> A study by MIT found that students who use AI to write show far less brain activity than those who used classic Google searching (with AI off) or those who used neither. Other studies find that students who use AI retain far less of the information that ends up in their writing, possibly as a result of “cognitive offloading” and “cognitive surrender.”
I'm unconvinced that AI will make us all dumber. In the public perception, at least among students, AI is viewed as a cheating tool. What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework?
On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.
I'd love to see the 'AI as personal tutor' approach. Even incorporating things like spaced repetition or the testing effect, or evaluating free-written responses.
A lot of potential that's currently unrealized. It takes a student to swim upstream to get there. The convenience of cognitive offloading is difficult to say no to. For evidence, I see it everywhere at work, including (at least in some cases) in my own work, for matters I don't care to invest effort in learning because it's a one-off.
The rates of AI use show it far exceeds the rate of good old-fashioned cheating, and not an equivalency between them.
So I am convinced AI will make the ~80% dumber, at least until there are excellent teaching products and changes to teaching practices that end up making that 'AI as a personal tutor' the norm. In the absence of the actual right answer -- actual people as personal tutors with qualified, well-paid teachers and right-sized classrooms -- an AI as personal tutor is extremely scalable and would allow productive 'struggle' learning.
I don’t think this is likely to happen in the foreseeable future, because learning still requires struggling even under the best of personal tutors. For most of the “80%” it requires some level of compulsion and submitting to authority that would be bad PR for a product, and that people won’t be very accepting of, coming from an automation.
I'd say "some learning" -- I've learned how to operate and maintain an excavator from YouTube without significant struggle. otoh it might be difficult to learn linear algebra that way. But otooh an LLM might be far better than YouTube at teaching mathematics, while being orders of magnitude less costly than a real teacher. Even in the USA proper mathematics teachers are unavailable in many areas.
The discussion was about people who right now prefer to use AI for cheating (or for avoiding work) rather than for learning. I don’t think that a “personal tutor” mode would significantly change these dynamics without some form of coercion.
> What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework?
Typically speaking, the ones that run companies.
> On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.
To be especially contrarian here, people said the exact same thing about the internet. That it would let you connect with anyone and truly evolve your knowledge and skill. It may be true for an extremely small minority of people but for most the reality was almost exactly the opposite. People willingly became dumber, embedding themselves into conspiracy and ways to hide from reality.
Im not sure if the internet made anyone dumber. It is just early on the average idiot self selected out of internet usage and there wasn't as much corporate or advertising money it to be worth manipulating.
AI im not sure of because it generates so much slop and anyone not already deep into a topic or field are unlikely to be able to recognize what parts are useful and what parts are common misconceptions or hallucinations.
Search engines are certainly worse tho, the first 20 hits on certain topics these days are AI articles that lack the needed details in favor of verbose generalizations or have questionable figures that other slop makes difficult to verify.
>The only field where people are being replaced wholesale is in computer programming, where AI is making leaps in capability.
I'll give the author a pass because he's not in the industry, but even an outsider looking closely enough would know that this is not true. Companies have been laying off while using AI as an excuse, but before AI it was the end of ZIRP, and before that it was something else.
Also the layoff peak was 2023.
My first-impression is that this site is vaporware generated by someone prompting an LLM to babble about how an LLM could be secured.
At best, perhaps it's an overengineered way to force humans to rigorously validate every action... which the humans are all very hostile to doing.
> [Architecture page] Reasoning is Read-Only: Input=Data, not Instructions
This doesn't make make sense unless the "reasoning" is regular executable code, and then someone still needs to audit the code whenever it changes. The core LLM algorithms simply don't have room for the distinction.
> Complex workflows broken down into encrypted graph segments
Grandiosity++, where does "the architecture" actually end?
> But would it have improved my comprehension? The research says no.
I don’t know, I find myself doing things I would’ve never done before AI.
I find myself doing more projects outside of work.
I discover new problem domains and are less afraid of tackling the unknown.
I code in languages I don’t know and start learning how they work.
I can get anything explained to me, at any time, in a somewhat coherent manner, by a tutor that won’t get tired or annoyed.
Look— I’m not exactly thinking AI is free of criticism, but it’s definitely a revolution in access to information and at least to me that’s a big deal.
