I suppose it sorta makes sense that early humans traded off fur coats and physical strength for big brains that allowed us to create clothes and tools and now we’re apparently trading off those big brains for the ability to use hallucinatory auto-complete to write reports for us. - ThreadSky

astrokatie.com • 16 days ago

I suppose it sorta makes sense that early humans traded off fur coats and physical strength for big brains that allowed us to create clothes and tools and now we’re apparently trading off those big brains for the ability to use hallucinatory auto-complete to write reports for us.

Reposted from Sam Cole

all signs point to cooked www.404media.co/microsoft-st...

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sirala6.bsky.social•16 days ago

Everyone forgot this classic; a vision as dreadful as 1984.

newtyke.bsky.social•16 days ago

Sort of in-line with this, I recall a test of reading speed and comprehension for different professions.

UK High Court judges have by far the lowest reading speed and by far the highest degree of comprehension and retention of information. As it should be.

Don't know about USA.

noplacelikegnome.bsky.social•16 days ago

It really doesn’t make sense to me considering that probably 75 to 85% of the knowledge I gained in college was from my research projects and papers and if I had had some robot write all my research. It would’ve definitely diminished that quite a bit.

dvdkfr.bsky.social•16 days ago

The principal of least energy expenditure?

dvdkfr.bsky.social•16 days ago

Or should we call it rhe principal of maximum laziness?

koutavi.bsky.social•16 days ago

people don't like to hear this but "use it or lose it" is, in fact, applicable to most things in life.

pathintegral.bsky.social•16 days ago

🤣

anubisthejackal.bsky.social•16 days ago

Reminds me of how I read a lamentation once of human memory getting worse ("people used to memorize Beowulf before it was written down!").

But the trade off is that modern humans (used to) know how to easily acquire knowledge when they needed it, rather than focusing on one single skill.

reneestephen.bsky.social•16 days ago

The beneficial trade-offs are much less clear here though. The report says that the skills being selected for are "asking AI stuff," problem being foundational knowledge and critical thinking are what that costs.

anubisthejackal.bsky.social•16 days ago

Yeah, now there is no beneficial trade off - AI is just offloading critical thinking, much in the same way that we use traffic lights to offload individual driver decision making to an impassive, dumb machine.

andrewjplant.bsky.social•16 days ago

I'm trying to be optimistic and looking at this is a rare oppourtunity to personally dodge an evolutionary dead end.

krazykitkat.bsky.social•16 days ago

I do not understand anyone who uses junk like chatgp for their work. No way I could trust what it spat out.

anthonyl.bsky.social•16 days ago

The WALL-E future will be here before we know it.

msaunby.bsky.social•16 days ago

Evolution pretty much proves that humans are not particularly intelligent. There is no next nearest intelligent species to compete with. Or is it cats? Yes, it's probably cats, but we were too stupid to notice.

msaunby.bsky.social•16 days ago

Ok, I know that the real answer is other hominids. But that battle is long over.

john-gardi.bsky.social•16 days ago

I ran my own businesses since I was 21, from craftsperson to store owner to coder to troubleshooter.
I had to make dozens of decisions a day and sometimes, like designing failsafe systems, lives depended on getting it right first time, 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 time!
All I relied on was RI (𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘭 intelligence) compute.😏

jonroberts.bsky.social•16 days ago

We have ultra processed food and now with AI we have ultra processed thinking. It's too easy to consume and it's not good for us.

colin99.bsky.social•16 days ago

I do worry about too much ai filling in all your conversations. At what point do we stop thinking? As someone going through a memory disorder this is on my mind alot

sucrose10.bsky.social•16 days ago

Is this possibly a matter of correlation rather than causation, though?

People who don't think about their jobs may be more inclined to see hallucinatory autocomplete as 'good enough.'

sillycentrist.bsky.social•16 days ago

As always with technology, some people will use it to make life easier and others will use it to go further on their path than they could before.

epvh.bsky.social•16 days ago

The worst is when you use your critical thinking to engage with a problem then teammates quote generative AI at you ignoring the context and details of your engagement. Just awful and depressing.

thingsandstuff.wtf•16 days ago

paired with social media rotting our brains and being flooded with untruths. we are fucked.

lizardky.bsky.social•16 days ago

The problem is, we've been conditioned by having tech that really works so much of the time that there's far fewer errors if we trust it. How often is your desk calculator wrong, if you enter the correct numbers? GPS is generally faster and more up-to-date than using a paper map. 1/?

lizardky.bsky.social•16 days ago

2/2 Spell-check is possibly the worst case for mature technologies, as anyone who has received a "Deer Sir" email can attest, but it's still better than the average human.

