Reliance on artificial-intelligence tools degrades the abilities of physicians and software engineers, studies show.
The amount of people blindly trusting a black box word predictor with actual life decisions is terrifying. I’m legit cutting people out of my life due to this shit rofl
Respect. Many opportunities these days for people to show us who they really are.
Also, excellent username.
Respect. Many opportunities these days for people to show us who they really are.
Unfortunately so. Truly I just want the best for those around me but you can only spend so much time trying to help before it becomes detrimental to oneself.
Also, excellent username.
Thanks :)
Twenty-five years ago I drove taxi for a few years and during training they were very clear that relying on gps prohibits you from learning. Taxi people knew that.
For the last fifteen years I’ve been a software engineer and in this field, the ability to pick up and maintain knowledge are cornerstones of the job. Having someone do your tasks for you will degrade your abilities to get said tasks done. CS people knows that.
Management however thinks that we will not need those skills in the future.
Because a good chunk of c-suite management jobs are mostly a bullshit job designed to give trust fund kids some sort of career. Their jobs are the most easily replaced by automation since most of what they do is bitching at people via emails.
As someone who’s been on both sides we’re all just trying to do what’s best for keeping people paid. Unless you work in a PE company and you’re constantly sucking the boards cocks so you dont get fired.
Do you believe the majority of taxi drivers don’t use GPS?
Breaking News: making robots do stuff for you destroys your ability to do stuff.
From the future:
AI was the stealthy nail in the coffin. We’d already experienced a century of loss of knowledge. Basic things like animal husbandry, growing crops, mining, smelting, forging…programming. all the things that used to be done by brute human strength or knowledge were now done by computers and AI. But profit was king, out with the old knowledge, in with the new lack of it.
So when the calamity finally happened, nobody was left with any of the knowledge to rebuild.
I think in five years — if the tools manage to stick around — finding coders that can work without AI assistance will be like finding skilled assembler developers.
EDIT: Yep I’m definitely a bot because I typed an em dash. You can be a bot too on Ubuntu by hitting control+shift+u and then typing 2014 (the last year of semi-sanity in US politics).
Sweet. I’m set for life, and I’ll get to be one of those devs that tells the bosses what I’ve decided to work on.
Can I join your dream?
As a senior c/c++ expert I hope it comes true but somehow I doubt it 😔.
And how much you’ve decided to work for.
Or a life of fixing AI slop the AI sloppers generate but can’t fix.
The next question is, who is going to be looking for them?
Most of Africa, from what I heard from African developers.
There are still large patches where the internet has outages often, data centers there too suffer from it. Same with energy, depending on the region it is not a guarantee.
(This is of course a consequence of Africa still transforming and putting up infrastructure, and it varies vastly depending on the region).
It’s hard to code with remote LLMs if they can go dark for half a day, and it is pricey to have it running on a local stack (at good token output speed).
Excellent answer.
Find the bot with the mdash
Said the AI comment.
Isn’t the entire point of computers to achieve a result faster than we could without them?
Your argument seems like bemoaning the invention of the paint roller because people won’t learn how to use brushes or their hands to paint walls.
Work output isn’t inherently more valuable just because the job was harder to do, or took more effort.
To stay with the paint analogy, AI is more like a paint roller that can paint by itself.
Just tell it what color you want the room to be, and walk away. Did it remove the original coat properly? Sand, prime, and double recoat? No idea, it looks good at the moment. But we’ll find out in a couple years when the cracks and bubbles start showing.
…which would be a useful continuation of the analogy if not for the fact that 95% of human house painters rush through jobs, cut costs on materials, and overcharge.
Just like every other new technology before it, those who oppose love to compare the lowest quality output of the new technology to the output of the Top 5% of human craftspeople.
For anything AI can do, there are MILLIONS of lazy humans taking 100 times longer pumping out the same or worse quality work at 10 times the cost.
Eh, not really, and it isn’t really an argument but more of a lighthearted prediction.
I think the big question is whether or not the “frontier” models continue to be available and evolve, because the business model for running them seems very unsound.
I kinda hope the AI bubble busts, and that afterwards some of the efforts turn toward making open source models more performant and powerful.
Hell, even before AI there were signs. Half the mechanics in our shop can’t diagnose shit unless there’s an error code shown when they plug in the computer.
I googled the error code and it says you might have “network connectivity issues”
I can’t figure out what’s wrong. Every time I print a document, it says it prints, but I just get out a piece of white paper. It was getting lighter and lighter and lighter, and now it’s just gone entirely.
Lol
Ah, no, see if you demonstrate any capacity for troubleshooting printers you fail the intelligence test.
As an IT guy, I can confirm, it’s a trap.
It’s No Child Left Behind from Lil Bush…
They just stopped teaching critical thinking and empathy decades ago. People in their 30s and under were never taught critical thinking.
Even with video games, they grew up where a 5 second pause meant googling a walkthrough video. The Water Temple would have broken them.
Can confirm, water temple broke me
It’s a good thing AI doesn’t rely on competent people for training its input and double-checking its output, because otherwise this would be very bad news.
i mean look at reddit andf dev subreddit. since ai NONE of them look capable to code anything.
