In Remarks on AI from NZ, Neal Stephenson captures something I’ve been grappling with as I learn to program: a sense that leveraging AI for certain tasks can rob us of the opportunity to learn.
Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation. […] Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned. I follow conversations among professional educators who all report the same phenomenon, which is that their students use ChatGPT for everything, and in consequence learn nothing. We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down. Earlier I spoke somewhat derisively of lapdogs. We might ask ourselves who is really the lapdog in a world full of powerful AIs.
The post also reflects on other forms of intelligence from a perspective that was new to me.
via Simon Willison
In Calculators & Writing, Chris Coyer points to something that’s been lingering in the back of my mind when using AI for certain tasks. My partner actually brought this up to me a while ago, and at the time I thought they were wrong – but I’ve come around. The quote below gets to the heart of it:
… with writing, humans are thinking, feeling, and communicating. Computers do not do these things.
Using AI to write means you’re robbed of the thinking and feeling it takes to write, which is (most?) of the value. Communicating, I suppose, you’re doing either way, you’re just communicating something you didn’t think about or feel if your writing is generated, which is fucked.
Despite remarkable progress in AI, some tasks still demand our effortful engagement. Learning, for example, requires one “to make eye contact with the idea” because the value lies in the effort, not just the outcome.
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