Not-writing things makes you worse at writing things and dumbs you down.
But, we knew that.
Discussion
Wait until the results come in from people who have abandoned reading.
it's already pretty bad the state of literacy in the education system now due to DEI woke nonsense as it is...
Not using an LLM also dumb you down, or does it simply imply you’re dumb?
It's the frozen 🍕 of software development.
Great, when you're in a rush, but you'll forget how to code and always need the LLM. Same way people forget how to cook.
Brains atrophy alarmingly fast. You have to actively attempt to stay intelligent, or you just rot.
People used to ask me what is your favorite programming language. My response ended up being “simply English” and that’s the vibe coding model going for. I am not sure if I see it as a frozen pizza, or some inferior thing. I might see it as a superior 3d printed pizza, a holy grail.
Computers don't actually understand English, tho.
Maybe. Not yet.
THEY'RE CALCULATORS, SIR.
You’re pointing to calculators and calling them calculators, there’s absolute truth in that. But to say that “they can only be calculators” and they shall stay in that way, that is an entirely different statement.
They're called "computers" because they compute. They are adding machines. They just add very very fast, now.
Good grief.
Maybe we won't need to write things anymore so the whole experiment is irrelevant.
It's like the GPS. We used to drive everywhere with just the rough map on our brain. Now it's less so. But the activity itself is not that important anymore. So, why should we care? ..
Adaptability is the core of evolution after all...
Technology shifts where we focus our effort, and we get better at the things we focus on. In aggregate our overall skill is probably not changing as long as we keep doing something.
They can't read a map or music.
They can't read anything, at all.
They can't cook.
They can't carry on a polite conversation.
They can't write.
They can't sew or keep house.
They can't budget.
They can't formulate a logical argument or do basic arithmetic.
They can't play board games or fill in a crossword puzzle.
They can't tie their shoes or screw in a lightbulb.
They can't...
They aren't replacing these things with higher things.
They're being turned into complete vegetables.
The gap between Average Joe and the Cognitive Elite used to be a small jump. Now, it's the Mariana Trench... and growing.
Need to strike the right balance between humanity-empowering and humanity-subtracting uses of technology
I think it's different, it's worse in my opinion.
To me reading and writing is the closest we have ever gotten to telepathy. There's the saying that a picture is worth a 1000 words, but sometimes a 1000 words are worth a 1000 pictures.
The actual process of writing is, for me, the process of thinking through an idea.
Yet I sometimes catch myself offloading thinking to an LLM, it's infuriating whenever I notice doing this, but I don't always catch myself doing it until it's too late (not sure if that makes sense). It's often for the stupidest reasons, such as when I'm trying to formulate a complex argument, I rewrite it once or twice, and it looks unreadable, I take my stream of thoughts and prompt the llm to "rewrite it so it doesn't read like a jumbled mess".
The more I find myself doing this, the worse I get at writing extemporaneously without "quickly putting the message into llama".
I used to pride myself on my ability to write, almost as much as my ability to code. I feel myself becoming dumber every time I offload my thinking to an LLM; and yet it's hard to stop because brains are designed to go towards the path of least resistence.
If I find myself doing this, having been an LLM skeptik for so long, I shudder to think what those who are pro LLMs do, and I am genuinely scared for the future, not for an AI uprising, but for the lowering of the relative intelligence of the average person if this keeps going.
I don't know what the solution is, but I know this isn't progress, and I know that if we don't stop it, it will become as big a problem as the overwellian surveillence state we live in
(no LLM was used to write this)