Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI

I find this to be an interesting anecdote because at a certain level for a long time the most helpful advice you could give is what would be the best reference for the problem at hand which might have been a book or website or wiki or Google for stack overflow and now a particular AI model might be the most efficient way to give someone a 'good reference.' I could certainly see someone recommending a model the same way they may have recommended a book or tutorial.

On point of discussing code.. a lot of cloud frameworks are boring but good. It usually isn't the interesting bit and it is a relatively recent quirk that everyone seems to care more about the framework compared to the thing you actually wanted to achieve. It's not a fun algorithm optimization, it's not a fun object modeling exercise, it's not some nichey math thing of note or whatever got them into coding in the first place. While I can't speak for your father I haven't met a programmer who doesn't get excited to talk about at least one coding topic this cloud framework just might not have been it.

> It was the first time in my whole life that programming was not fun at all.

And learning new technologies in pursuit of resume-driven-development is fun?

I gotta say, if learning the intricacies of $LATEST_FAD is "fun" for you, then you're not really going to have a good time, employment-wise, in the age of AI.

If learning algorithms and data structures and their applicability in production is fun, then the age of AI is going to leave you with very in-demand skills.

Jaron Lanier was a critic of the view that files were somehow an essential part of computing:

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/01/08/jaron-lanier/gory-an...

Typing on a keyboard, using files and writing on a word processor, etc. are accidental skills, not really essential skills. They're like writing cursive: we learned them, so we think naturally everybody must and lament how much it sucks that kids these days do not. But they don't because they don't need to: we now have very capable computing systems that don't need files at all, or at least don't need to surface them at the user level.

It could be that writing or understanding code without AI help turns out to be another accidental skill, like writing or understanding assembly code today. It just won't be needed in the future.

> I don't how to care for livestock or what to do to prepare and can a pig or a cow. I could learn it. But I'll keep using the way of least resistance and get it from my butcher

You'd sing a different tune if there was a good chance from being poisoned by your butcher.

The two examples you chose are obvious choices because the dependencies you have are reliable. You trust their output and methodologies. Now think about current LLMs-based agents running your bank account, deciding on loans,...

Sure, but we still will need future generation people to want to learn how to butcher and then actually follow through on being butchers. I guess the implied fear is that people who lack fundamentals and are reliant on AI become subordinate to the machine's whimsy, rather than the other way around.

Maybe its not so much that it prevents anything, rather it will hedge toward a future where all we get is a jpeg of a jpeg of a jpeg. ie. everything will be an electron app or some other generational derivative not yet envisioned yet, many steps removed from competent engineering.

This is a great quote, but for the opposite reason. Lying has been an option forever - people learn how to use it and how not to use, as befits their situation and agenda. The same will happen with AI. Society will adapt, us first-AI-users will use it far differently than people in 10, 20, 30+ years. Things will change, bad things will happen, good things will happen, maybe it will be Terminator, maybe it will be Star Trek, maybe it will be Star Wars or Mad Max or the Culture.

Current parents, though, aren't going to teach kids how to use it, kids will figure that out and it will take a while.

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I've long maintained that kids must learn end to end what it takes to put content on the web themselves (registering a domain, writing some html, exposing it on a server, etc.) so they understand that _truly anyone can do this_. Learning both that creating "authoritative" looking content is trivial and that they are _not_ beholden to a specific walled garden owner in order to share content on the web.

> It's just an example, extrapolate python to everything tech that is needed for us to have a healthy relationship with tech.

Perhaps that's also a reason why - tech is so large, there's no time in a traditional curriculum to teach all of it. And only teaching what's essential is going to be tricky because who gets to decide what's essential? And won't this change over time?

> it will only get better

I wanted to highlight this assumption, because that's what it is, not a statement of truth.

For one, it doesn't really look like the current techniques we have for AI will scale to the "much better" you're talking about -- we're hitting a lot of limits where just throwing more money at the same algorithms isn't producing the giant leaps we've seen in the past.

But also, it may just end up that AI provider companies aren't infinite growth companies, and once companies aren't able to print their own free money (stock) based on the idea of future growth, and they have to tighten their purse strings and start charging what it actually costs them, the models we'll have realistic, affordable access to will actually DECREASE.

I'm pretty sure the old fashioned, meat-based learning model is going to remain price competitive for a good long while.

I can get productivity advantages from using power tools, yet regular exercise has great advantages, too.

It's a bit similar with the brain, learning and AI use. Except when it comes to gaining and applying knowledge, the muscle that is trained is judgement.

That's optimistic. Sci-fi has taught us that way worse forms of AI are possible.

Meanwhile, in 1999, somewhere on Slashdot:

"This is the worst form of web there will ever be; it will only get better."

people say this but the models seem to be getting worse over time

The amount of cheating and ease of it has gone way up based on my monitoring of teaching communities. Like it's not even close in terms of before ChatGPT vs. after ChatGPT.

Worse yet many educators are not being supported by their administration since enrollments are falling and the admin wants to keep the dollars coming regardless of if the students are learning.

It's worse than just copying Wikipedia because plagarism detectors aren't as effective and may never be.

It's an arms race and right now AI cheating has structural advantages that will take time to remove.

