Did calculators or abacuses do the same thing? This argument has no merit.
Tools allow you to do you work better and be able to focus on doing other parts better. It’s not like people can’t do basic math, yet people want to say AI means we will go back to banging rocks? Yeah that makes sense…
Yes? Of course some people are gonna struggle with stuff. Some people are illiterate as well, and have had zero access to technology. What do you think that supports or proves? There’s also people who have every limited mental functions, through no fault of their own.
Skill atrophy is an issue with nearly every technology though. Unless you want to go back to knapping your own hand axes and starting fires with sticks you will be dependent on some technology to cover the skills you don’t have.
There’s a hard limit on the kind of paywall you can put on LLMs as well. Open source models exist and companies / people are increasingly turning to them instead of shelling out millions to the frontier labs. Even the frontier models are becoming increasingly commoditized as it’s relatively easy to swap out which model a given application is using. If anthropic starts charging exorbitant rates per token you can switch to a gpt or Gemini model relatively easily.
People keep doing this - arguing that if you’re against AI you must not want to use any technology.
Because that’s what happens if you take this argument and apply it to almost any other technology. If you are truly worried about skill atrophy you shouldn’t use calculators to preserve your math skills, you shouldn’t use gps to keep navigation skills, you shouldn’t use the Internet for research to keep library skills, and there were people at the time when these were introduced making those exact arguments that we now regard as irrelevant. Why this time the argument will be relevant has not been shown to me.
all the previous examples of technology improving has a greater benefit to offset the detriment.
Books, for example, did decrease our skill to just retain information; however, the benefit of sharing, storing, and propagating information long after you’re gone has proven WAY more useful.
a GPS might have decreased your skill in navigation (although reading abstractised maps of where you are is a trade-off), but it allowed for improvements in travel, a harder time getting lost, enabling rescue operations etc.
genAI so far does have it’s uses in fields like medicine, chemistry, any domain where generating by hand is unfeasible. But for the general population, it has been proven to impact cognitive skills, it eroded trust across the board:
you have to second guess if someone online is a LLM or a person
you have to scrutinise whether or not an art piece is made with or without AI
news and media have become so much easier to impact
not to mention, all the climate impact the rapid constructions of data centres does (yes, data centres have existed and have been built before, but not to this pace or scale)
and maybe the increasing cases of AI psychosis, with all the varieties of harm people have experienced due to this.
etc.
For all of this to be offset, there’d need to be a phenomenal benefit to come out of genAI the way it’s used today.
I don’t think the advent of books, libraries, calculators and GPS have had a combined net loss for everyone, more than AI has.
And for the record, I do believe AI is an useful technology. But that remaining usefulness will only show itself from the shockwave, after the bubble bursts.
Why would you take that argument and apply it elsewhere? Not every argument applies to every single thing.
Again, rather than just “maybe we should hold onto the skills we have”, the AI brain solution is “let’s just build our own infrastructure for doing the thinking for us”.
Why would you take that argument and apply it elsewhere?
Ask Immanuel Kant . If you inconsistently apply an argument then that is a sign of hypocriticality, ie. Lack of criticality. The hypocrite inconsistently applies criticisms to support an already held belief that is independent of that argument.
For example if I said immigration should be banned but carved out an exception for European countries, then that means I don’t actually believe that immigration should be banned, it probably means I don’t like brown people and am using this argument in bad faith to justify that belief.
The sign of a good argument is consistency, and any inconsistent application of it requires an explanation.
If calculators, gps, and the internet are exceptions to the rule of avoiding skill atrophy, explain why. Otherwise you are being a hypocrite.
But I think the point about bad faith misses the mark. For one to conduct themselves or argue for a position in bad faith (even against only themselves), they must first hold a true, hidden belief. I don’t think that’s typically the case here.
You could argue that there is a hidden belief and that it is something like “AI is bad” or “I don’t like AI.” However, the people arguing this position are often quick to point out themselves that AI has legitimate value, even if they then go on to narrowly define the character and application of that value.
I would argue instead that what is actually being hidden here isn’t a belief, but is instead a sentiment something like, “I’m scared.” Which, while being completely understandable, is an emotive state or pseudo-belief, not a truly-held but hidden belief. Because of that, they (in the general sense) aren’t calculating hypocrites; they’re are just panicking.