Google was the previous revolution. AI is the next. I get info from LLMs way better than I generally got from Google, at least for some large subset of things I used to try to get from Google.
You said revolution, that’s barely incremental. If you had googled “apartment electricity usage calculator” you would find many options that provide exactly the information you want without risk of hallucination.
Did you deliberately screw up the capitalization so thoroughly that it bears no resemblance to the standard abbreviations? Are you one of those people who writes about "mb" and "kb" for computers, too?
It's funny how this works. When Apple came out with the iPad Reddit absolutely hated it. No one would want it. It's a crappy product. Who even needs 4 iPhones glued together and so on and so forth. This all reads like that. It's just completely divorced from reality.
I bought the original iPad 2 on the day it was released (which was just after the Fukushima earthquake in 2011). Still have it. Still use it occasionally to play retro iOS games. Still runs great on its original battery and iOS 6. Still connects to my WiFi and Bluetooth devices! (Although the Safari is so ancient it’s pretty useless for the modern web)
But I always swore I would never buy another iPad until Apple added one key feature: support for multiple user profiles.
Can’t understand why they’ve never done this. Even Apple TV has user profiles now. Perhaps they think they will sell less iPads if family members can share them.
I am reading and writing this on my computer with my iPad next to me (side screen for alternate content). I plan on probably buying one for my wife who is not tech-savvy (to say the least).
I don’t think the analogy makes any sense whatsoever either.
Elon talks a lot of crap about topics he has barely a cursory knowledge of so I wouldn't take anything he says at value except for how to manipulate large financials and tax burdens.
I mean, I'm concerned about the societal impacts too, but this article is pure nonsense as far as how useful today's AI tools are. I know multiple people with very high paid jobs who have told me they simply couldn't do that job now without AI. I create software much quicker and better than I have in the past 40 years using AI tools. I've learned all kinds of things technical and otherwise from LLMs. This writing is about as useful as the people who said calculators would mean nobody understands mathematics, or that watching tv would turn everyone into a zombie (obviously it was smart phones that did that).
That was not a very insightful article. It's super easy, and in most cases, correct to hate on AI. But that ignores a couple key facts:
* It's not going to go away and will only get more sophisticated whether we like it or not.
* It has legitimate super powers that can enable people do things that would either be impossible or insanely expensive.
I've been fascinated by tech my whole life and have watched various waves of technology transform society:
* solid state electronics enabling portability and functionality hitherto not possible
* integrated circuits bringing down the cost and increasing the capability of electronics, including microprocessors
* the personal computer revolution
* mobile telephony
* the internet
* smart phones
* AI
Most of those wonders have come with significant societal costs (e.g., silicon valley promised a revolutionary new industry without pollution, but instead gave us multiple superfund sites to clean up the toxic materials they haphazardly dumped without care, etc.)
We can't stop AI but we should try to have serious conversations how how to live in a non-dystopian world that it threatens to bring us. The small flaw with that idea is that those in power have no fucks to give in that regard and will sell out humanity if it means they can have the deluxe bunker package and enough slaves to serve them.
> It's super easy, and in most cases, incorrect to hate on AI.
There, fixed that for you.
I'm not saying the haters have zero point, but I find AI far more useful than not. I think so do most people. If I walk into any coffee shop and look over the at the screens of the people next to me, I see all asking AI questions and getting something positive from it. So I don't think "most cases" is correct.
I think you missed my point: it is incredibly useful. But its important to recognize that there are indirect costs that come from it and more in store.
Smartphones are cool, but do you think that they don't have issues?
* Distracted driving
* Attention span decimators
* A culture of zombies staring at their screens?
The list goes on for everything I mention: virtually all of them had some sort of cost to society and it's important to recognize that.
It’s one of the most amazing technological achievements of the 21st century to date, if not the most amazing by far. But it’s still a machine executing a program. Your emotional reaction to it might be because you’re seeing it as something more than that.
mRNA vaccines takes the first place for sure, and by a wide margin. But also advancements in lithium ion batteries and solar cell technology. We also finally generated electricity with fusion power this century, traveled to Pluto and set up the James Webb Space telescope [albeit the latter two are engineering achievements].
