> if it takes 1 hour to get one answer by hand, but only 20 minutes for the machine, and 20 minutes to check the answer, the user still comes out ahead
IF the machine actually got it right.
IF the machine actually got it right.
1) spend 10 hours doing all of them by hand
2) spend 3h 20 waiting for the machine, 3h 20 checking the machine, and 1h replacing the machine's mistake with a hand-written version, for a total of 7h 40
(I never trust marketing claims, so I doubt 90% accuracy; but also it generally takes LLMs a few seconds rather than tens of minutes to produce an output to be checked).
I think it's tempting but oversimple to focus on "output" and "time saved generating it," but that misses all the other stuff that happens while doing something, especially when it's a "softer" task (vs. say, mechanical calculation). It also seems like a mindset focused on selling an application rather than doing a better job.
I don't think that captures what I'm thinking about, which is more skills atrophy ("Children of the Magenta") problem than a conflict of interest problem.
https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/sp/2015/05/msp2015050...
> William Langewiesche's article analyzing the June 2009 crash of Air France flight 447 comes to this conclusion: “We are locked into a spiral in which poor human performance begets automation, which worsens human performance, which begets increasing automation” (www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash).
> ...
> Langewiesche's rewording of these laws is that “the effect of automation is to reduce the cockpit workload when the workload is low and to increase it when the workload is high” and that “once you put pilots on automation, their manual abilities degrade and their flight-path awareness is dulled: flying becomes a monitoring task, an abstraction on a screen, a mind-numbing wait for the next hotel.”
I still think it's a concern at least as old as writing, given what Socrates is reported to have said about writing — that it meant we never learned to properly remember, and it was an illusion of understanding rather than actual understanding.
(That isn't a "no", by the way; merely that the concern isn't new).