Another Atlantic article that appears to hit.
The TLDR is if you seek higher cognition and use AI as a tool alongside that practice you’ll be fine. If you lean on AI to avoid cognition then you’ll backslide into the primordial goo as a person.
I understand that this is anecdotal, but the schoolteachers I know all tell similar stories.
Most kids can’t read up to their grade level and can’t focus for more than 60 seconds. They’re unable to tell you the answer to a question when it’s literally written on the board in front of them, and a common question they ask is: “If AI can do this for me, why do I have to learn it at all?”
Which tells me that the AI age will produce lazy people who are unable to think for themselves or solve simple problems. Then again, maybe BCI’s will become common and they literally won’t have to actually think for themselves.
It’s gonna be so great getting old with them running the world.
It’s gonna be so great getting old with them running the world.
Based on the current situation, why do you think they will run anything? From the currently available data, the oldest fucks (then, we) will run the show until they (we) fall over dead (and sometimes beyond, looking at Moscow Mitch).
That’s probably a fair point. We’ll see how it all plays out. I’m assuming the worst for due to the lack of any concern on the part if the tech community and the lack of any meaningful guardrails or regulation.
I started backsliding into a primordial goo person almost 15 years ago tyvm
Before it was cool!
I predict less of an imagination/less productive with no patience.
The less patience and higher anxiety is already happening in higher numbers among new hires. It’s astonishing.
The people who spend 23 hours a day running agents and outputting 300 slop emails an hour aren’t seeking cognition, they’re seeking quick rewards; “working” with “AI” isn’t a cognitive task so much as it’s a gambling task. Just keep asking Claude to try again on that PR and eventually you get that dopamine hit from it making a not-totally-shitty solution and you never had to actually engage your higher brain function, you just did lots of low level churn of “prompting”.
I think the article had a couple of good examples of how to use an AI.
Ask for hints, not answers: People who ask AI to directly answer their questions suffer severe declines in motivation and ability. But people who ask AI for background thinking or clarifications do not.
Start with a blank page: Before you go to the bot, start with a blank piece of paper and write up your own analysis and conclusions. Then ask AI to challenge your thinking, not produce it.
Ask for thinkers, not thinking: My favorite trick when using Claude is to never ask it to think through a problem for me. I ask it to summarize the thinkers who have already addressed a given problem. If I’m trying to understand child development, I ask it to imagine a debate between Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson. What would these two great psychologists say to each other about the problem I’m wrestling with? Then I ask it what books by these thinkers I should read if I want to understand their work. I get much better results from AI when I treat it as a brilliant librarian rather than as an oracle.
I’ve got a coworker who still attends something one could call programming school. They use AI extensively. I am not sure if I could trust him to complete a project in a way that would leave it maintainable. Or that he could maintain it.
People with no critical thinking skills. Also, people who believe everything if you can show them the AI confirming it.
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