Although, I prefer the admittedly archaic flatus vocis for describing this particular brand of cognitive dissonance because it translates basically to “mouth farts,” and that makes me chuckle.
Maybe the pace of development would’ve been slower, giving us more time to react to it. Or it wouldn’t get shoved down our throats every second, or it’d be renoved from the places it’s more harmful, if making money wasn’t the only concern
We would still have to deal with the skill atrophy of AI use.
I don’t think you need to worry about skill atrophy if you recognize the skills as necessary and useful.
We still teach basic arithmetic in elementary school, even though we have calculators.
Even if AI is entirely green, publicly owned and widely accessible, it will negatively affect us.
Tools to rapidly parse, sort, aggregate, and distribute information aren’t going to affect us any more negatively today than they did 40 years ago or 400 years ago.
A large question is if the “skill atrophy” is more than just having to lean on AI and if it contributes to broader mental decline over time. Years down the line we might have a huge bump in dementia. People aren’t using it to manage information that was merely beyond their reach like tools to date, they are offloading writing communication. Saw someone proudly proclaim the use LLMs to write all their comments in online discussions, which seems absurd.
I will say that at least some folks I know personally that went all in on conversational AI use now seem… Off compared to before when talking to them face to face.
Note that the discussions were at least intended to be an earnest debate. However, since one was using LLM he was skipping the critical thought portion and just trying to use an LLM to fake engagement but to try to just re-emphasize their perspective.
While flooding the field with bullshit low quality content isn’t new, this is a whole new level of disengagement.
However, since one was using LLM he was skipping the critical thought portion and just trying to use an LLM to fake engagement
This presupposes sincere engagement prior to LLMs. You’re assuming this guy wasn’t just regurgitating talking points cobbled up the old fashioned was, as though repeating lines you heard from Jordan Peterson or JD Vance on a Joe Rogan podcast.
Alternatively, that this person remains totally sincerely in their beliefs and simply leverage the LLM to recall obscure, vaguely remembered historical details. Or to clean up their poor grammar or clumsy prose.
LLMs have no impact on critical thinking in either case. At least, no more than spell check or a Wikipedia fact lookup or a brain saturated by other people’s professed views.
While flooding the field with bullshit low quality content isn’t new, this is a whole new level of disengagement.
The argument that someone is “using LLMs” becomes a superficial excuse to disengage.
And hey, maybe that’s good. Maybe less people treating the Internet as a real place with sincere people will convince folks to engage more in MeatSpace.
But “technology is making us dumber” is a line I see floated endlessly. It reads more as misanthropy and elitism than any real critique of the new technology
We’re going to end up with civil engineers who don’t know how to calculate dynamic weight ratings, because they used Claude to get through their physics classes.
Skill atrophy is absolutely a concern, even if we continue teaching the fundamentals. Because without that higher level knowledge, there is nobody to check for hallucinations.
The desktop calculator is an amazing tool for people who do a lot of math, but those people still know how to do the math. AI is fundamentally changing that, because it is directing users on how to do the work, not simply taking in {a}+{b} and returning {c}. It is a user going “hey chatbot how do I find the difference between {a} and {b}?” Then the AI confidently (and incorrectly) goes “Oh all we need to do is {a}+{b} to give us the result {c}.” But if the user already doesn’t know how to find a difference, they won’t notice that the AI is incorrect.
And that is obviously a small example, but apply it to larger problems like calculating thermal expansion requirements for a suspended walkway. Calculating maximum wattage ratings for a circuit. Calculating maximum weight ratings for a highway overpass or bridge. Calculating medicine dosage based on a patient’s body weight and an interactive drug.
Any one of these could lead to disaster if done incorrectly. And the issue with AI is that it will happily hold your hand through the entire process, while confidently being incorrect the whole time.
