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.

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://subterrane...

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.