alt Hacker NewsHere's a thought experiment: why is it that I can't do long division?
The Calculator!
Calculators deskilled long division!
Thing is though: who gives a damn about long division? The real task is your taxes or making a massive BI report for your presentation tomorrow.
AI makes stuff that was hard - someone's bread and butter - possible to ask for and have done for you. Why bother staying skilled at those things when you can broaden? It clears the way for tasks that used to take forever to become something to steamroll through on your way to a much greater outcome. It's the micro way that, in the macro, humanity becomes far more capable as a species. The gates are being flung wide open and the gatekeepers are being lapped and they have blogs!
It's not a tragedy, it's universal access to leverage.
Replies
I think a closer analogy would be forgetting basic arithmetic as a concept. Imagine how hard it would be to work with more complex math without understanding what division is. How do you prompt the genie, or understand its outputs, without the foundational knowledge?
> in the macro, humanity becomes far more capable as a species
Not humanity, a small number of people in this planet, will benefit about this, because now they no longer have to depend on under payed workers to do the job, and will use AI to make the lives of all other human being poorer.
I think that we need to oppose this tech dictatorship, first thing stopping using AI and thus stop depending on an handful of companies that are able to provide it, that while they gain more and more power we all gets poorer.
What was wrong in using our brain, in the end? I still use my brain on my job and I always will, maybe one day they will say that there is no more need of computer experts because AI can do everything (still people bring me their laptop to reinstall Windows, something I've done for 20 years and that AI didn't change), I will just find another job but I will refuse to use this AI shit.
the analogy doesn't work unless your role means having to occasionally do long division, on the spot, without a calculator
You can own a calculator for $2, good luck owning your own frontier model
You still need to be able to do long division so you can tell when you screwed up on the calculator.
Nobody can read a map anymore, either. Or operate a loom, etc, etc.
This is a poor analogy because I don't think your inability to do long division will cause as much damage as an inability to bring the site back up in an emergency situation.
Except as every damn AI app says: AI is prone to making mistakes. If AI deskills you with a non-zero chance of getting the problem wrong, that seems deeply, profoundly bad.
You can type the same long division problem into a calculator 65,000 times and you will get the right answer 65,000 times.
Can AI get even CLOSE to that?
> why is it that I can't do long division?
> The Calculator!
Well, I'm sorry to hear that. I have a calculator and some pretty neat computing hardware. If I go into the attic and search long enough I can probably find my old sliderule. I can also do long division, as can all of my kids. I think it is an essential skill to understand all basic mathematical operations, and to be able to use them on small data sets. If I didn't know how to do division without a calculator I would consider that a failure of my basic education.
Edit: "HackerNews" and people can't do long division??