I have, not in education (I have relatives who work in higher education and they claim as such, but both of these are anecdotes anyway) but the interview process. My work has struggled to hire anyone and its driving me bananas. They either get candidates who used AI to pass the non-technical phone screen and show up for the first interview clearly asking AI about industry standards and they flunk almost immediatly. The second group are full on tripple threats, they can sing, dance and act, but balk at the first talk of pay (my business daddy has not kept up with the competition in a narrow field, they can get a lot more across the street).
We are looking down the barrel of the last cohorts of classically trained professionals working through their careers, the world is about to be a much weirder and worse place because of [gestures broadly to everything] but mostly AI.
We teach arithmetic, but are people better or worse at it than before calculators were widely available?
I’m not sure what you mean by “if you recognise the skill as necessary or useful” - but taking a leap, I don’t see how that matters.
If I allow a machine to code for me, and don’t regularly use my own skills, when that machine becomes financially inaccessible, or just breaks down, it doesn’t matter how important I think the skill is - I’ve given it away.
No question the average person is worse at arithmetic since the invention of the calculators. But we probably wouldn’t have our current standard of living if we hadn’t invented the calculator either. And calculators wre so ubiquitous and basic…
So… On balance it was a net benefit. On the other hand AI affects more than a single skill. Will the QoL improvements outweigh the negative behavioural effects? I think the jury is still out on that one.
Absolutely, I’m not necessarily making the argument that calculators are bad, just the point that technology can help us, and also create dependency, or at least a kind of laziness.
Go back to growing your own food than. It’s not laziness to take advantage of efficiency gains. Do you know how to grow a large varieties of vegetables? Or has your reliance on grocery stores and farmers atrophied your intelligence?
…said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”
But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.
“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” (Phaedrus 274c-275b)
Why don’t you try getting a new argument, yours is a bit dated.
That was written when less than 10% of the population was literate because of how expensive and difficult it was to learn. There was no publicly funded literary education, and public opinion on literacy was at best contentious.
It’s not a similar conclusion. You are literally parroting the same talking points. They are just as fundamentally misguided and divorced from reality now as they were 2000 years ago.
I once had to explain to a room of four other servers and a bartender (so you know, people who are more likely to do mental arithmetic at work than many others), that if each of five servers tips the bartender out ten percent of their earnings, then he’ll earn half of the average tips. Several of them did not believe me even after went through a couple examples.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I do despair if that’s the best we can do.
He’s not really citing anything, just making a claim that happens to align with his existing argument.
People certainly don’t seem better at arithmetic, and readily rely on calculators. Which isn’t necessarily bad, but it speaks to my argument that technology can, and does, cause skills to atrophy.
Well yeah, but so are you and I’m just bringing up an anecdote. If we wanna bring numbers into this, they’ve probably got some evidence related to the Flynn effect, but I don’t know that there’s a good way to actually determine whether the average person got better at arithmetic after calculators came out, unless we want to reuse some oooooold tests.
While anecdotes are iffy sometimes, I think they’re alright in this context.
If people feel the need to reach for calculators rather than doing simple maths in their heads, that at least nods in the direction that the technology has impacted our skill development, or at the very least, made us inclined to use the tool over our own facilities.
But also, there’s emerging evidence of the issues with frequent AI use, so it seems pointless to split hairs.
Edit: just to clarify, I was agreeing with you in my first comment
I was saying the person you responded to was essentially saying “nuh uh!”
As with all anecdotes, it does not explain itself, but I can explain this one: repetition.
I don’t think that was really in question though and both you and the other person have already responded genuinely, which makes this interaction less fun than I was intending, because I had hoped my anecdote would be taken as the joke it was.
I think there’s an issue with lumping them all together here. There is a functional difference between a machine that does your homework and is designed to endlessly praise you, and a model specifically designed to identify viruses or medications.
That’s like saying you can have space exploration without ballistic missiles. Once the technology is there power and/or the market will do whatever it wants with it.
Except even moreso with language models. Here it is not just a similar technology, but the exact same vehicle.
Translation: The way scaling laws and gradient descent work for language models means that there is NO functional difference between a machine that does your homework and is designed to endlessly praise you, and a model specifically designed to identify viruses or medications.
That is all they are good for. They are ok for translation, although even then they miss a lot of nuance like someone who can speak a language but isn’t fluent.
Well, there are a lot of malicious uses, but passable translation is the one positive use case.
