On the other hand, maybe abacuses and written language won't be the downfall of humanity, destroying our ability to hold numbers and memorize long passages of narrative, after all. Who's to know? The future is hard to see.
[1] I mean there's a hell of a lot of research on the topic, but here's a meta-study of 46 reviews https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...
The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though. We rely on calculators because they eclipse us in _any_ calculation, we rely on books because they store the stories permanently, but if I use chatGPT to write all my easy SQL I will still have to write the hard SQL by hand because it cannot do that properly (and if I rely on chatGPT to much I will not be able to do that either because of attrition in my brain).
If we're lucky, the tendency toward random hallucinations will force an upswing in functional skepticism and and lots of mental effort spent verifying outputs! If not, then we're probably cooked.
Maybe a ray of light, even coming from a serious skeptic of generative AI: I've been impressed at what someone with little ability to write code or inclination to learn can accomplish with something like Cursor to crank out little tools and widgets to improve their daily life, similar to how we still need skilled machinists even while 3D printing has enabled greater democratization of object production. LLMs: a 3D printer for software. It may not be great, but if it works, whatever.
Yeah, you'd think that a profession that talks about stuff like "NP-Hard" and "unit tests" would be more sensitive to the distinction between (A) the work of providing a result versus (B) the amount of work necessary to verify it.
Not sure about books. Between self-help, religion, and New Age, I'd guess quite a lot of books not marked as fiction are making false claims.
If you want reliable list of facts, use (or tell the AI to use) a search engine and a file system… just then you need whatever system you use to be able to tell if your search for "Jesus" was in the Christian missionary sense, or the "ICE arrested Jesús Cruz" sense, or you wanted the poem in the Whitehouse v Lemon case, or if you were just swearing.
If you can't tell which you wanted, the books being constant doesn't help.
> There is no calculation on which the calculator can randomly fail, leading me to do it by hand, so I don't need to retain the skill of doing it by hand.
I've seen it happen, e.g. on my phone the other week, because Apple's note-based calculator strips unrecognised symbols, which means when you copy-paste from a place where "." is the decimal separator, while your system settings say you use "," as a decimal separator, it gives an answer off by some power of ten… but I've also just today discovered that doing this the other way around on macOS (system setting "." as separator) it strips the stuff before the decimal.
Just in case my writing is unclear, here's a specific example, *with the exact same note* (as in, it's auto-shared by iCloud and recomputing the answer locally) on macOS (where "." is my separator):
123,45 / 2 = 22.5
123.45 / 2 = 61.725
123,45 / 2 = 61,725
123.45 / 2 = 6.172,5
I remember around ~2000 reading a paper that said the effects of the internet made people impatient and unwilling to accept delays in answering their questions, and a poorer retention of knowledge (as they could just re-research it quickly).
Before daily use of computers, my spelling and maths were likely better, now I have an overdependence on tools.
With LLM's, i'll likely become over-dependant on managing of sentence syntax and subject completion.
The cycle continues...
Things like ChatGPT have much more in common with social media technologies like Facebook than they do with like writing.
Is this comment ridiculing critique of AI by comparing it to critique of writing?
Or.. is it invoking Socrates as an eloquent description of a "brain on ChatGPT".
I guess the former? But I can easily read it as the latter, too.
Tell me you don't have ADHD without telling me you don't have ADHD (or even knowing what ADHD is, yet) ;)
It’s like saying “someone on a bike will not develop their muscles as well as someone on foot when doing 5km at 5min/km”.
But people on bikes tend to go for higher speeds and longer distances in the same period of time.
out-of-ideas•5h ago