This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example.
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
I am sure many smokers in the 1950s also saw the health benefits of tobacco, that they were very happy to experience the increased energy after a smoke and could get more done as a result. I‘m pretty sure none of them felt their lungs and throats deteriorating either.
Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is. We don‘t have the research (yet) that AI is addictive and causes brain atrophy, but all the evidence is certainly pointing that way, the same way the evidence were pointing that way about tobacco in the 1950s. My only hope is that it doesn’t take us another 2 decades to prove the obvious.
One thing I've learned in life is to accept that I'm in many ways an outlier, which means that even if the research is done, it frequently doesn't apply to me anyway.
Like I wouldn't doubt that research could show that more time spent on youtube is inversely correlated with learning. But if you just use it to watch lectures or tutorials for some skill, obviously you will be an outlier.
Or when "research shows that dieting doesn't work," obviously the result there is "research shows that most people don't maintain a healthy diet," and it shouldn't dissuade you from doing so. Choosing to do so anyway is what makes you the outlier.
And so it will likely go with AI's effect on the brain. Most people will likely use it to avoid thinking, and the research will show it to be a disaster. A small group will use (or already is using) it to challenge them and expose them to new ideas. You can choose to be in the latter group if you'd like.
>You can choose to be in the latter group if you'd like.
And now you inherit the burden of proving you are "one of the good ones" after a mass amount of disappointment from the normal use case. I don't think the "it's okay, I'm different" methodology ever works out unless you can prove you are so utterly beyond the competition that you can't be ignored.
But an outlier is just that. And as we see here, outliers cannot change society single-handedly. You at least need to be an outlier good enough to convince a lot of "normal" people that you are to their benefit and be willing to lead those "normal" people.
You don't need to prove anything or lead anyone or change society. You have a tool in front of you that can help you achieve your goals or distract you from them. You decide how you want to use it. Just do your thing.
> It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
So you're just saying "it's okay I got mine" in that case, and don't care if the rest of society rots because "I can use it well". Fair enough.
And I assume you never need to worry about applying to a W2 job with that mentality
I mean sure I care. I'd love for my kids to grow into a world where everyone around them is a super jacked highly competent and motivated ubermensch, but what are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to get people to not let themselves rot other than to remind them that it's an option, and all they need to do is to decide to take it. If anyone doesn't care, it's the person who's resigned to the inevitability of rot even in the face of someone telling them they're looking at a tool for self-improvement.
>I'd love for my kids to grow into a world where everyone around them is a super jacked highly competent and motivated ubermensch, but what are you supposed to do?
I just gave an example. Use your power to lead and improve your community, and society as a whole. Use your leadership to add guardrails so the tools assist the user, as opposed to the current state of unchecked capitalism that simply extracts funds with no care for results.
You dismissed it and said to focus in yourself. Which is exactly how we get to such a situation.
This contradictory feeling of powerlessness while simultaneously striving to use such tools to influence the community simply shows why the wider population is gaining mistrust for the tech. Telling people to be better people because ot works for you has never ended well.
I influence where I can, and I have encouraged my team at work to use models as learning tools. Probe into their claims. Ask them to prove things with a quick demo/test/PoC. etc. They have tons of embedded knowledge that you can dig out. But running for president of the world so I can demand guardrails is a little out of my scope.
Reminder that this reply chain was about someone saying how they use LLMs for personal growth, and someone replying that they're deceiving themselves. You don't have to get hung up on how to fix society (who were already happy to rot with TV, instagram, tiktok, etc.) and keep that from seeing a useful tool in front of you.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
runarberg · · focus · HN ↗
Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is. We don‘t have the research (yet) that AI is addictive and causes brain atrophy, but all the evidence is certainly pointing that way, the same way the evidence were pointing that way about tobacco in the 1950s. My only hope is that it doesn’t take us another 2 decades to prove the obvious.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
Like I wouldn't doubt that research could show that more time spent on youtube is inversely correlated with learning. But if you just use it to watch lectures or tutorials for some skill, obviously you will be an outlier.
Or when "research shows that dieting doesn't work," obviously the result there is "research shows that most people don't maintain a healthy diet," and it shouldn't dissuade you from doing so. Choosing to do so anyway is what makes you the outlier.
And so it will likely go with AI's effect on the brain. Most people will likely use it to avoid thinking, and the research will show it to be a disaster. A small group will use (or already is using) it to challenge them and expose them to new ideas. You can choose to be in the latter group if you'd like.
johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
And now you inherit the burden of proving you are "one of the good ones" after a mass amount of disappointment from the normal use case. I don't think the "it's okay, I'm different" methodology ever works out unless you can prove you are so utterly beyond the competition that you can't be ignored.
But an outlier is just that. And as we see here, outliers cannot change society single-handedly. You at least need to be an outlier good enough to convince a lot of "normal" people that you are to their benefit and be willing to lead those "normal" people.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
> It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
And I assume you never need to worry about applying to a W2 job with that mentality
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
I just gave an example. Use your power to lead and improve your community, and society as a whole. Use your leadership to add guardrails so the tools assist the user, as opposed to the current state of unchecked capitalism that simply extracts funds with no care for results.
You dismissed it and said to focus in yourself. Which is exactly how we get to such a situation.
This contradictory feeling of powerlessness while simultaneously striving to use such tools to influence the community simply shows why the wider population is gaining mistrust for the tech. Telling people to be better people because ot works for you has never ended well.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
Reminder that this reply chain was about someone saying how they use LLMs for personal growth, and someone replying that they're deceiving themselves. You don't have to get hung up on how to fix society (who were already happy to rot with TV, instagram, tiktok, etc.) and keep that from seeing a useful tool in front of you.