I think using an absurd amount of power to train a neural network on stolen data which is then used to perform mundane tasks and performs significantly worse then if done manually. If anything LLMs is one of the least impressive, yet most annoying technological achievement this century.
“Everybody…except [those advocating for it]” –– rhetoric that is almost tautology but, regardless, the author cites the Gallup poll showing 7 in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers and alludes to other widely-held sentiment. But it’s not about your feelings.
This piece, by a defense analyst formerly at RAND, expands its concerns out from public sentiment and is mainly drawing attention to major yet-unsolved and generally uncontested issues such as AI output being unoriginal (fundamentally due to next-word prediction), the output polluting future training (garbage in garbage out), and errors only being caught by experts (cf. the Gell-Mann amnesia effect). The essay, in a political magazine, intends to warn elected leadership about strategic issues that are likely to arise if our government and experts intertwine AI into their decision making without these concerns being solved first.
What makes you think that opposition to data center construction in their local area is proof that locals are 'weirded out' by AI generally, rather than just opposed to eyesores that drain their water and put up power prices?
> A study by MIT found that students who use AI to write show far less brain activity than those who used classic Google searching (with AI off) or those who used neither. Other studies find that students who use AI retain far less of the information that ends up in their writing, possibly as a result of “cognitive offloading” and “cognitive surrender.”
I'm unconvinced that AI will make us all dumber. In the public perception, at least among students, AI is viewed as a cheating tool. What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework?
On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.
I'd love to see the 'AI as personal tutor' approach. Even incorporating things like spaced repetition or the testing effect, or evaluating free-written responses.
A lot of potential that's currently unrealized. It takes a student to swim upstream to get there. The convenience of cognitive offloading is difficult to say no to. For evidence, I see it everywhere at work, including (at least in some cases) in my own work, for matters I don't care to invest effort in learning because it's a one-off.
The rates of AI use show it far exceeds the rate of good old-fashioned cheating, and not an equivalency between them.
So I am convinced AI will make the ~80% dumber, at least until there are excellent teaching products and changes to teaching practices that end up making that 'AI as a personal tutor' the norm. In the absence of the actual right answer -- actual people as personal tutors with qualified, well-paid teachers and right-sized classrooms -- an AI as personal tutor is extremely scalable and would allow productive 'struggle' learning.
I don’t think this is likely to happen in the foreseeable future, because learning still requires struggling even under the best of personal tutors. For most of the “80%” it requires some level of compulsion and submitting to authority that would be bad PR for a product, and that people won’t be very accepting of, coming from an automation.
I'd say "some learning" -- I've learned how to operate and maintain an excavator from YouTube without significant struggle. otoh it might be difficult to learn linear algebra that way. But otooh an LLM might be far better than YouTube at teaching mathematics, while being orders of magnitude less costly than a real teacher. Even in the USA proper mathematics teachers are unavailable in many areas.
The discussion was about people who right now prefer to use AI for cheating (or for avoiding work) rather than for learning. I don’t think that a “personal tutor” mode would significantly change these dynamics without some form of coercion.
This sounds like a very much wanted release of mental stress to me.
> What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework?
Typically speaking, the ones that run companies.
> On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.
To be especially contrarian here, people said the exact same thing about the internet. That it would let you connect with anyone and truly evolve your knowledge and skill. It may be true for an extremely small minority of people but for most the reality was almost exactly the opposite. People willingly became dumber, embedding themselves into conspiracy and ways to hide from reality.
Im not sure if the internet made anyone dumber. It is just early on the average idiot self selected out of internet usage and there wasn't as much corporate or advertising money it to be worth manipulating.
AI im not sure of because it generates so much slop and anyone not already deep into a topic or field are unlikely to be able to recognize what parts are useful and what parts are common misconceptions or hallucinations.
Search engines are certainly worse tho, the first 20 hits on certain topics these days are AI articles that lack the needed details in favor of verbose generalizations or have questionable figures that other slop makes difficult to verify.
yeah, I think we have plenty of evidence that a certain sector of the population absolutely "vibe codes" life.
>The only field where people are being replaced wholesale is in computer programming, where AI is making leaps in capability.
I'll give the author a pass because he's not in the industry, but even an outsider looking closely enough would know that this is not true. Companies have been laying off while using AI as an excuse, but before AI it was the end of ZIRP, and before that it was something else. Also the layoff peak was 2023.
