LLMs are perhaps accelerating that but aren’t the only cause (lack of reading, more short form content, etc)
The things that are actually dangerous in our lives? Not informing ourselves enough about science, politics, economics, history, and letting angry people lead us astray. Nobody writes about that. Instead they write about spooky things that can't be predicted and shudder. It's easier to wonder about future uncertainty than deal with current certainty.
What's more, that's not fundamentally new! It's always been possible for someone to just helplessly cling to another human as their brain, but we've typically considered that to be a mental disorder and/or abuse.
That's a very low bar. I expect most people know how to cook, at least simple dishes.
Notice something subtle.
Early inventions extend coordination. Middle inventions extend memory. Later inventions extend reasoning. The latest inventions extend agency.
This suggests that human history is less about tools and more about outsourcing parts of the mind into the world.
Even just writing notes you'll never refer to again, you're making yourself codify vaguer ideas or impressions, test assumptions, and then compress the concept for later. It's an new external information channel between different regions of your head which seems to provide value.
Working in this manner, it is so painfully clear it doesnt really follow the flow of the article even. It misses on so many critical details and just sorta fills in its own blanks wrong... When you tell it that its missing a critical detail, it treats you like some genius, every single time.
It is hard for me to try to imagine growing up with it, and using it to write my own words for me. The only time i copy paste words to a fellow human that is ai generated, is for totally generic customer service style replies, for questions i dont totally consider worthy of any real time.
AI has kinda taken away my flow state for coding, rare as it was... I still get it when writing stuff I am passionate about, and I can't imagine I'll ever wanna outsource that.
Yeah, or as I say, Uriah Heep.
To be fair, telling everybody they are geniuses is the obvious next step after participation awards.
Because people have figured out that participation awards are worthless, so let's give them all first place.
To his point: personally, I find it shifts 'where and when' I have to deal with the 'cognitive load'. I've noticed (at times) feeling more impatient, that I tend to skim the results more often, and that it takes a bit more mental energy to maintain my attention..
That's the risk involved with opinions and conclusions.
The article he references gives this example:
“Is it lazy to watch a movie instead of making up a story in your head?”
Yes, yes it is, this was a worry when we transitioned from oral culture to written culture, and I think it was probably prescient.
For many if not most people cultural or technological expectations around what skills you _have_ to learn probably have an impact on total capability. We probably lost something when Google Maps came out and the average person didn’t have to learn to read a map.
When we transitioned from paper and evening news to 24 hour partisan cable news, I think more people outsourced their political opinions to those channels.
https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2012-10-03-yva...
Cogito, ergo sum
The corollary is: absence of thinking equals non-existence. I don't see how that can be an improvement. Improvement can happen only when it's applied to the quality of people's thinking.
(And that's not what the Cogito means in the first place. It's a statement about knowledge: I think therefore it is a fact that I am. Descartes is using it as the basis of epistemology; he has demonstrated from first principles that at least one thing exists.)
If outsourcing thought is beneficial, those who practice it will thrive; if not, they will eventually cease to practice it, one way or another.
Thought, as any other tool, is useful when it solves more problems than it creates. For instance, an ability to move very fast may be beneficial if it gets you where you want to be, and detrimental, if it misses the destination often enough, and badly enough. Similarly, if outsourced intellectual activities miss the mark often enough, and badly enough, the increased speed is not very helpful.
I suspect that the best results would be achieved by outsourcing relatively small intellectual acts in a way that guarantees very rare, very small errors. That is, AI will become useful when AI becomes dependable, comparable to our other tools.
It makes them prey to and dependent on those who are building and selling them the thinking.
> I suspect that the best results would be achieved by outsourcing relatively small intellectual acts in a way that guarantees very rare, very small errors. That is, AI will become useful when AI becomes dependable, comparable to our other tools.
That's like saying ultra processed foods provide the best results when eaten sparingly, so it will become useful when people adopt overall responsible diets. Okay, sure, but what does that matter in practice since it isn't happening?
I suspect that outsourcing thinking may reflect on quite some outcomes, too. We just need time to gather the statistics.