alt Hacker NewsA new and growing fear I have is that AI cuts off some of the most well-trodden pathways to intellectual growth. Every time the AI solves a problem that I would not have been able to efficiently solve alone, it has replaced an interaction that previously would have happened with a mentor/supervisor/code reviewer. This is faster for the person seeking the micro-assistance, but there is a flipside: fewer human-to-human acts of mentorship and shared problem solving. We lose a lively ingredient of team formation, expert formation, and a source of joy for all involved. As this scales up it feels plausible that we end up with a wider deagradation of intellectual standards. I like the Cognitive Comons framing.
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Maybe it just means more people are pushing some envelope (their own) faster and more often than before.
In the aggregate everyone maybe learns on average about as much new stuff in a year anyway.
There _are_ still humans out there talking to each other.
>Every time the AI solves a problem that I would not have been able to efficiently solve alone, it has replaced an interaction that previously would have happened with a mentor/supervisor/code reviewer.
I suppose that Socrates would strongly agree, seeing how the same argument could be applied to learning from a book.
Someone recently linked the "eating your seed corn" wiki page about AI and it feels like it sums it up.
Except there's mass directives to eat as much seed corn as you can
I think this has already happened to some extent, with social media etc. crowding out reading books. Even higher quality stuff like HN pales in comparison with what a good book brings, and it's a daily struggle to keep reading.
At least we're (mostly) not scrolling feeds all day at work. AI is going to be like this for all our professional competencies.