That makes sense and seems obvious. I’ve worked in tech for over 20 years and have learned the most while banging my head against the keyboard trying to solve a problem. I wouldn’t have learned all I know now without that experience. I doubt that process is specific to tech. If AI can just give us the answers, what kind of long term impact does that produce? Ideally it frees us up for higher/order thinking but that seems like a pie-in-the-sky dream to me. I’m concerned but hope those concerns end up unwarranted.
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Claude, remind me to take a break every 9 minutes and 30 seconds.
See, antis? It's that simple and you couldn't come up with it.
/s
No problem: I have a 9-minute timer to stop doing AI in time so I can stay hard.
Using a drill instead of a screwdriver erodes your ability to do hard work.
Could you please explain in further detail why offloading cognitive labor is equivalent to reducing physical labor? Cognitive and physical labor are two different things: you need to struggle through a challenging problem to build structural thinking capacity for higher-order thinking; skipping fraction math isn't just saving physical energy but skips building the schemas needed for calculus, linear algebra, and so on. Using a drill over a screwdriver just saves your arm muscles, and it doesn't condition you to expect wood to screw itself together without your input.
You still have to use the correct drill bits, so you have to know how to properly use a drill, but since those same tools are available as hand tools, its lazy to use a drill.
Imagine a world where a company invents an Automated Robotic Sculpting Arm.
You don't need to hold a chisel or hammer anymore. You simply stand in front of a block of marble and speak to the robot using natural language: "Sculpt me a realistic human torso, slightly leaning forward, capturing a sense of tension."
A novice steps up to the machine. They have never touched clay, never studied human anatomy, never felt the resistance of marble grain, and never made a mistake that chipped off an irreplaceable nose.
The robot chisels out a figure in seconds.
A veteran sculptor walks by and points out: "The muscle attachment at the collarbone is anatomically impossible, and the weight distribution makes the statue structurally unsound—it will tip over in a high wind."
The novice replies: "No problem! I don't need to know anatomy or physics. I'll just refine my prompt!"
So the novice turns to the robot and says: "Fix the collarbone so it looks anatomically correct, and adjust the weight distribution so it won't tip over."
The master sculptor will eventually die and that hard learned knowledge and finesse will be lost. The pointed details will be locked into a fixed context and become immutable and untransferable to other works which will eventually lead to only the same exact sculptures will be made. Sculpture ceases to be an expression on individual understanding of reality and becomes a standardized product.
Writing that made my stomach churn. It is nightmare fuel.
Ok you win. Everything I do needs to be a chisel and hammer and I must be a master of every trade I do. I wont use a drill ever again.
You need to understand when to use a drill and when to use a screwdriver, to be most effective.
That is not the issue here. It really is not.
Apparently it is
Would you use a drill to fit screws on sensible components or that required precise and careful fitting?
Probably wouldn't want to use any old drill in that job. Would need a multi-million dollar specialized drill for that use case.
Let's refine the question even more: would you put together a watch with a drill?
Yes. CNC machines are fantastic drills for producing watches. Micro-drills are also used to create tiny accurately placed holes in movement plates, bridges, cases, etc. Why do you ask?
Would you use a drill to assemble a watch?
You are being unnecessarily coy with your replies. You stated that using a drill or a screwdriver have no inherent difference, I am trying to establish there is one using your own argument.
The last reply was a shift in your original position. I am not talking about producing parts and components.
Change the question all you want. What does hard work have to do with watches?
I refined my question and replaced "put together" with "assemble" after your comment involving CNC and parts production. Felt as if I wasn't being clear enough in my words.
Back to the watch analogy.
Assembling a watch is a time consuming process, requiring patience and precision. It takes time to learn the process and failure, although not rewarding, is a crucial part of it.
Using an LLM to do whatever it gets used for cuts off the building of the delayed reward process and lowers the threshold for people to endure frustration in order to achieve a result.
A straight forward example: internet searching. A standard search result returns a series of possible pages where the answer for a given question may be. It may be the first link that supplies the information required, it may be the second, the tenth or a sum of the links, but it's up to the person doing the search to decide. And LLM returns a prechewed result that gives instant gratification but not long lasting learning.
Yeah, anyone can use it wrong. Im not arguing that. Thats why you don't use just any drill for watch making.
Apparently, you are. If you can equate using a drill to perform a task where the screwdriver is more adequate, you are not understanding the fundamental issue.
But you do you.
I wonder if search engines did the same thing.
No. Using a search engine justs presents a list of possible locations for an answer. There us still the need to check and access if one or the other is a possible solution and choose which is the better one. There is an involved process. The LLMs spit out a prescribed solution, with an enforced by marketing and ignorance presupposition it is correct.
They do not for the same reason libraries don't make people stupider.
They did not. Anything that requires serious research still requires work. Anything simple or trivial became easy to check rather than relying on what the most confident person around you said.
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