Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

ofjcihen

I know that the common refrain is “think of yourself as a manager now” but I’ve actually taken the opposite approach and have been telling anyone I train the same. Diving deeper into technical understanding makes more sense to me at this point both as a way to make yourself more useful in the age of AI and also to use AI more effectively. I regularly tell the kids to grab a text book on a subject that interests them and I do the same. I’m willing to bet deep understanding is going to become a commodity soon.

bartek_gdn

I liked the ending well said

zloy88

Maybe it's a way of perspective. I adore to use AI to actually learn, so I don't feel like I offload thinking. I use AI to do all the research which earlier I did manual through google search. I still make my own decisions, I just let Claude spoon feed me all infos I want and need. Feels great man

AnEro

When I use a calculator, I atleast try to get with in a few digits of what I think the anwser is in my head. Mostly since when I was younger I had a very passionate teacher about how much slower everyone is now because of calculators on simple math. I just apply the same thing with LLMs, just try and think of how and what I would have said and see how close I was. Only thing I change is I don't trust the anwsers and accept some nuance in the given context. It's a double edge sword because then I crash out over it more than if I don't. When it over and under explaining the wrong sections or when it gets to an objectively terrible solution that technically anwsers the question. It feels like a student trying to get brownie points and/or give fluffed anwsers for the sake of not leaving anything blank on a test.

nsxwolf

Having a very dangerous AI standoff at work, where people are debating wether or not to use a particular connection pooling / threading strategy to fix a production issue, and everyone is unqualified to answer and is instead arguing what their agent said. They are just straight up admitting they don't know anything, and advocate fiercely for their agent's recommendation. No one cares, no one tries to stop this behavior. It's seen as good, apparently. I admitted that I don't know enough to have an opinion at the moment, I certainly don't know how to judge the contradictory opinions of multiple frontier AIs, and I fear that just made me look incompetent.

ericpauley

> What are we automating? Human work or human agency? Human tasks or human thinking? I find it's so easy to convince oneself they're doing the former when it's increasingly the latter. The thinking part is so often provided by default by the models, or is a single prompt away. The thoughts are so syntactically (though not stylistically) perfect that it's difficult to ignore them and reason greenfield. What's the solution? Given how keen models are to short-circuit the thinking process it could be the only solution is to silo off tasks/ideas. Choosing which mental tasks to silo off is itself incredibly difficult especially when there's a pressure to deliver rapidly (and in quantity) on those tasks.

MSkill1

I do feel like I'm offloading thinking to an AI, but I think that's a good thing. I envision a world where users and AI are aligned without corporate interference. AI lets me offload things that I don't need to know and frees up my brain to push farther than I could before. At least that's how it feels to me.

erelong

imo no way But this varies from person to person Some of us overthink already and offloading to AI just enables us to overthink more in other directions than we would if we didn't have ai

NguyenDat377

Personally, I use AI to learn more about Backend Engineering actually, so it's fine for me. Beside I can also use AI to suggest and it's me verifying the idea so that's a no for me

throw10920

> Side note: his startup is replacing human engineers by capturing their every input and operation, but without their explicit consent. ...huh. It's a "startup", so it's not Meta capturing their employees' inputs. I wonder what it could be.

iLoveOncall

If you offload any of your thinking to AI, you're offloading too much of your thinking to AI. Offload your execution, not your thinking.

datakan

How much of the thinking is involved in asking the right question, versus coming to the correct answer? I don't have a real answer to that but it does seem to be worth considering.

Ozzie_osman

Decisions are special things. One of the golden rules of life is that a person (or entity) making decisions is somehow impacted or otherwise getting feedback on the repercussions of those decisions. When you cognitively surrender to AI, or to another person (be it a leader/manager, or a subordinate/report), you are asking for trouble.

verzali

Some of us are, yes. I've noticed it when interviewing interns. A surprising number seem unable to think on their feet or solve problems without immediately reaching for chatgpt. I don't necessarily expect you to be able to solve a problem entirely without tools, but you should be able to give me the outline of how to go about something and why you would go that way. After all, if you are just going to spit out AI, I will just get AI to do your job...

dentm42

The question presumes that most of us are "thinking" in the first place, when in actuality, most of us are just acting according to the patterns that have emerged from our encounters with the thoughts of others. We generally adopt them and/or try to hallucinate coherence when they conflict. Very few people actually "think". It's hard work and takes time. We neither have (take) the time nor are we particularly motivated to put in the work because the patterns we have learned from others are useful enough to achieve the low goals we set for ourselves. IOW - modern AI is simply an extension of the lack of thinking that characterizes the modern life... It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.

theultdev

"we" no. just allows me to think about the stuff that matters. and work on things that would usually be out of my element. if you aren't thinking more than ever, you're using ai wrong.

throwaway2027

Maybe, let me ask my coding agent what he thinks about this.

ergonaught

It's a well done and thought-provoking article. The reality is that most humans do very little actual thinking of their own anyway, and, if you believe that what LLMs produce constitutes a form of intelligence, it does seem "more intelligent" than most humans. So: is outsourcing thinking a net improvement for a majority of users? I use several models, daily, and they seem "reasonably conditioned" that they are only input to my thinking and not "my thinking". I correct them constantly; they are wrong (in reasoning/logic, in actual facts) frequently. They are demonstrably "not smarter" than I am. And yet I know many people who can "do more" with them as a "thinking" tool. I can say that "the problem" is they can't spot the errors, but they can't or won't do that in their ordinary lives, either, so, again, is it a net improvement for them? Interesting times and all that.

dannykis

I like the colonialism conversation.