Wife is a lawyer. She needs to do complex keyword searches on massive volumes of legal documentation. She absolutely loves how quickly and easily Copilot parses and tabulates info based on her queries.
Total game changer for the kind of work she’s doing.
I work in IT. Love to cobble together scripts in languages I’m otherwise unfamiliar using Claude. It’s also excellent at diagnosing system errors and providing effective remediation.
There are better AI options that could be developed for that over a massive all in one inefficient LLM like Copilot. If the same amount of money was thrown at dedicated development AI and searches it would require far less energy, pollution, hardware, and could be run locally in many cases with the same or better results.
I was replying to a post about LLMs and the article is about LLMs so while it is true that AI predates LLMs and the label isn’t literally limited to only LLMs and genAI those two things have taken over the label and are what nearly everyone means when they say AI.
They aren’t talking about the AI used to find exoplanets, or the AI used with lidar to find structures in jungles, or to do actual medical science, or all of the other types that are useful tools. The article is about LLMs implemented by the big companies that are designed to steal and manipulate data in ways that are detrimental to society.
Maybe if we keep the AI but loss the Oligarchy…
We would still have to deal with the skill atrophy of AI use.
Even if AI is entirely green, publicly owned and widely accessible, it will negatively affect us.
Did calculators or abacuses do the same thing? This argument has no merit.
Tools allow you to do you work better and be able to focus on doing other parts better. It’s not like people can’t do basic math, yet people want to say AI means we will go back to banging rocks? Yeah that makes sense…
Scroll the comments, we’ve had this exact argument.
People literally do struggle with basic maths also
Yes? Of course some people are gonna struggle with stuff. Some people are illiterate as well, and have had zero access to technology. What do you think that supports or proves? There’s also people who have every limited mental functions, through no fault of their own.
Skill atrophy is an issue with nearly every technology though. Unless you want to go back to knapping your own hand axes and starting fires with sticks you will be dependent on some technology to cover the skills you don’t have.
There’s a fairly hard limit in the kind of paywall that can be put in front of lighters, axes and pencils.
Not all technology is bad, not all exchanges are detrimental.
People keep doing this - arguing that if you’re against AI you must not want to use any technology.
There’s a hard limit on the kind of paywall you can put on LLMs as well. Open source models exist and companies / people are increasingly turning to them instead of shelling out millions to the frontier labs. Even the frontier models are becoming increasingly commoditized as it’s relatively easy to swap out which model a given application is using. If anthropic starts charging exorbitant rates per token you can switch to a gpt or Gemini model relatively easily.
Because that’s what happens if you take this argument and apply it to almost any other technology. If you are truly worried about skill atrophy you shouldn’t use calculators to preserve your math skills, you shouldn’t use gps to keep navigation skills, you shouldn’t use the Internet for research to keep library skills, and there were people at the time when these were introduced making those exact arguments that we now regard as irrelevant. Why this time the argument will be relevant has not been shown to me.
all the previous examples of technology improving has a greater benefit to offset the detriment.
Books, for example, did decrease our skill to just retain information; however, the benefit of sharing, storing, and propagating information long after you’re gone has proven WAY more useful.
a GPS might have decreased your skill in navigation (although reading abstractised maps of where you are is a trade-off), but it allowed for improvements in travel, a harder time getting lost, enabling rescue operations etc.
genAI so far does have it’s uses in fields like medicine, chemistry, any domain where generating by hand is unfeasible. But for the general population, it has been proven to impact cognitive skills, it eroded trust across the board:
For all of this to be offset, there’d need to be a phenomenal benefit to come out of genAI the way it’s used today. I don’t think the advent of books, libraries, calculators and GPS have had a combined net loss for everyone, more than AI has.
And for the record, I do believe AI is an useful technology. But that remaining usefulness will only show itself from the shockwave, after the bubble bursts.
Why would you take that argument and apply it elsewhere? Not every argument applies to every single thing.
Again, rather than just “maybe we should hold onto the skills we have”, the AI brain solution is “let’s just build our own infrastructure for doing the thinking for us”.
