alt Hacker NewsThis is new, the scope of it, its not just about individual "skills" because its all of them; we are being challenged at the very fundamentals of our ability to think deeply and widely and persistently. That has never happened before like this.
It is quite extraordinary and breath-taking at times to see the agents in action; the flipside is that very power renders us both vulnerable to its seduction and enfeeblement on an equal scope - its almost hard-drug like in its potential long-term psychological effects.
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Human mind as much as body needs challenge. That's the only way for growth, heck even sustaining some higher cognitive levels.
Nurses, doctors and family members know damn well how life trajectory nosedives for somebody ie suddenly bound to bed, when stimulus and doable challenges are reduced to minimum.
llms remove challenges, or minimize them. I can't image any added value for any engineer apart from cost cutting for employer. Sure, next come folks who are doing 10x compared to before, and some actually do. Even there, I have my doubts. For rest of us, its not good and won't get better unless they price it out of most markets.
> That has never happened before like this.
You should possibly spend some time reading what people used to say about the invention of Radio and Television.
> It is quite extraordinary and breath-taking at times to see the agents in action;
So is any magic trick. The unsettling notion that it may all just be an illusion that you've failed to correctly understand doesn't seem to weigh on people.
> its almost hard-drug like in its potential long-term psychological effects.
That might have more to do with how the owners of these products choose to market and deploy them. Perhaps if they peeled back the covers just slightly your euphoria would change to dread. There's an Upton Sinclair moment coming.
> we are being challenged at the very fundamentals of our ability to think deeply and widely and persistently. That has never happened before like this.
Social media and content algorithms come to mind as an early wave that changed the landscape here that defines the horrible status quo leading into the AI era.
These days it's trivial to slide into an echo chamber and very hard to break out of the silo.
There might be a double-edged sword here where AI, trusted by most people as an omniscient oracle, can offer the only pushback we encounter on positions we picked up passively by scrolling social media, Youtube, TikTok.
For example, ask Claude, ChatGPT, and even Grok about the "space lasers" that started wildfires in Hawaii in 2018, something people like Marjorie Taylor Greene floated on social media. It quickly debunks it as bullshit.
Now, maybe it will pan out such that everyone will have their own AI that tells them what they want to hear. But so far I've watched people abandon arguments on Twitter because Grok rejected their claim. So it feels like there's a glimmer of hope.