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Comment by quibono | Hacker News Reader

I have been thinking about this for a while. I'm not a Luddite, I can see the amazing value that modern AI brings, and how useful it can be.

At the same time I can't help but wonder that this is almost too much for us to cope, the LLMs are _too_ easy to use. I think we're very good at pretending there isn't a problem here but there is definitely going to be some cognitive decline happening.

We want to pretend like reading over the output of an LLM is nearly the same as us making those changes ourselves but I think there's a lot of value in those boring and manual steps. And most people (including me) will be too lazy to not eventually offload most things to the LLMs.

In a way this is similar to how watching a lecture tends to give one an "impression" of understanding that doesn't correlate with reality. We need hands-on work and some course work to get our monkey brains engaged.

I can only imagine what effects this is going to have in education.

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We've surrendered many uses of our cognitive power throughout the centuries while replacing by others.

Our cognition didn't evolve to produce arguments for online discussions, but for making crude tools and hunting. As we stopped applying our intelligence towards these uses as a result of our tools, we simply shifted it to new problems that were unthinkable previously.

A caveman probably wouldn't care too much about algebra, a topic most children learn today.

We should stop thinking about the problems AI trivialized and, under the assumption that AI won't fully replace human capability (a key assumption), start thinking about the problems that were previously out of reach. Education would then start focusing on that.

This is true, but the nature of declining cognition is to not even notice what used to be possible.

Taking clothing for example, there's more available now than ever. It's disposable at great cost to the environment and the workers that produce it, but very little to you.

Yet, I bet you cannot evaluate garments, construction, or fabric quality. You may not know how to wash woolens and linens. You may have only worn smelly plastic workout clothing and plastic suits for formal events.

You may never have worn a piece of clothing that actually fit your body.

You may not realize that you can alter any clothing, that most clothing was intended to be altered once upon a time. Or that older garments were both more expensive and higher quality, because the expectation was the most important items would need to last for a decade.

The Luddite's central objections about automation was about declining working conditions (objecting to child labour, for instance), bad pay, and declining quality. They used the 'obnoxious' machines they broke. They saw what was being lost and demanded better (without demanding no machines at all).

Later, the rise of unionization brought about many of the changes they'd asked for decades before.

I hope this current technologic movement doesn't end where fast fashion has, with influencers buying a new outfit [repo] every day for a year. A vortex of undifferentiated slop for its own sake.

> The Luddite's central objections about automation was about declining working conditions

I can also recommend the book "Blood in the Machine" by Brian Merchant [0][1] which is precisely about this.

[0] https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/bloo...

[1] https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/about

The fast fashion parallel is an apt one. Cheap slop (both clothes and code) only can exist because our system does not value the environment or human rights as much as it values profit. It makes me somewhat pessimistic about the future of the AI movement, because we haven't managed to curtail these kinds of abuses in already existing industries. :~/

Are you going to bring up the point where you spent 10-15% of your income on clothing back then. A worthwhile trade was made.

I don't think externalizing harms to child labourers in the 'third world' is worth the next quarter of LVMH's profits mildly disappointing investor expectations.

Clothing is still stitched together with human hands, and I'd gladly pay much more to know that I'm not underwriting massive harm.

Would you still happily buy your cheap t-shirt if you had to meet the person who stitched it together for a few cents an hour?

Right, but algebra is free. You can do it with a pencil and paper

AI is not free. Even "free" and open source models require complex silicon to operate. The silicon and copper is assembled in complex fabrication plants. Those plants are very close to geopolitical belligerents

What I resist is the dependence. I'm not willing to trade short term productivity, for long term dependence

>I'm not willing to trade short term productivity, for long term dependence

Then you're already so lost you'll never recover. Walk away from your phone and computer. Walk away from your infrastructure and chlorinated water. Walk away from your medicine and antibiotics. Humanity has built a huge pile of dependencies on itself already.

Telephone networks are state properties; so is the water system. The only scenarios where they fail are if my nation-state actually collapses. (And even then, I've hedged for that - I know where I would emigrate)

It's about the cost and benefit of a given dependence.

Letting computers perform rote mental labor for us took us to new horizons of science, and for most of us, didn't make us particularly worse at thinking - the only population whose thinking could have been impoverished by computers are pupils, but that's just an educational debate for people in that system to have.

AI is a general intelligence calculator. If you allow it, it will perform almost every logical and emotional duty for you: a calculator can't write your birthday greetings or reassure you how you're absolutely right to have broken up with someone over them not believing in UFOs... It's a common enough documented experience to start using LLMs for small practical tasks like search or coding, and then gradually fall into emotional dependence and delusion.

We seek this kind of relief because thinking is hard. It's terrifying to think of how you'd be judged for your choices, to fall behind your peers, to make mistakes... But without these, you loose the fundamental part of what makes you human. You shouldn't need a data-center to process your own emotions.

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