Not a doomer, but yeah…no. It encourages further passivity and trains people to be receivers, this is an especially subtle problem for young people (broadly defined) who are in the prime of development.
Acts like creating a research plan to get an answer to a question and then having to research an issue by cross referencing sources and then synthesizing them (using your judgement throughout) or creating your own story that incorporates your life into the fantastical to amuse yourself or in general learning how to use your imagination when bored, create immense value that we underestimate.
It’s great that we can harness AI’s power for greater efficiency in professional and research settings, offloading certain necessary but rote tasks to it…there are always pluses and minuses, but I have doubts we will use this technology in a way where the former will outweigh the later.
Yeah I think there is value in learning how to do stuff rather than having a machine (or paying someone to) do it. It's actually a big part of what life is.
Maybe I'm old fashioned and wrong (legitimately) but I think there is value in learning how to outline a document, having attention to detail in writing etc. And if the next generation is raised without those things, we're not even going to know how to put checks and balances on certain parts of AI. And it's not necessarily that knowing how to do those things is important. It's more the process of learning how to do those things (or really anything) that makes us into better, more complete people.
This is not a doomer perspective. It's more of a "life" view. Life is learning how to do things, grinding at times, working your way through something from beginning to end. I accept that there was probably someone like me saying something like this about the washing machine or word processing software. But I think there is a line. Brave New World is far from the worst dystopia, but it's probably not a great life either. I think there is a risk of losing, or at least fundamentally changing what it is to be a person.. or really like an effective, mature adult
The washing machine is a good example actually of trade offs. Lots of population wide physical health problems can in part be explained by a more sedentary lifestyle enabled by technology which does more of the work for us. Probably on balance good because the physical labor we had to do was also not without costs, but the minuses are not minor.
I think the trade offs for having to do much less intellectual labor are not great in *most* circumstances. Your brain does not get arthritis, and there is no brain cartilage to fray.
This is the kind of argument that would have been made against calculators. “Kids today aren’t learning arithmetic, they’re just punching numbers into this machine.”
Of course there’s value in doing long division, and no tool can be a replacement for learning to problem solve. The presence of a useful tool does not presuppose that. It changes the nature and scale of the problems to be solved.
It was; and it was good to ban them from math classes. I wonder how many people can work out how to tip 20% of a $87.12 bill without the aid of a machine.
I’d be very careful with how much I let my kids use Chat GPT to learn things because it’s wrong.. like a lot. “Hallucinations” are way more common than people think and tools like Chat GPT aren’t designed to be “right” they’re just designed to sound right.
Also, I just read a fascinating series on AI in Ed Zitron’s newsletter that highlights we may actually have already seen peak AI because these large language models have already consumed basically the entire internet and would need 5X more data to continue to evolve. Pair that with the limits on computing power being nearly reached and I’m not nearly as concerned as I used to be about AI taking over the world, I’m more concerned now that AI is just the new crypto and the bubble is gonna burst.
AI is making us dumber, I’m not a full doomer but people are worse with directions bc of gps, is gps good? Mostly but the cost is more and more people not being able to get home without it. You can find more info through chat gpt but are you actually learning more? is your critical thinking better bc you are told the answer rather than having to search it? We are losing small skills that were seen as a waste but in my mind, it’s what made us humans. I’m glad you’re excited but I don’t really wanna mess with it. I haven’t looked but I assume our reading levels have went down as well with more Audio books, long discussion podcasts and other things. I don’t believe this will kill us but i do fear the death by a million paper cuts.
Teachers will have to shift their pedagogical approach from being at the center of the learning experience (“sage on the stage”) to focusing on facilitating individual experiences (“guide on the side”) by leveraging llms. Not going anywhere tho, especially as during the pandemic we found a big part of their role is fundamentally child care
I don’t think it’ll end the world but I think your personal experience is creating blinders for you. The easiest and likeliest path for AI is that it will be deployed and consumed lazily, like everything else — deployed to increase corporate efficiency and cut some jobs, remove human middlemen at your local DMV or whatever; and consumed by individual people mostly to stupid ends — distraction, idleness, meme culture, etc.
Your optimism here very much echoes what people were saying about the mass communication and interconnectedness potential of Twitter back in like 2011. The flattening effect of our collective laziness and midwittery is, however, pretty darn close to undefeated.
Love it. I've built (very simple versions of) models like GPT-X in the past, and this take seems pretty accurate to me. I especially laughed at the idea of explaining stuff to a six-year-old and talking about '90s movies and AI because I wrote a post about a year ago in which I talk about explaining things to my (then-)six-year-old and comparing AI to '90s movies. Feel free to check it out by clicking on my name/Substack. Or not. Thanks for the chuckle!
Your father is an octogenarian? "Being the child of older parents" feels like one of those things people online ascribe a great deal of explanatory value to after they learn it even if they never would have guessed it with any confidence before. "Of course you have an older dad, I knew it."
Like an even less obvious version of "I bet you are an only child".
Not a doomer, but yeah…no. It encourages further passivity and trains people to be receivers, this is an especially subtle problem for young people (broadly defined) who are in the prime of development.
