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Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

Using an LLM to handle a task for you seems a lot like letting a car move you. Cars will make you “fat and lazy” if you never move your body otherwise, but it’s fairly clear to see that this is avoidable.

The research seems to always get (intentionally?) misconstrued at headlines that LLM is “bad for you” as opposed to more mundanely stealing opportunities for exercise and practice of mental activities if you let it.

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I like how people come up with some analogy (and all analogies are wrong by definition) and then attack said analogy and based on that make a declaration on the original statement. But what if we use a different analogy: basically using an LLM is like skipping the whole learning process - not learning how to read, not learning how to write and not learning how to think, then what?

Learning to read, learning to write, learning to think, only have value because of the outcomes they produce.

If the outcomes can be reached with just AI, then AI has all the value.

"If" is doing an enormous amount of work here.

Don‘t take it personally, you might be right in your extreme position, but this feels like a horrible take on what it means to be human.

"What it means to be human is to work 16 hours a day for someone else taking home just enough salary to survive another day, because you too, someday could become a millionaire" --HN

A lot of what humanity does seems to be a persistent terrible take.

Does a human only have value then once they have learned to do those things?

I hope you count "stimulating our minds for either learning or imaginative purposes" as one of those outcomes because if you only count "work produced and kpis met" as an outcome then that sounds pretty bleak.

> Learning to read, learning to write, learning to think, only have value because of the outcomes they produce

Only have economic value maybe.

Humans have more value than just whatever economic crap they produce

> basically using an LLM is like skipping the whole learning process - not learning how to read, not learning how to write and not learning how to think, then what?

I take this same argument and fold it slightly.

Think back to Cliff's Notes. A student has a paper due. They are low on time. They use Cliff's Notes to help them write a paper and get at least a passing grade.

If the student does this one time or for an occasional crunch, there's not a big issue.

If the student does this all the time, and then later complains they didn't get a good education, who should have the accountability for that?

Interestingly enough, the act of writing notes is evidentially a very effective learning method.

> Interestingly enough, the act of writing notes is evidentially a very effective learning method.

In case you don't know, CliffsNotes isn't you writing notes, it's using someone else's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CliffsNotes

Just so long as we don't get something that is to LLMs as car-centric urban design is to cars.

Someone suggests putting all the stuff the average person needs within 15 minutes of the average person's home, and soon after we got a conspiracy theory about 15 minute cities being soviet control gates you'll need permission to get out of.

LLMs are already capable of inventing their own conspiracy theories, and are already effective persuaders, so if we do get stuck, we're not getting un-stuck.

> Cars will make you “fat and lazy” if you never move your body otherwise, but it’s fairly clear to see that this is avoidable.

why would you choose to compare ai to cars? you seem to be defending ai, but to compare it to cars... cars have been a horrible development.

I don't own a car, I don't drive a car, and I will never live in a city that has been made for a car primarily. That is not a majority-opinion nor majority-behavior in the US.

Cars are obviously useful at moving things around places (eg. Taxis are great, Fedex would never make sense as a service with public transit), but shaping our civic society around them have been terrible for the humans within it.

AI is obviously useful, and has proven clear use-cases that generate value. I think it'll be terrible if we make civic society for it like we did the car.

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