The intro of Idiocracy on overdrive. Well done.
What?
Walley if anything, but I hate how fucking no one understands Idiocracy but other idiot always upvote any comment containing it.
I’ve watched thst movie at least 4 times and can pretty much cite it.
The beginning shows the downfall of humanity due to the wrong people reproducing, true. That’s not exactly to what’s going on here. Still it’s a parallel.
Were voluntarily externalizing and hence losing knowledge.
So whats your issue. That it’s not identical? Gatekeeping the understanding of Idiocracy, man. Get a grip.
Why the fuck would anyone answer your questions when you ask them like that?
Why wouldn’t the other person just give up on helping you understand it?
Like, you memorized some quotes to a movie you didn’t understand, congrats bro, that’s what a fucking chatbot can do. That’s the level you’re on, but you undoubtedly think of yourself as Not Sure.
I feel like you’ve never seen the movie Idiocracy before. It’s about how the general population gets stupider over time and finally when the most average person in the world finds himself in the future with all of the dumbs, he’s the smartest person in the world. That’s the whole point of the movie. Sure the movie setup is different than this in that it’s about the only worst people reproducing and raising dumb children to perpetuate that cycle.
Your initial response was hostile to OP, and then you had your feelings hurt when they responded sternly? Then you throw fucking tantrum like a the dumbs in Idiocracy, which again, I think you should watch, so that next time you care to talk about the movie, you at least have a base understanding of what it’s about. Fucking grow up.
Note that the premise that the general population gets stupider over time is incorrect. Flynn effect.
“our”? Screw you too.
Wait, really? Oh damn. Maybe we should… Naaaaaah.
IMO, this is just the older generations thinking badly of the young. Be it rock n’ roll, D&D, internet, smartphones, or AI, the older generations will not understand the priorities, workflows, and conditions of their younger peers.
Opposing AI is like rejecting the bicycle, sickle, or calculator. The thing that people should contemplate isn’t whether to use AI, but rather how to use it. Do we want only wealthy elites to have access to AI, or should everyone be able to use it? Should we use AI to teach people, and if so, what subjects? How do we prevent people from falling into poverty? And so forth.
Outright rejection of AI is foolish, and simply means that the peoples who adapt to a world with AI, will come ahead of those who have isolated themselves.
A bicycle will transport me in the same manner every time I use it. A calculator will always give me the correct result of 2+2.
What was your point about AI again?
That it is useful, and a civilization would be diminished if it doesn’t use technology. GLM 5.2, as of now, is able to almost perfectly copy Pac-Man. While this is a model that has a 700gb footprint for a Q6, we can expect future models of this ability to be usable on gamer hardware within a decade. My guess is that DDR6 RAM is roughly where we get to the turning point for local models.
What this means in practice, is that it would be much easier for non-programmers such as artists to have an local AI handle the parts of game development that they can’t do. Same goes for programmers who can’t draw worth a damn - I watched a video of Touhou EDM music, and the character depictions by an AI were quite nice looking. Individuals, provided they have the hardware, will become able to see many ideas and desires to fruition, as they don’t have to rely on acquiring other humans or venture capital.
Depending on how the cards play out, this could go a great way towards destroying capitalism as we know it. A burger flipper wouldn’t be able to pay a living salary to another person to create things - but an AI can be a much smaller investment. That same burger flipper might be able to create media or other AI assisted projects, that would otherwise be impossible on their budget or time.
Many humans claim to have imagination, but the luddites of our day seem to lack it.
I think you’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent here. This is less about lack of understanding and more about people utilizing AI to offset their thinking. The less we exercise our skills (be it writing software, medical diagnosis, etc.) the fewer opportunities for growth and reinforcement of skills users of AI have.
The bicycle never replaced walking, it just provided another means of locomotion. People straight up use AI to think for them.
Did… Did you read the article?
No they had Claude summarize it for them
Some of the “older people” were around in the dot com bubble. It’s not that we think there’s no future for it (the internet didn’t go away after the dot com bubble burst) it’s that it’s currently unreliable tech. I use it all the time, but I’m not going to put significant effort into integrating it into my workflow until after the bubble bursts. The costs are currently being subsidized by a ridiculous amount of investment dollars so we don’t actually know what the price tag will be when they need to make a profit to make a return on the investment. Currently AI is in a similar place to companies like AOL were in the dot com bubble when you look at the finances of this thing.
Also be aware that fraud has been effectively decriminalized in the US. There are no consequences for lying to investors now. And they are lying. The statement that “software development has been solved” is a lie. Some of us know about the Halting Problem and know that statements like that are mathematically false.
After the bubble bursts, the tech will become more reasonable. We’ll have actual prices so we can assess where the tech is worthwhile to use and where it’s too expensive to use. Choosing where to use an algorithm and where not to use an algorithm is what software engineering has always been about, so it’s not exactly a game changer.
In the meantime, yeah I use the investor subsidized service, because why not use something someone else is paying for? It gives me an idea of which problems it’s suitable for and which problems it’s not good for. When there’s actually real prices to the tech I’ll know everything I need to know to be able to make more permanent implementations of the tech. But I know from experience that it’s a bad idea to become dependent on tech before you know what the price tag will be.
