Good morning Will ☕️ I think people will get to dependent on the AI, that’s why I’m trying to teach my kids stuff without it. I fear that people who only learn through AI use will lose their critical thinking skills. It is like the old theory that everyone starts out with a photographic memory, but over time you lose it if you don’t actively use it on a regular bases. In my work as a delivery driver, a few years back they gave us navigation and told us to run the routes the way the computer told us to… the problem with this is that the computer didn’t always recognize commercial stops that closed by a certain time, didn’t always know that their weren’t always streets where it thought, and didn’t understand traffic, so a lot of us still ran the routes a specific way. Now I can tell the drivers that became dependent on the computer telling them where to go, most of them can’t read a map anymore and I fear AI will have that effect on people that let it have that much control in their lives. Don’t get me wrong, I think AI is a great tool as well though, but I think programmers should learn the code before they give the wheel to AI.
Discussion
I think ai is a great learning tool personally. I don’t think it stops critical thinking, i believe it enhances it. It knows so much stuff so it’s like a search engine of knowledge.
The problem i was eluding to was the fact that ais are almost too good at certain things to the point you don’t really have to think about how to do something. You depend on some machine to do it for you.
We depend on machines all the time: like to do mathematical calculations (calculators, computers). we don’t do it on paper anymore. It’s slow, tedious, and error prone. if the tool is good enough and accurate most of the time, people will just use it instead of doing the more difficult thing.
I think whats happening is we’re offloading neural cycles to machines to give us more time to do things we want to do, the same way we offloaded physical work to machines in the industrial age (tractors, etc)
I understand that, but when people start just contracting out all the menial tasks to ai, over time that menial task is memory holed and lost. That necessarily isn’t that important as long as all the systems are still operating, but what if there is a hiccup in the system (power loss, programming error, etc.) and the menial skill was lost… look at how dependent people are on the internet these days, there are dozens of tools in my house that depend on the internet… even though they really don’t need to. If I have the graphics and the program to print and cut something with my Cricut on my computer, why does the program require the internet to allow my cricut to work. There are always going to be variables that the machine can’t handle and people need to be able to fall back to a tiny little insignificant skill at some point and I just don’t want us to lose those.