Ask Immanuel Kant . If you inconsistently apply an argument then that is a sign of hypocriticality, ie. Lack of criticality. The hypocrite inconsistently applies criticisms to support an already held belief that is independent of that argument.
For example if I said immigration should be banned but carved out an exception for European countries, then that means I don’t actually believe that immigration should be banned, it probably means I don’t like brown people and am using this argument in bad faith to justify that belief.
The sign of a good argument is consistency, and any inconsistent application of it requires an explanation.
If calculators, gps, and the internet are exceptions to the rule of avoiding skill atrophy, explain why. Otherwise you are being a hypocrite.
I love the appropriate application of Kant!
But I think the point about bad faith misses the mark. For one to conduct themselves or argue for a position in bad faith (even against only themselves), they must first hold a true, hidden belief. I don’t think that’s typically the case here.
You could argue that there is a hidden belief and that it is something like “AI is bad” or “I don’t like AI.” However, the people arguing this position are often quick to point out themselves that AI has legitimate value, even if they then go on to narrowly define the character and application of that value.
I would argue instead that what is actually being hidden here isn’t a belief, but is instead a sentiment something like, “I’m scared.” Which, while being completely understandable, is an emotive state or pseudo-belief, not a truly-held but hidden belief. Because of that, they (in the general sense) aren’t calculating hypocrites; they’re are just panicking.
Although, I prefer the admittedly archaic flatus vocis for describing this particular brand of cognitive dissonance because it translates basically to “mouth farts,” and that makes me chuckle.
Maybe the pace of development would’ve been slower, giving us more time to react to it. Or it wouldn’t get shoved down our throats every second, or it’d be renoved from the places it’s more harmful, if making money wasn’t the only concern
Maybe yeah. There’s certainly ways it could have played out better.
I don’t think you need to worry about skill atrophy if you recognize the skills as necessary and useful.
We still teach basic arithmetic in elementary school, even though we have calculators.
Tools to rapidly parse, sort, aggregate, and distribute information aren’t going to affect us any more negatively today than they did 40 years ago or 400 years ago.
A large question is if the “skill atrophy” is more than just having to lean on AI and if it contributes to broader mental decline over time. Years down the line we might have a huge bump in dementia. People aren’t using it to manage information that was merely beyond their reach like tools to date, they are offloading writing communication. Saw someone proudly proclaim the use LLMs to write all their comments in online discussions, which seems absurd.
I will say that at least some folks I know personally that went all in on conversational AI use now seem… Off compared to before when talking to them face to face.
How is that any different than the million bot farms that already exist?
Like, shit posting isn’t a critical value added skill.
Note that the discussions were at least intended to be an earnest debate. However, since one was using LLM he was skipping the critical thought portion and just trying to use an LLM to fake engagement but to try to just re-emphasize their perspective.
While flooding the field with bullshit low quality content isn’t new, this is a whole new level of disengagement.
This presupposes sincere engagement prior to LLMs. You’re assuming this guy wasn’t just regurgitating talking points cobbled up the old fashioned was, as though repeating lines you heard from Jordan Peterson or JD Vance on a Joe Rogan podcast.
Alternatively, that this person remains totally sincerely in their beliefs and simply leverage the LLM to recall obscure, vaguely remembered historical details. Or to clean up their poor grammar or clumsy prose.
LLMs have no impact on critical thinking in either case. At least, no more than spell check or a Wikipedia fact lookup or a brain saturated by other people’s professed views.
The argument that someone is “using LLMs” becomes a superficial excuse to disengage.
And hey, maybe that’s good. Maybe less people treating the Internet as a real place with sincere people will convince folks to engage more in MeatSpace.
But “technology is making us dumber” is a line I see floated endlessly. It reads more as misanthropy and elitism than any real critique of the new technology
We’re going to end up with civil engineers who don’t know how to calculate dynamic weight ratings, because they used Claude to get through their physics classes.
Skill atrophy is absolutely a concern, even if we continue teaching the fundamentals. Because without that higher level knowledge, there is nobody to check for hallucinations.
