AI was great until it was not

sdevonoes

It’s the same at work. You don’t ask your colleagues for help anymore, you ask the agent. You can clone all the necessary repos, link to confluence/figma/drive and then ask. It sucks. I don’t care about being efficient (that’s something the executives care about). I care about how I live my life, and at work that means learning from others (and offer the little knowledge I have to others)… if it takes 2 engineers 2h to solve a bug (vs 20 min for 1 engineer and an agent) then thats great for me. I get the chance to exercise my brain, solve a bug, learn from other engineer and have a bond with that individual. If I solve the bug in 20min with an agent, well, that’s something my boss would love, but I personally would have gained nothing… and would have to jump to solve more bugs alone in the remaining 100 minutes (which feels like running a marathon)

intended

I’m being reminded of “journey before destination”, quite a bit since AI has come out. Looking at people who are happiest leveraging it, it’s people who want to build something. The people who are maximizing its utility are those with (deep) pre existing expertise. For people who want to understand and think deeply about things, it’s … less useful. It can be used to create prototypes, or explain terms. This is the path that is most precarious. Its utility is entirely dependent on being self motivated learners. As the article showed, at some point people who want to just build, and don’t care about the learning, will just use ChatGPT to build their homework. The situation seems like we are consuming the seed stock of expertise. If evidence turns up of students and new entrants to the labour market finding ways to grow, learn skills or just find employment, the picture would clear up.

bemtevi

> In particular, it would be pretty sad to destroy one of the few things that makes our life meaningful, not the fancy prize or the fancy position, but simply having a community to share and discuss and learn. Exactly. The problem is a weird one though, because there are at least independent forces that are working together here: (1) The people that are inventing AI or those that are pro-AI are typically those that have been conditioned to enjoy the "information rush" and place personal superificial enjoyment over human interaction. Lots of nerds/geeks simply love the idea of having a playground devoid of the necessity to actual interact outside their microcosm and so they think AI is the best thing since sliced bread. They're often people who were taunted in school or at least partially ostracized early in life because of their intelligence and take emotional comfort in tech. (2) The perverted incentives of academia reward publishing and in general the incentives of capitalism create an arms race to be as efficient as possible at the cost of goods like "community" that only accrue vague benefits often outside the capitalistic system. So people tend to use AI. (3) Very advanced technology itself weakens and even destroys smaller communities whose members then seek out technology as a superificial salve to ease what they consciously or subconsciously feel as something missing. AI was never great. Knowledge as an end in itself is not a good thing and we should seek knowledge to better ourselves in a myriad of ways. But today it's just sought out for material and capitalistic advancement, which prevents our using it to actually become wiser and enjoy the basics of life. The only people who defend it are those who are already addicted to it, or those who don't want to experience the cognitive dissonance of the truth of its harmful nature.

jakubmazanec

Not worth reading. A lot of whining about ChatGPT and lazy Oxford students, not enough substance, only "wisdoms" like "But mirrors can be dangerous if we stay for too long too charmed by our own reflection".

tarkin2

Society benefits when in person collaboration builds understanding and creates new ideas and approaches /in both parties/. Since now the former potential collaborators are feeding on more or less the same generated content, it's hard to see how AI will replace that. And that's not the mention the further alienation it causes, as heavily alluded to in the article.

UpsideDownRide

I feel like people are trapping themselves with LLM use patterns. As OP has noted it's a pretty damn good self tutor tool, it's also great for offloading tasks you don't care about. But it will be devastating when people use it to do the important things foe them instead. Potential bright side is that those people that will put in actual work and learn how to use AI as a complement and not replacement should have sizeable competitive advantage. LLMs are still dumb af in many ways.

surgi

I somewhat agree with the article on the narrative level. Lately, my thoughts on our LLM future darkened a tad, too. I find the parallel between LLMs and Sophons from the 3-Body Problem novels increasingly accurate. That is, specifically, in terms of their effect of stalling human progress. Sure, anybody can opt out of using LLMs (unlike with Sophons), so the restriction on progress seems kind of "soft" in this sense, but the chances of someone choosing to do so aren't too high, IMO. It is so much easier to avoid forcing yourself to learn or explore hard stuff and just ask the model instead. While I tend to support this in a field such as SW Engineering (if only the Standards and Quality Control aspects advanced as fast as raw code generation...), I share the same fears as Tao and others regarding Mathematics (and not just Mathematics; Computer Science, which ultimately underlies SWE, is on the spotlight as well).

thewhitetulip

I was wondering about this the other day Thank God OpenAI didn't come up with Docker. Otherwise we would be drinking water from bottles rhat are docker enabled

plesiv

Beautiful writing style. So light, still eloquent.

RugnirViking

Reads like a diary entry. I sympathise, I just wish there were some conclusion the piece could come to, some action I could take or insight I could gleam. But nope, its just another soul trapped in the torment matrix. (to be clear, there is good reason there is no call to action: a big part of the horror of all this is that there is no clear thing anyone can do)

AnodicElegy

I'm glad I finished my Ph.D. before any of this stuff hit the market. It sounds like it would have been a substantially different experience, and I suspect I might not have finished it with as solid a grasp on my thesis subject as I have. Her comment about the Mathematica notebook really hits home. As a scientist, not a software engineer, who uses code as a tool to speed up more critical parts of my work, I was thrilled to have the chance to learn programming skills on the job. I could justify it because the time saved by the fruits of it outran the time I spent learning it. I can't do that anymore. I'm not building software, just scripting, so even the cheapest models today can give me suitable code quicker than I could write it myself. So I can no longer justify learning new programming skills, at least on work time. I'm glad I had a few years to pick up the basics before these tools became available.

simianwords

Time and time again, I see the same complaints. A new technology comes and it removes bottlenecks. The ideal person should be ecstatic with new capabilities being unlocked. But they are complaining. Why? They don't trust their peers to use it properly and externalise the concerns to the technology itself. > The problem is that the little chatbot in our pockets is making us more isolated and in so, it’s making us stray further from this humble goal: to learn I don't understand the author here, ChatGPT (as admitted by herself) does help people learn. Far more than what was possible before. Her only complaint is that society is not able to leverage ChatGPT to further the spirit of physics, but that's on her on peers and not on the technology. As usual, society adapts given enough time.

mono442

The purpose of a university is to provide a paper stating that one has completed it. If llms can do something decently, it is a waste of time to learn it properly.

poulpy123

It's not the focus of the post but there is a word missing at the end of the post and it is "PhD supervisor". There are supposed the first person to interact with about your

nojvek

> In particular, it would be pretty sad to destroy one of the few things that makes our life meaningful, not the fancy prize or the fancy position, but simply having a community to share and discuss and learn. To learn things. That is a beautiful thing. That is indeed a beautiful thing. Even at work, everything is codex/claude. Don't review code. If you are reading code, you are in the past. Everyone thinks some other company has achieved a 100x way of being productive by vibing their way. Don't ask questions, ask claude to figure it out. I really enjoyed building products for last 20 years. This year it feels different. Like we care less about our products, about the little details, about the users. Slop is okay, as long as you're moving fast. But moving fast for what?