AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

‘AI’ is my newest litmus test for whether who I’m engaging with should be taken seriously or not.

‘AI’ doesn’t exist, and LLMs have vanishingly narrow legitimate justifiable use cases. Any output from one is intrinsically, explosively, imprecise, and can’t be trusted to be build upon without specialist treatment. I’m yet to identify any application of a LLM which can rationally be mistaken for intelligence.

Anyone who persists in referring to LLMs as ‘AI’ is either betraying they don’t understand what they’re talking about, or they’re invested too deeply in an active grift.

Bellissimo

I think many of us have interviewed people with 10+ YoE, and resumes that seem impressive, and then seen them fail to do much of anything in evaluations. I expect this problem to get significantly worse. There will be a class of people tucked into organizations where they can get away with sitting in meetings and YOLOing AI code for years.

Convenience is king. We became fat and unhealthy because high calorie foods are cheap and easy. We will become stupid because AI will do our thinking for us. There’s no way around it. Only a small percentage of the population are capable of perpetual self control. The old world forced you to be healthy, there was no other choice. Now there are like 15 things you have to have self control to do the hard work at even though you can get the same results the easy way. Working out, dieting, “proper” social interaction, sleep timing, child rearing, social meetups, career networking etc. The list is never ending and none of it is organic like it used to be.

Post title is completely misleading relative to the article. Article title: "A.I. Should Elevate Your Thinking, Not Replace It"

Skills you don't need, atrophy. Skills you need, don't. It's very simple, and the "you won't have the skills you used to need but don't need any more!" line of reasoning is tired and invalid.

Here's the question I want to posit and nobody who's against AI has managed to answer satisfactorily: what is it in for me if I were to acquire all those skills?

I don't give a shit about this career. I don't give a shit about engineering. I despise every second of it. There's nothing to aim for other than being a drone that does whatever is asked of it.

If AI can reduce my mental workload, why wouldn't I want to delegate everything over to it so I can save my faculties for what I truly enjoy? For the art of a worthless craft?

It doesn't elevate thinking no matter how you use it. It is a lookup tool at best.

For the new prompt engineers I suggest the following title:

  MCSE => Microsoft Certified Slop Engineer

Aaand it's the second "AI is bad" story on the front page today that's evidently generated by AI.

In answer to the headline - it's not, no more than calculators stopped people from thinking.

It's changing the way we think, and reason.

Speaking as a BE focused Go developer, I'm now working with a typescript FE, using AI to guide me, but it scares the shit out of me because I don't understand what it's suggesting, forcing me to learn what is being presented and the other options.

No different to asking for help on IRC or StackOverflow - for decades people have asked and blindly accepted the answers from those sources, only to later discover that they have bought a footgun.

The speed at which AI is able to gather the answers from StackOverflow coupled with its "I know what I am talking about" tone/attitude does fool people at first, just like the over-confident half assed engineers we have always had to deal with.

Unlike those human sources, we can forcefully pushback on AI and it will (usually) take the feedback onboard, and bring the actual solution forward.

Thus proving the engineer steering it still has to know what they are doing/looking at.

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Structure engineer can't either any more build bridge or tower without CAD or FDM

Calculators and computers are creating engineers that can't think without them either. There are many problems with AI, but from my point of view, the title has not thought things through.