The desktop calculator is an amazing tool for people who do a lot of math, but those people still know how to do the math. AI is fundamentally changing that, because it is directing users on how to do the work, not simply taking in
{a}+{b}and returning{c}. It is a user going “hey chatbot how do I find the difference between {a} and {b}?” Then the AI confidently (and incorrectly) goes “Oh all we need to do is{a}+{b}to give us the result{c}.” But if the user already doesn’t know how to find a difference, they won’t notice that the AI is incorrect.And that is obviously a small example, but apply it to larger problems like calculating thermal expansion requirements for a suspended walkway. Calculating maximum wattage ratings for a circuit. Calculating maximum weight ratings for a highway overpass or bridge. Calculating medicine dosage based on a patient’s body weight and an interactive drug.
Any one of these could lead to disaster if done incorrectly. And the issue with AI is that it will happily hold your hand through the entire process, while confidently being incorrect the whole time.
I haven’t seen any actual evidence of this.
I have, not in education (I have relatives who work in higher education and they claim as such, but both of these are anecdotes anyway) but the interview process. My work has struggled to hire anyone and its driving me bananas. They either get candidates who used AI to pass the non-technical phone screen and show up for the first interview clearly asking AI about industry standards and they flunk almost immediatly. The second group are full on tripple threats, they can sing, dance and act, but balk at the first talk of pay (my business daddy has not kept up with the competition in a narrow field, they can get a lot more across the street).
We are looking down the barrel of the last cohorts of classically trained professionals working through their careers, the world is about to be a much weirder and worse place because of [gestures broadly to everything] but mostly AI.
Can I ask in which field you work? And also, can you give some tips for interviewing? As in, what would you like from a candidate?
We teach arithmetic, but are people better or worse at it than before calculators were widely available?
I’m not sure what you mean by “if you recognise the skill as necessary or useful” - but taking a leap, I don’t see how that matters.
If I allow a machine to code for me, and don’t regularly use my own skills, when that machine becomes financially inaccessible, or just breaks down, it doesn’t matter how important I think the skill is - I’ve given it away.
No question the average person is worse at arithmetic since the invention of the calculators. But we probably wouldn’t have our current standard of living if we hadn’t invented the calculator either. And calculators wre so ubiquitous and basic…
So… On balance it was a net benefit. On the other hand AI affects more than a single skill. Will the QoL improvements outweigh the negative behavioural effects? I think the jury is still out on that one.
Absolutely, I’m not necessarily making the argument that calculators are bad, just the point that technology can help us, and also create dependency, or at least a kind of laziness.
Go back to growing your own food than. It’s not laziness to take advantage of efficiency gains. Do you know how to grow a large varieties of vegetables? Or has your reliance on grocery stores and farmers atrophied your intelligence?
Why don’t you try getting a new argument, yours is a bit dated.
Can’t help but notice that in addition to being weirdly smug, all you did was show that someone else has come to similar conclusions.
Writing things down is a great way to offload the cognitive load of remembering things.
Fortunately, it’s hard to paywall writing. The same isn’t true for AI.
That was written when less than 10% of the population was literate because of how expensive and difficult it was to learn. There was no publicly funded literary education, and public opinion on literacy was at best contentious.
It’s not a similar conclusion. You are literally parroting the same talking points. They are just as fundamentally misguided and divorced from reality now as they were 2000 years ago.
Removed by mod
Thankfully, removing literacy from someone is cost prohibitive.
Better. Significantly better.
I once had to explain to a room of four other servers and a bartender (so you know, people who are more likely to do mental arithmetic at work than many others), that if each of five servers tips the bartender out ten percent of their earnings, then he’ll earn half of the average tips. Several of them did not believe me even after went through a couple examples.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I do despair if that’s the best we can do.
He’s not really citing anything, just making a claim that happens to align with his existing argument.
People certainly don’t seem better at arithmetic, and readily rely on calculators. Which isn’t necessarily bad, but it speaks to my argument that technology can, and does, cause skills to atrophy.
Well yeah, but so are you and I’m just bringing up an anecdote. If we wanna bring numbers into this, they’ve probably got some evidence related to the Flynn effect, but I don’t know that there’s a good way to actually determine whether the average person got better at arithmetic after calculators came out, unless we want to reuse some oooooold tests.