Every now and then I give LLMs a try, because I think it's important to stay up to date with technology. Sometimes there have been specs that I find particularly hard to parse in domains I am a bit unfamiliar in where I thought the AI could help. At first the solutions seemed correct but then on further inspection, no they were far more convoluted than needed, even if they worked.

I think so too. Otherwise every Google maps user would be an awesome wayfinder. The opposite is true.

Reading an explanation is the first part of learning, chatgpt almost always follows up with “do you want to try some example problems?”

First, as you get used to LLMs you learn how to get sensible explanations from them, and how to detect when they're bullshitting around, imo. It's just another skill you have to learn, by putting in the effort of extensively using LLMs.

> Reading an explanation may feel like learning, but I doubt it. It is the effort of going from problem/doubt to constructing a solution - and the explanation is a mere description of the solution - that is learning. Knowing words to that effect is not exactly learning. It is an emulation of learning, a simulacrum. And that would be bad enough if we could trust LLMs to produce sound explanations every time.

Every person learns differently, and different topics often require different approaches. Not everybody learns exactly like you do. What doesn't work for you may work for me, and vice versa.

As an aside, I'm not gonna be doing molecular experiments with sugar preservation at home, esp. since as I said my time budget is 3 minutes. The alternative here was reading about it on wikipedia or some other website.

These tools are broadly forced on everyone. Can you really avoid smartphones, social media, content feeds, etc these days? It's not a matter of choice -- society is reshaped and it's impossible to avoid these impositions.

It’s not about the tool itself, but more so the corporate interests behind the tools.

Open source AI tools that you can run locally in your machines? Awesome! AI tools that are owned by a corporation with the intent of selling your things you don’t need and ideas you don’t want? Not so awesome.

> Reading the explanation involves memorising it temporarily and at best understanding what it means at a surface level.

I agree. I don't really feel like I know something unless I can go from being presented with a novel instance of a problem in that domain and work out a solution by myself, and also explain that to someone else - not just happen into a solution.

> Plato might have been wrong about the ills of cyberization cognitive skill such as memory.

How so? From the dialogue where he describes Socrates discussing writing I get a pretty nuanced view that lands pretty much where you did above: access to writing fosters a false sense of understanding when one can read explanations and repeat them but not actually internalize the reasoning behind it.

> What's the difference? Isn't explaining things so that people don't have to figure out by themselves the whole point of the educational system?

  THEN SAID A teacher, Speak to us of Teaching.
  
  And he said:
  
  No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

  The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.

  If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.

  The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding.

  The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it.

  And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither.

  For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.

  And even as each one of you stands alone in God’s knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.

I mostly use chatgpt to make my writing more verbose because I've been told that it's too terse.

But it takes longer. People taking a proper course in software engineering or reading a good book about it is like going through a game tutorial, while people going through LLMs skip it. The former let you reach faster to the intended objectives, learning how to play properly. You may have some fun doing the latter, but you may also spend years and your only gain will be an ad-hoc strategy.

Temporarily. Then your brain normalizes to the novelty and you’re just a junkie looking for a novel fix again.

Not really sure where you all think the study of language driven thought gonna get you since you still gonna be waking up tomorrow on Earth being a normal human with the same external demands of society regardless what of the bird song. Physics is pretty normalized and routine. Sounds like some sad addiction driven disassociation.

As someone who grew up reading encyclopedias, LLMs are the most interesting invention ever. If Wikipedia had released the first chat AI we'd be heralding a new age of knowledge and democratic access and human achievement.

It just so happens unimaginative programmers built the first iteration so they decided to automate their own jobs. And here we are, programmers, worrying about the dangers of it all not one bit aware of the irony.

Before you jump to conclusions, you should make a reasonable claim that IQ is still a reasonable measure for an individual's intellectual abilities in this context.

One could very much say that people's IQ is bound to decline if schooling decided to prioritize other skills.

You would also have to look into the impact of factors unrelated to the internet, like the evolution of schooling and its funding.

IQ scores may be declining, but it's far from certain that the thing they're trying to measure (g, or general intelligence) have actually declined.

https://open.substack.com/pub/cremieux/p/the-demise-of-the-f...

Is this culture based or reproduction based?

Do you mean developed? OECD are all rich western countries.

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He was not wrong. We forget stuff all the time and in huge quantities. I can't even remember my own phone number half of the time.

Those guys could recite substantial portions of the Homeric epics. It's just that there is more to intelligence than rote memorization. That's the good news.

The bad news is that this amorphous "more" was "critical thinking" and we are starting to outsource it.

Writing had existed for 3000 years by then, alphabetic writing in Greek had existed for several centuries. The quote about "the invention of writing" is Socrates telling a story where a mythical Egyptian king says that.

Socrates also says in this dialogue:

"Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing."

The essence of his admonishment is that having access to written text is not enough to produce understanding, and I not only tend to agree, I think it is more relevant than ever now.

I’m inclined to believe he was right? There’s other benefits to writing (and the act of writing) that weren’t well understood at the time though.

That’s okay, we’re moving to post reading :)

Cave paintings were made by AI robots trained on the IP of real painters?