It’s kind of an Iceland situation. In Iceland there was a massive influx of money from hedge fund operations. Fishermen became bankers. Then 2008 happened, and the bankers had to go back to being fishermen again. The lesson is, when there’s amounts of money that doesn’t even make sense being thrown around, it’s a good idea to still maintain your fishing boats and nets.
It is certainly true that AI is in a bubble, alongside the (false) economy. I just have a feeling that people are deluding themselves into thinking AI is useless and undesirable to society, and by doing so, are robbing themselves and the better parts of society the opportunity to steer the future.
Your measured approach is an appropriate response. Familiarity with the technology gives you genuine agency about how you interact with it in the future.
Ha, jokes on you. I never had the skills to ruin. Now I can make my messes bigger.
And ever since I got a forklift my arm strength has gone down.
You use a forklift to do things you physically can’t do. This is a bad analogy. Even if you never used a forklift at all you’d still likely not have the muscle capacity to lift 500+ lbs pallets all day. You certainly couldn’t just lift a tonne.
And you wouldn’t use a forklift to increase your muscle tone, or build muscle.
I physically can’t refactor a codebase in 15 minutes.
Neither can AI, unless you want a garbage heap of a codebase.
The only codebase an agentic system could refactor in 15 minutes would be almost trivially small. I still couldn’t do it in 15 mins, but give me a couple hours and I’ll make much more meaningful improvements
I think you’re missing the forest for the trees here because the point is, you’re capable of doing the task, just not doing it in the same amount of time as a computer.
You chose a poor analogy to explain your POV. I’m pointing out the flaw in it.
And I could manually relocate all the contents of a palette, too. Just not anywhere near as quickly and easily as I can with a forklift. The analogy is still apt.
Ok. Look at it the other way. The person who can lift the heavy thing may not be able to continue to lift the heavy thing if they use the forklift all the time and don’t ever train their muscles. Which is what the article is pointing out. Doing the task by hand re-enforces knowledge and skill. Over-reliance on a tool is a well known phenomenon.
And yet the person with the forklift is moving more stuff than the guy who did it by hand could manage. The “over” in “over-reliance” is a subjective value judgment and I just don’t agree.
I’m not seeing the problem here. Technology is developed specifically for this purpose, to remove unnecessary burden from humans and enhance their capabilities. There’s nothing noble about laboring unnecessarily hard to accomplish goals in a suboptimal manner. I could write programs in assembly language but instead I use high-level languages and compilers. Does that result in over-reliance on compilers?
John Henry died in the process of “beating” the steam hammer and then got replaced anyway. Nowadays it’d be considered foolish to do that work by hand.
Ok, there are definitely a lot of trades where things are still taught by hand in the event that you have to do them by hand some day. Doing it by hand does more than just re-enforce knowledge. It also teaches you new things and allows a process, and the space to re-evaluate and innovate. We improve by doing those things by hand. That is very often worth the cost. You very often don’t get things quickly, cheaply, and with quality. The AI will degrade if we don’t provide it with quality information to work with. It is nothing without our skills. We won’t have those skills if we don’t use them.
You talk like a businessman rather than an artisan or a creator of things, so perhaps your mindset is different but what happens when the AI breaks something and nobody can fix it because they lack the ability to think about the problem constructively or understand what the problem actually is.
Are we going to pay to go to a mental gymnasium where we complete coding and critical reasoning tasks manually to stave off the atrophy?
I mean, people already do this. Lots of folks do crosswords or sudoku or other puzzles to keep their mind sharp. It’s pretty commonly recommended by doctors I think.
Hah. Leetcode becomes more popular among the employed. Software developers have AI agents run some big tasks while they get some Leetcode time in. Lol
Removed by mod
We don’t let people use calculators until they reach a certain level of maths proficiency without one. Also, we don’t let calculators decide what sums to do.
When software developers are using AI to assist them, that’s different than someone vibe coding something. It didn’t sound like that commenter was promoting vibe coding.
Is it different? I’d say “it depends” because if you are letting agents write most of the code for a start you aren’t developing any more and it very much is vibe coding. If they are reviewing and testing properly and not just taking the AIs word for it then fair enough, but I’ll bet time pressures and human laziness reduce the effectiveness of that.
Also, how are junior coders going to learn the craft to get good enough to make proper use of AI, they certainly shouldn’t be using it heavily fir the same reason kids aren’t given calculators in maths class to start with.
Yes, I think we’re in agreement here. This is exactly what I’m saying
It’s not me making the claim, I just posted the link.
I’m shocked that a person who is touting AI so hard missed a pretty basic context clue. Maybe those basic tasks that they are using AI to skip could have helped them in this situation.
Yeah, but they can’t understand that because they use AI heavily…
You didn’t read the article or choose whether to post it?
Definitely degradation. Deskilling is a well-established phenomenon.
Here’s an AI comment and an AI link, showing you I use AI heavily. Since I can’t understand this, it means you’re wrong, otherwise it would mean you’re right and the AI brainrot is already why I can’t understand it. And my chatbot says I’m stunning and brave!