While anecdotes are iffy sometimes, I think they’re alright in this context.
If people feel the need to reach for calculators rather than doing simple maths in their heads, that at least nods in the direction that the technology has impacted our skill development, or at the very least, made us inclined to use the tool over our own facilities.
But also, there’s emerging evidence of the issues with frequent AI use, so it seems pointless to split hairs.
Edit: just to clarify, I was agreeing with you in my first comment
I was saying the person you responded to was essentially saying “nuh uh!”
I mean, that’s a curious anecdote. But it doesn’t explain why they would have been better at the math prior to 1970
As with all anecdotes, it does not explain itself, but I can explain this one: repetition.
I don’t think that was really in question though and both you and the other person have already responded genuinely, which makes this interaction less fun than I was intending, because I had hoped my anecdote would be taken as the joke it was.
Them’s the breaks over text sometimes.
:-/
Again, nothing in this story explains why calculators are to blame. If anything, it illustrates how calculators are useful.
What if AI was only used for skill building?
what if twinkies were only used for critical nutrition? then they would be healthy!
It has potential, though I wonder if that’s genuinely better than studying the old fashioned way.
It can definitely feel more dynamic, I’m not convinced the outcomes are provably better.
I imagine something like a tutor. You have an interactive system for 1 on 1 attention that teachers and parents can’t always provide.
Nothing I’ve seen is nearly ready for this, but at the same time, its not completely useless.
This seems like a particularly expensive and resource hungry solution when we could just train more teachers and tutors.
and create better educational resources
What is even the benefit
Advancing medicine, for one.
I think there’s an issue with lumping them all together here. There is a functional difference between a machine that does your homework and is designed to endlessly praise you, and a model specifically designed to identify viruses or medications.
In this case it’s basically the same technology (LLMs); you don’t get one without the other.
Sure you do. We don’t have to have every permutation of every technology.
That’s like saying you can have space exploration without ballistic missiles. Once the technology is there power and/or the market will do whatever it wants with it.
Except even moreso with language models. Here it is not just a similar technology, but the exact same vehicle.
Translation: The way scaling laws and gradient descent work for language models means that there is NO functional difference between a machine that does your homework and is designed to endlessly praise you, and a model specifically designed to identify viruses or medications.
And a space ship can be used as a ballistic missile directly itself dude… There’s no difference, you’re arguing nothing.
Your research model can do anything an llm can and there’s nothing stopping someone. So how’s it different?
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Well, for starters, if you want to translate a written work to another language, it has never been easier.
LLMs are excellent tools for modeling large languages.
That is all they are good for. They are ok for translation, although even then they miss a lot of nuance like someone who can speak a language but isn’t fluent.
Well, there are a lot of malicious uses, but passable translation is the one positive use case.
They could replace the CEOs. Huge cost savings for stock owners.
I mean, a drunk chicken could replace a CEO.
A sociopathic drunk chicken, maybe
Wife is a lawyer. She needs to do complex keyword searches on massive volumes of legal documentation. She absolutely loves how quickly and easily Copilot parses and tabulates info based on her queries.
Total game changer for the kind of work she’s doing.
I work in IT. Love to cobble together scripts in languages I’m otherwise unfamiliar using Claude. It’s also excellent at diagnosing system errors and providing effective remediation.
There are better AI options that could be developed for that over a massive all in one inefficient LLM like Copilot. If the same amount of money was thrown at dedicated development AI and searches it would require far less energy, pollution, hardware, and could be run locally in many cases with the same or better results.
You can take that up with management. I don’t get to pick what AI agent my boss decided to pay for.
You have, and let me be clear on this, absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
Also, not all AI is LLMs
I was replying to a post about LLMs and the article is about LLMs so while it is true that AI predates LLMs and the label isn’t literally limited to only LLMs and genAI those two things have taken over the label and are what nearly everyone means when they say AI.
They aren’t talking about the AI used to find exoplanets, or the AI used with lidar to find structures in jungles, or to do actual medical science, or all of the other types that are useful tools. The article is about LLMs implemented by the big companies that are designed to steal and manipulate data in ways that are detrimental to society.
what ai!? there is no ai!
down with killing the oligarchs though.