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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

30 years ago my math teacher already referred to our calculators (Casio fx82s) as “cerebral prosthetics”. I’ve always used that for our bicycles of the mind.

Computers change who I am, for example they make me remember better and be more punctual. Probably indeed my smartphone messes with my ability to hold sustained attention.

But this article. it feels like one of those “why so complicated” ones. Why “our consciousness is partly in a machine”. It’s all just a matter of definitions. For example advocates of EMT and non-advocates probably just differ in some definition. It feels so unimportant. Other than that, nice read.

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Yet most of the people now struggle with some basic calculations: “your calculator history is more embarrassing than your browser history”.

Ie “use it or loose it” kind of vibe.

That’s why one of the possible threats of AI is if one would “forget” how to reason. Or even worse: brain rewires itself to never being able to reason again.

Then again, for me personally it’s a very low probability in our lifetime: ie no that kind of earth-shattering changes of either real AI or, say, nuclear fusion in this century.

However I would love to see long-term studies of someone really smart start only watching tictoc, reels and shorts (and doing nothing else). With brain scanning and what have you.

> Ie “use it or loose it” kind of vibe.

> That’s why one of the possible threats of AI is if one would “forget” how to reason. Or even worse: brain rewires itself to never being able to reason again.

The "WALL-E/Idiocracy"-ification of humanity. It won't get so bad that we lose our ability to reason, but we're definitely losing something. Perhaps it's just our inevitable evolution.

The Roman legion marched up to 3mph, 18 miles a day bearing up to 70lbs.

They did this on considerably less nutrition and with smaller frames than your average American today.

The average human doesn't need to be that fit and strong anymore. Just like the future human won't need to be so intelligent anymore.

And yet it feels like maybe we shouldn't be giving that up so easily...

Idk, I simply enjoy gathering knowledge and understanding things.

Formally educated as a biologist, nobody ever forced me to install Gentoo. Or compile kernels, or self-host all the things, or read Harari. It was all just curiosity. And I believe many if not most people here are like that.

So be careful generalizing I guess I’d say.

Rightly so - I happen to enjoy staying fit and strong far beyond what my life needs of me. I also enjoy keeping my mind enriched.

But the reality is that a sedentary lifestyle is the norm in the aggregate, despite the numerous people who buck the trend

“I take a gramme and only am.”

I always think this when doom scrolling. I just can’t do it for very long without chiding myself. And now I see this generation below me who needs some moment for them selves every day: “I’m going to take some me time.” And what do they do? Take the somma (like YT shorts). It’s not inducing happiness. I worry sometimes.

> The average human doesn't need to be that fit and strong anymore. Just like the future human won't need to be so intelligent anymore.

I disagree. What saved us from physical toil was not physical fitness, but ingenuity. What keeps the world running is still ingenuity, and all signs point to the exact opposite of what you're saying: we'll need even smarter people in the future.

In most cases AI doesn't even lower the bar for anyone and makes topics harder to understand on a sufficiently deep level to do anything useful with that knowledge. With LLMs too many conflate communication with understanding. A robot middleman merely relaying the understanding of other humans does not itself possess that understanding.

I don't think we're in disagreement. In the past the environment necessitated that even scholars be fit and strong because they probably had to carry tomes around and fetch things from shelves whereas today we carry more than the Great Library in the palm of our hands.

The plough spared people from back breaking labour but now we have the opposite problem where less than 25 percent of Americans walk for more than ten minutes continuously in a typical week[1] and this presents both health problems both MSK and cardiovascular but also burdens on the healthcare system.

You seem to place a lot of faith in LLMs just being middlemen but the real life proof seems to be that many people, especially children and students, are leaning on it heavily in place of learning and understanding

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121130151132.h...

> most of the people now struggle with some basic calculations

When was the time "most" didn't struggle?

I was talking about people in school where those things were forbidden vs them again couple of decades later.

as a programmer i always love when i can understand algorithms to the point i can do them by hand

same thing for numerical computations, i just watched a videos about handmade logarithms tables, and without this i don't grasp the concept much

it's a common issue for me that very often if I use a tool directly, i don't understand the principles behind and it feels all kinds of wrong

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