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