Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them

lerp-io

dont you gain skills with ai? it teaches you how to do stuff, you ask it questions, etc like a tutor?

igor_mart

My skills was forged in the other type of school, I know how to operate a lathe and milling machine but I don't think it's a good thing now and very dangerous too. The time dictates the skills. But understanding of the basic life/ physical principles was fired in me by my father, so I don't rely to school on that, it's the parent who is responsible.

itmitica

Why would cognitive overload work better? AI is a tool to help you see the forest from the trees. You reading articles the old fashion way can be akin to seeing the trees but not seeing the actual forest. Young minds tend to learn. How they do it, the old fashion way, the new AI way, they will learn. Many blank out in school on different subjects and the cognitive overload byproduct follows them all their life making them wary of new things. And finally, maybe you, personally, are reaching a limit in your comprehension of the modern world, and you show it by fighting the wrong battle with the wrong arguments. Or maybe you are onto something.

ookblah

i feel like people should be focusing on the damaging things that aren't just "ai" (like what he hell does that even mean, it's too broad?). dark app patterns, gambling, etc. like seriously, i know we all want to hate on llms or whatever stealing our jobs or making us stupider but has this been any different from the past in that regard? whether it be radio, tv, computer, internet, video games, etc. all of these claimed to be doing something "to the children" but i agree with another comment said kids will figure out a way to learn and utilize the tools given to them. did me "offloading" my thinking to google or some computer instead of cracking open some library book or doing calculations by hand damage my thinking at the time? no... because a sufficiently motivated person will learn regardless, figure out why things work the way they do, and rather it's better access to said information that helps. we should be fixing the motivation problem rather than the tools which we've been trying to do for decades. teach people the framework for solving problems and critical thinking. kids nowadays have way more things demanding their attention and it's been on a decline far before this AI wave (cough social media). we literally sound like old farts lol.

RcouF1uZ4gsC

Books also cause loss of skills. One effect of widespread books is we don’t have poets like Homer. We don’t develop the memorization skills like they did in the past. And that’s ok. We can use the bandwidth for other stuff.

bitbasher

It aligns with my experience and what I have seen. Looking at this through the lenses of writing software; much of "learning" to write software comes down to experience. When you see an error like, "error: expected ‘,’ or ‘;’ before ‘include’" you know what happened and where to look because you've seen it a hundred times before. AI takes that away. It's not inherently bad, it's great that it can solve those sort of things for you. However, the second order effects are terrible. You end up never developing that experience. Is this simply evolution of the craft? Is that experience no longer necessary? I could be wrong, but I believe that experience is necessary and losing it will be a net negative. Furthermore, the reduction of experience will increase dependency on these tools and the companies that provide them.

vidarh

This is such a lazy argument. Every tool that displaces old tools causes skills to be lost when those skills are no longer needed. To the extent that people still need to be able to critically assess what AI delivers to achieve their goals, they will still pick up those skills or fail. They will then need to either invest the time to learn, or they'll fail to find employment, or fail in other aspects of life. When we see people lamenting lost skills like this, it is usually a result of them overestimating the continued necessity of certain skills in the face of new technology. You won't suddenly have a generation of software developers (for example) who don't know the necessary skills to do their work, but you may get a generation of software developers who don't have the skills you think are necessary to do their work.

adi_kurian

Lots of people gaining skills with AI too.

ramesh31

The skills I've lost are no longer valuable. No one with a brain will ever spend another minute writing HTML/CSS by hand anymore. But I spent a decade of my career doing that all day long every day. It's time to move on and up. The horizon for software is limitless now that we've been freed of the drudgery.

childintime

Skills have a life cyle. That's something you learn as you get older. You are inevitably a part, an expression, of the time you grow up in. We become obsolete by the time we die. We die knowing our exact knowledge can't be replaced, it dies with us.

casey2

Research papers are already summarized, at the top there is a section called "Abstract" which includes the summary. Usually the first and last sentences are the relevant abstraction layer for most people. When automation comes along it gives humans the time to actually think about what they are doing and whether it even makes sense. Is your goal to motivate some research? That likely requires a conversation with one or more authors. Otherwise it's an exercise in narcissism. I am the elite who will bestow this sacred knowledge unto the commoners and cross-disciplinary researchers who cannae understand it without me. With automation more people are unfit, but some people are better in every metric that exists. What's important is that everybody has the freedom, if they wish, to achieve those top metrics. Insofar as those metrics don't involve direct control overs resources, since those will always be gatekept and require the approval of others.

the_real_cher

I like how it lets me pick what skills I want to learn. I want to run NixOS but I don't want to to learn their esoteric programming language? A.I. I want to set up a proxmox server but I don't want to read the entire manual and do extensive research I just want some working containers on my local network? A.I. This frees me up to learn other things