If I may, I think it has to do with this... and it's about to get weirder and weirder unless you change the paradigm:
https://safebots.ai/declarative.html
My first-impression is that this site is vaporware generated by someone prompting an LLM to babble about how an LLM could be secured.
At best, perhaps it's an overengineered way to force humans to rigorously validate every action... which the humans are all very hostile to doing.
> [Architecture page] Reasoning is Read-Only: Input=Data, not Instructions
This doesn't make make sense unless the "reasoning" is regular executable code, and then someone still needs to audit the code whenever it changes. The core LLM algorithms simply don't have room for the distinction.
> Complex workflows broken down into encrypted graph segments
Grandiosity++, where does "the architecture" actually end?
> But would it have improved my comprehension? The research says no.
I don’t know, I find myself doing things I would’ve never done before AI.
I find myself doing more projects outside of work.
I discover new problem domains and are less afraid of tackling the unknown.
I code in languages I don’t know and start learning how they work.
I can get anything explained to me, at any time, in a somewhat coherent manner, by a tutor that won’t get tired or annoyed.
Look— I’m not exactly thinking AI is free of criticism, but it’s definitely a revolution in access to information and at least to me that’s a big deal.
> it’s definitely a revolution in access to information
Did you mean: Google?
Google was the previous revolution. AI is the next. I get info from LLMs way better than I generally got from Google, at least for some large subset of things I used to try to get from Google.
An example from last night. If I Google “how much is 7KwH”, I get a list of calculator websites for converting units.
If I ask an LLM, it tells me “your usage is pretty low for an apartment, good job!”
The latter is exactly the question I had in mind. Not even close.
You said revolution, that’s barely incremental. If you had googled “apartment electricity usage calculator” you would find many options that provide exactly the information you want without risk of hallucination.
Did you deliberately screw up the capitalization so thoroughly that it bears no resemblance to the standard abbreviations? Are you one of those people who writes about "mb" and "kb" for computers, too?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt-hour
Obviously, LLMs are quite tolerant of typos, and even ignore mis-capitalization, or it may have at least tried to correct your improper usages.
"Everybody's Weirded Out by AI-Except the People Who Live in Zip Codes Starting with 940, 941, 944, 950 and 951"
There's some 98XXX codes that make the list too.
Hey, there are some AI-affirmative people in Marin County (949).
hey now there's plenty of ai fanatics in zip codes starting with 100 and 11
It's funny how this works. When Apple came out with the iPad Reddit absolutely hated it. No one would want it. It's a crappy product. Who even needs 4 iPhones glued together and so on and so forth. This all reads like that. It's just completely divorced from reality.
But I don't know anybody that uses iPads? To me it clearly out sold the market it is actually useful for.
I bought the original iPad 2 on the day it was released (which was just after the Fukushima earthquake in 2011). Still have it. Still use it occasionally to play retro iOS games. Still runs great on its original battery and iOS 6. Still connects to my WiFi and Bluetooth devices! (Although the Safari is so ancient it’s pretty useless for the modern web)
But I always swore I would never buy another iPad until Apple added one key feature: support for multiple user profiles.
Can’t understand why they’ve never done this. Even Apple TV has user profiles now. Perhaps they think they will sell less iPads if family members can share them.
I’m reading and writing this on an iPad.
I don’t think it makes sense as an analogy to AI, however.
I am reading and writing this on my computer with my iPad next to me (side screen for alternate content). I plan on probably buying one for my wife who is not tech-savvy (to say the least).
I don’t think the analogy makes any sense whatsoever either.
This piece is a little odd for me. I don't understand the logic behind this:
"read Kant and found it to be dense and impenetrable...an AI generated summary would have helped"
followed by "Would it have improved comprehension? No."
Why? Because "research says so."
Wut?
(still waiting for one or more HN commenters to freak out because the article has gasp! multiple em-dashes)
Elon Musk himself used to be quite anti-AI, often saying that it was an “existential risk to humanity” or more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
He seems to have changed his mind now that he owns a major AI company.
Elon talks a lot of crap about topics he has barely a cursory knowledge of so I wouldn't take anything he says at value except for how to manipulate large financials and tax burdens.
