Posted by yenniejun111 10 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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
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.