Acts like creating a research plan to get an answer to a question and then having to research an issue by cross referencing sources and then synthesizing them (using your judgement throughout) or creating your own story that incorporates your life into the fantastical to amuse yourself or in general learning how to use your imagination when bored, create immense value that we underestimate.
It’s great that we can harness AI’s power for greater efficiency in professional and research settings, offloading certain necessary but rote tasks to it…there are always pluses and minuses, but I have doubts we will use this technology in a way where the former will outweigh the later.
Yeah I think there is value in learning how to do stuff rather than having a machine (or paying someone to) do it. It's actually a big part of what life is.
Maybe I'm old fashioned and wrong (legitimately) but I think there is value in learning how to outline a document, having attention to detail in writing etc. And if the next generation is raised without those things, we're not even going to know how to put checks and balances on certain parts of AI. And it's not necessarily that knowing how to do those things is important. It's more the process of learning how to do those things (or really anything) that makes us into better, more complete people.
This is not a doomer perspective. It's more of a "life" view. Life is learning how to do things, grinding at times, working your way through something from beginning to end. I accept that there was probably someone like me saying something like this about the washing machine or word processing software. But I think there is a line. Brave New World is far from the worst dystopia, but it's probably not a great life either. I think there is a risk of losing, or at least fundamentally changing what it is to be a person.. or really like an effective, mature adult
The washing machine is a good example actually of trade offs. Lots of population wide physical health problems can in part be explained by a more sedentary lifestyle enabled by technology which does more of the work for us. Probably on balance good because the physical labor we had to do was also not without costs, but the minuses are not minor.
I think the trade offs for having to do much less intellectual labor are not great in *most* circumstances. Your brain does not get arthritis, and there is no brain cartilage to fray.
My assumption is that we'll move on to learn to do different things.
Indeed, there are always new frontiers in slop scrolling and pornography to explore.
This might me my most favorite comment ever.
Yes it will free up more time for tearing our culture apart over nonsense in pseudo religious intellectual crusades.
Does you local library stock the right books? Now since you have so much free time you can make a big scandal about it!
This is the kind of argument that would have been made against calculators. “Kids today aren’t learning arithmetic, they’re just punching numbers into this machine.”
Of course there’s value in doing long division, and no tool can be a replacement for learning to problem solve. The presence of a useful tool does not presuppose that. It changes the nature and scale of the problems to be solved.
It was; and it was good to ban them from math classes. I wonder how many people can work out how to tip 20% of a $87.12 bill without the aid of a machine.
I’d be very careful with how much I let my kids use Chat GPT to learn things because it’s wrong.. like a lot. “Hallucinations” are way more common than people think and tools like Chat GPT aren’t designed to be “right” they’re just designed to sound right.
Also, I just read a fascinating series on AI in Ed Zitron’s newsletter that highlights we may actually have already seen peak AI because these large language models have already consumed basically the entire internet and would need 5X more data to continue to evolve. Pair that with the limits on computing power being nearly reached and I’m not nearly as concerned as I used to be about AI taking over the world, I’m more concerned now that AI is just the new crypto and the bubble is gonna burst.
AI is making us dumber, I’m not a full doomer but people are worse with directions bc of gps, is gps good? Mostly but the cost is more and more people not being able to get home without it. You can find more info through chat gpt but are you actually learning more? is your critical thinking better bc you are told the answer rather than having to search it? We are losing small skills that were seen as a waste but in my mind, it’s what made us humans. I’m glad you’re excited but I don’t really wanna mess with it. I haven’t looked but I assume our reading levels have went down as well with more Audio books, long discussion podcasts and other things. I don’t believe this will kill us but i do fear the death by a million paper cuts.
Teachers will have to shift their pedagogical approach from being at the center of the learning experience (“sage on the stage”) to focusing on facilitating individual experiences (“guide on the side”) by leveraging llms. Not going anywhere tho, especially as during the pandemic we found a big part of their role is fundamentally child care
What could possibly go wrong
I don’t think it’ll end the world but I think your personal experience is creating blinders for you. The easiest and likeliest path for AI is that it will be deployed and consumed lazily, like everything else — deployed to increase corporate efficiency and cut some jobs, remove human middlemen at your local DMV or whatever; and consumed by individual people mostly to stupid ends — distraction, idleness, meme culture, etc.
Your optimism here very much echoes what people were saying about the mass communication and interconnectedness potential of Twitter back in like 2011. The flattening effect of our collective laziness and midwittery is, however, pretty darn close to undefeated.
Love it. I've built (very simple versions of) models like GPT-X in the past, and this take seems pretty accurate to me. I especially laughed at the idea of explaining stuff to a six-year-old and talking about '90s movies and AI because I wrote a post about a year ago in which I talk about explaining things to my (then-)six-year-old and comparing AI to '90s movies. Feel free to check it out by clicking on my name/Substack. Or not. Thanks for the chuckle!
Your father is an octogenarian? "Being the child of older parents" feels like one of those things people online ascribe a great deal of explanatory value to after they learn it even if they never would have guessed it with any confidence before. "Of course you have an older dad, I knew it."
Like an even less obvious version of "I bet you are an only child".
Easy on the throttle son.
Very insightful, and it resonated with my thoughts and feelings about the "inevitable" AGI future. Thanks!
i use chatgpt almost every day for work, but haven't really used it with my kids too much. may try it out