I mean, I'm concerned about the societal impacts too, but this article is pure nonsense as far as how useful today's AI tools are. I know multiple people with very high paid jobs who have told me they simply couldn't do that job now without AI. I create software much quicker and better than I have in the past 40 years using AI tools. I've learned all kinds of things technical and otherwise from LLMs. This writing is about as useful as the people who said calculators would mean nobody understands mathematics, or that watching tv would turn everyone into a zombie (obviously it was smart phones that did that).
That was not a very insightful article. It's super easy, and in most cases, correct to hate on AI. But that ignores a couple key facts:
* It's not going to go away and will only get more sophisticated whether we like it or not.
* It has legitimate super powers that can enable people do things that would either be impossible or insanely expensive.
I've been fascinated by tech my whole life and have watched various waves of technology transform society:
* solid state electronics enabling portability and functionality hitherto not possible
* integrated circuits bringing down the cost and increasing the capability of electronics, including microprocessors
* the personal computer revolution
* mobile telephony
* the internet
* smart phones
* AI
Most of those wonders have come with significant societal costs (e.g., silicon valley promised a revolutionary new industry without pollution, but instead gave us multiple superfund sites to clean up the toxic materials they haphazardly dumped without care, etc.)
We can't stop AI but we should try to have serious conversations how how to live in a non-dystopian world that it threatens to bring us. The small flaw with that idea is that those in power have no fucks to give in that regard and will sell out humanity if it means they can have the deluxe bunker package and enough slaves to serve them.
> It's super easy, and in most cases, incorrect to hate on AI.
There, fixed that for you.
I'm not saying the haters have zero point, but I find AI far more useful than not. I think so do most people. If I walk into any coffee shop and look over the at the screens of the people next to me, I see all asking AI questions and getting something positive from it. So I don't think "most cases" is correct.
I think you missed my point: it is incredibly useful. But its important to recognize that there are indirect costs that come from it and more in store.
Smartphones are cool, but do you think that they don't have issues?
* Distracted driving
* Attention span decimators
* A culture of zombies staring at their screens?
The list goes on for everything I mention: virtually all of them had some sort of cost to society and it's important to recognize that.
Are you capable of dialectical thinking?
Everyone? Speak for yourself. I'm not weirded out by it.
Really? Interacting with an LLM feels like stepping on a slug. It's just gross.
Do you mean like inadvertently interacting with an LLM like when you call a customer service line and you get AI?
I find it hard to imagine having a chatbot fix your broken SQL query or summarize some event be experienced as gross.
The worst is when a friend in the group chat uses ChatGPT to write his comments for him. That's really icky.
I disagree, though I highly dislike the affect of Anthropic models.
It’s one of the most amazing technological achievements of the 21st century to date, if not the most amazing by far. But it’s still a machine executing a program. Your emotional reaction to it might be because you’re seeing it as something more than that.
mRNA vaccines takes the first place for sure, and by a wide margin. But also advancements in lithium ion batteries and solar cell technology. We also finally generated electricity with fusion power this century, traveled to Pluto and set up the James Webb Space telescope [albeit the latter two are engineering achievements].
I think using an absurd amount of power to train a neural network on stolen data which is then used to perform mundane tasks and performs significantly worse then if done manually. If anything LLMs is one of the least impressive, yet most annoying technological achievement this century.
“Everybody…except [those advocating for it]” –– rhetoric that is almost tautology but, regardless, the author cites the Gallup poll showing 7 in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers and alludes to other widely-held sentiment. But it’s not about your feelings.
This piece, by a defense analyst formerly at RAND, expands its concerns out from public sentiment and is mainly drawing attention to major yet-unsolved and generally uncontested issues such as AI output being unoriginal (fundamentally due to next-word prediction), the output polluting future training (garbage in garbage out), and errors only being caught by experts (cf. the Gell-Mann amnesia effect). The essay, in a political magazine, intends to warn elected leadership about strategic issues that are likely to arise if our government and experts intertwine AI into their decision making without these concerns being solved first.
What makes you think that opposition to data center construction in their local area is proof that locals are 'weirded out' by AI generally, rather than just opposed to eyesores that drain their water and put up power prices?
I don’t think that.