Diving deeper into technical understanding makes more sense to me at this point both as a way to make yourself more useful in the age of AI and also to use AI more effectively.

I regularly tell the kids to grab a text book on a subject that interests them and I do the same.

I’m willing to bet deep understanding is going to become a commodity soon.

They are just straight up admitting they don't know anything, and advocate fiercely for their agent's recommendation.

No one cares, no one tries to stop this behavior. It's seen as good, apparently. I admitted that I don't know enough to have an opinion at the moment, I certainly don't know how to judge the contradictory opinions of multiple frontier AIs, and I fear that just made me look incompetent.

I find it's so easy to convince oneself they're doing the former when it's increasingly the latter. The thinking part is so often provided by default by the models, or is a single prompt away. The thoughts are so syntactically (though not stylistically) perfect that it's difficult to ignore them and reason greenfield.

What's the solution? Given how keen models are to short-circuit the thinking process it could be the only solution is to silo off tasks/ideas. Choosing which mental tasks to silo off is itself incredibly difficult especially when there's a pressure to deliver rapidly (and in quantity) on those tasks.

But this varies from person to person

Some of us overthink already and offloading to AI just enables us to overthink more in other directions than we would if we didn't have ai

...huh. It's a "startup", so it's not Meta capturing their employees' inputs. I wonder what it could be.

Offload your execution, not your thinking.

When you cognitively surrender to AI, or to another person (be it a leader/manager, or a subordinate/report), you are asking for trouble.

I've noticed it when interviewing interns. A surprising number seem unable to think on their feet or solve problems without immediately reaching for chatgpt. I don't necessarily expect you to be able to solve a problem entirely without tools, but you should be able to give me the outline of how to go about something and why you would go that way.

After all, if you are just going to spit out AI, I will just get AI to do your job...

IOW - modern AI is simply an extension of the lack of thinking that characterizes the modern life... It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.

and work on things that would usually be out of my element.

if you aren't thinking more than ever, you're using ai wrong.

The reality is that most humans do very little actual thinking of their own anyway, and, if you believe that what LLMs produce constitutes a form of intelligence, it does seem "more intelligent" than most humans.

So: is outsourcing thinking a net improvement for a majority of users?

I use several models, daily, and they seem "reasonably conditioned" that they are only input to my thinking and not "my thinking". I correct them constantly; they are wrong (in reasoning/logic, in actual facts) frequently. They are demonstrably "not smarter" than I am. And yet I know many people who can "do more" with them as a "thinking" tool. I can say that "the problem" is they can't spot the errors, but they can't or won't do that in their ordinary lives, either, so, again, is it a net improvement for them?

Interesting times and all that.

But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. On the flip side, if you use an LLM do most of your thinking, what's still "you"? We have people here who use LLMs to raise their children, to manage relationships, to design products. So what's left? Are you the prompt you once wrote? What's your lasting edge, what's your purpose in life? You're standing in front of a machine, pulling a lever and sometimes receiving gifts.

Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect? If we're being honest, are you going to apply that knowledge of physics or computer science yourself, or will you just prompt the LLM again?

In my mind, it's pretty simple: I'm a human, LLMs are not. If a human writes a novel, it's inherently worth more. I want to support that. And I want to be a human who can write novels, the old-fashioned way. I'm not good at lifting weights or running, so my thinking is the only thing I have.

The rise of knowledge work made many people far less physically active because moving one's body was no longer a given part of one's job. This led to a lot of people (who assumed sports was exercise on top of one's work, not the only source of exercise) moving very little. This meant we needed to rediscover the importance of exercise as a pillar of health.

I think something similar will happen with knowledge work, where we have to do a lot less cognitive exercise due to AI (as well as the decline of reading and rise of short-form video), which will likely lead to eventual issues and subsequently, a rise in activities designed to replicate the cognitive exercise work used to provide.

Perhaps the question to ask is: who is making all of the final decisions for the things that really matter to you in your life?

No direct democracy, just people deciding for you. You can choose once every four years. Are we surprised of how easily we delegate decisions? May be AI can do it better

Especially given the comments I see here and on other tech and programming forums, I hate the direction things are going.

I still have some hope this will all fade, but the damage done will be worse the longer it goes on, I think.