AI, though, is utterly craptacular. It's wrong MORE often than a human is, obviously and painfully so. But people don't see it.

digifox.binaryden.net•16 days ago

I think the bigger problem is that when it*does* work, it feels magical. And people who have bought in and integrated these into their workflows are addicted to that feeling.

otternaut.bsky.social•16 days ago

💯!! It feels magic, feels intelligent, feels smart and empathetic and all those things until it's none of those things and it has you mixing bleach and ammonia up as the household detergent momma used to make.

lizardky.bsky.social•16 days ago

Humans are ridiculously prone to assigning an inner life to anything that seems to respond like a human. This is beneficial because it's the root of empathy. We project thought onto our pets or inanimate objects. ("My dishwasher hates me!") Eliza, running in 32K of RAM, had people bonding with it.

otternaut.bsky.social•16 days ago

Then you throw 32,000 GTX 4090s at them and the world creates a $4Tn investment bubble that's going to pop if the sentiment ever wears thin.

ecarney.bsky.social•16 days ago

That seems right. I've been flabbergasted by how many otherwise intelligent people fully bought into the "AI" hype, to the point that their own egos are now threatened by any implication that it sucks. They're committed to viewing hallucinations as rare exceptions to its usual omniscience.

duxinbelltown.bsky.social•16 days ago

I've been playing with a couple of the Chatbots for entertainment value. What struck me is that, that aside from the simple inaccuracies, they are flattering and obsequious to a comical extreme, presumably to encourage "engagement". That in itself is going to tend to displace critical thinking.

ecarney.bsky.social•16 days ago

I saw a thread on here a while ago in which someone, while trying to argue the merits of ChatGPT, posted a screenshot of his interaction with ChatGPT, in which he asked it to summarize the conversation so far and it said he had "cleverly" refuted the other person's point.

peavey666.bsky.social•16 days ago

Didn't anyone in the A.I. industry see the Terminator, between a.i. quantum computers and Donald Trump
We've sealed our fate, and I'm no expert but it's nit looking good for humanity! Maybe I'm Krazy?! Yall tell me.

rochellejann.bsky.social•16 days ago

"SciFi? That's just for kids."
Until it isn't SciFi anymore.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/01/army-has-sent-armed-robot-dog-middle-east-testing.html

paulbittlestone.bsky.social•16 days ago

It really is wilfully training oneself to ignorance and stupidity.
When it rolls out more into science with even more flawed peer review and verifying facts....
It's like going back to trying random mushrooms to see if they kill you.
Age of the Snake Oil Salesman.
"It's got electrolytes!"

antifajohnny.bsky.social•16 days ago

Laziness is virtuous now, and drives economies too!

noisetheorem.bsky.social•16 days ago

"Oh, won't that be grand. The computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop" - Walter Gibbs, TRON, 1982

otternaut.bsky.social•16 days ago

we're going to male Angler Fish ourselves to AI 🧠 👀 🤖

mathienz.bsky.social•16 days ago

😂

suego.bsky.social•14 days ago

Self-fulfilling "We don't need no education, we don't need no thought-control". Thus: No Department of Education!

tsancio.bsky.social•16 days ago

A recent guest on the @demystifysci.bsky.social podcast, Dr Richard Haier had an interesting take on the effects of new tools on intelligence. The conclusion seemed to be that the verdict is out. FWIW, I don't use AI because I agree with those that say it makes one slower https://youtu.be/XBurLnrAQkI?si=h_4ndM3tdbGKBBO7

geoffmcghee.bsky.social•16 days ago

camerondurham.bsky.social•16 days ago

In “gaming the system”, we ended up only gaming ourselves

trevorbelmont.bsky.social•16 days ago

NO! What do they own? The world? How do they own disorder? Disorder!

sinead0rebelli0n.bsky.social•16 days ago

It really does. I hate it.

richinwashington.bsky.social•16 days ago

Whenever I read articles about the rise of AI (etc) and the decline of human cognition, I hear Zager/Evans 2525 as the background music.

spaceshipfrick.bsky.social•16 days ago

Our whole planet is on track to be the setup for one episode of some other species' version of the original Star Trek.

alcinaus.bsky.social•16 days ago

If so, then AI is only the *latest* human invention (technological, social, etc.) to contribute to the atrophy of critical thinking skills. We've had some practice at this.

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