[_the_special_]

" will AI be a bicycle that we control, or an unstoppable train to destinations unknown? To put it in the same terms as the ad, will human will and initiative be flattened, or expanded?"

Interesting line of thinking here. I've never considered this but an observation from my usage of chat AIs at least is an increased willingness to defer my thought-organising process to the AI by just jotting down some random ideas and asking it to make it coherent. I guess on a personal level I'm flattening my own mind?

[btbuildem]

I find that terrifying -- when I do this, I feel I am willingly giving up hard-earned abilities, atrophying my ability to reason.

[danielheath]

I'm in two minds about it - in the strictest literal sense, it's true - but it also rhymes with Plato complaining about writing degrading the ability of scholars to memorize things.

[bayindirh]

Actually, Plato is not wrong. I'm a big pen and paper user, and write everything down. While it allows me to turn back six months, I can't turn two weeks back without my notebook in some cases.

Brain has a strange ability to understand that information is stored elsewhere. Write it, and you forget it. Take photos in a concert, and memories become fainter. Talk about something important, you start to forget it part by part.

AI is something way bigger. It's a dumb system which mimics us without the essence of the human or personal style, yet does mundane tasks without questioning. So you trade your own fine tuned, honed, polished ability to some GPUs which runs a software which is tuned for the masses. Like trading your beaten tungsten tool with a shiny iron one. Looks nice but way inferior. The ability to do these mundane tasks is the foundation for not doing the same tasks in a mundane way, or doing more complex tasks built on these mundane tasks. You rig your own foundations with explosives. Not wise.

I'd not do that. I don't use any AI systems in any of my tools.

[fl0ki]

> Take photos in a concert, and memories become fainter.

I don't know about short- or medium-term, but long-term the photos can remain objective anchors for memories that reduce the memory drift for everything all around them. When you have a photo of an event, even if you didn't take it yourself, it locks in many facts that individually weren't important enough to memorize but do constrain other possible facts and thus keep memory more accurate.

When I got into photography I took high-effort high-quality photos everywhere I went. There are so many minor events I wouldn't remember at all if not for the photos, and even for events I do remember, I likely would have forgotten that certain people even attended.

Long term, I can be completely objective about the times, places, people, conditions, etc. of a great many events in my life, and every time I refresh and reinforce memories it's anchored in those objective details.

There's a less objective angle to this that I still acknowledge and enjoy. When you take a good photo of a good moment, and look back on that as representative of the event, it has a way of making the entire event look that positive. You scroll back through a timeline of photos like this, it can make entire years of your life look as good as you want them to.

That's part of why I think there's a big difference between scrolling a backup of all your phone photos vs hand-curating albums (regardless of the device that took them). When you choose what you'll see in future you influence how you're going to feel about it, and that's an under-appreciated mechanism for investing in your future headspace.

[bayindirh]

Note: I'll take short snips from your quotes to keep this comment tidy.

> don't know about short- or medium-term, but long-term the photos can...

You're absolutely right, however I said concerts for a special reason.

> When I got into photography I took high-effort high-quality photos everywhere I went...

This is also what I do. When walking around in a city, or taking photos in a vacation, etc. You can do this. Because when taking photos in a relatively serene environment (when compared to a concert, esp. an open air, festival one), you can internalize whole event before taking that photo, so that photo becomes an anchor for that event. In a concert, everything is so fast. Trying to concentrate to take a good photo makes you ignore a large chunk which prevents you forming that emotion and memory.

> Long term, I can be completely objective about the times, places, people, conditions, etc. ...

True, but as I said, you had time to internalize that event before taking that shot. This is what it creates the anchor and reinforcing effect. You can't reinforce a memory you didn't form.

> There's a less objective angle to this that I still acknowledge and enjoy. ...

Photos bring joy, but not always. There are many positive photos which makes me feel bitter, or even sad.

> That's part of why I think there's a big difference between scrolling a backup of all your phone photos vs hand-curating albums ...

I can relate to that, but I also take a different approach. If I have the time and feel for it, I challenge myself with "1 scene, 1 shot", regardless of the camera I have with me. This allows you to ingest the scene you're in, take a purposeful look and decide which photo to take, which forces you to create a relationship with your surroundings. When you take that photo and revisit it in the future, that frame will make you remember the whole area where you searched for that one shot, and will bring tons of memories and visions back.

If I don't decide to or can't do that, I curate albums as you do, yes.

If you're interested, my photos are available at

https://flickr.com/zerocoder

https://instagram.com/hbayindir

P.S.: That flickr page needs some cleaning up and tidying.

[jjav]

> Write it, and you forget it.

For me, writing by hand means remembering.

I still lug around an actual notebook to all meetings and take notes by hand. I approximately never look at those notes later, because I remember everything important that I wrote.

I've tried every variant of taking notes electronically and the result is I don't remember any of it. Counterbalancing, it sure is easier to grep a text file than search on paper pages in my notebook.

But, having the info in my head is still orders of magnitude faster than grep, so taking notes on paper wins for me.

[bayindirh]

> For me, writing by hand means remembering.

When you're writing about a subject or meeting notes, sure. When you're writing a 30-item to do list, your brain will say "Nope, everything is on that notebook, refer to that".

As I noted in my original comment and elsewhere, I'm a heavy pen and paper user. I finish approximately two notebooks a year, plus I do my thinking/research on their dedicated notebooks.

Personal knowledge base and other digital notes are just distillations of these notebooks in a synced/searchable form, and I'm slowly making these public, as I have time.

[williamcotton]

Can you critique my usage of ChatGPT?

How exactly is this rigging my "own foundations with explosives"?

https://chat.openai.com/share/927ac3b7-2b3c-46ea-a74b-d0dec5...

[bayindirh]

Putting that there's no guarantees for correctness for AI models aside, you miss the opportunity to read the docs and learn (or at least be aware of) the whole capabilities which may help you in the future.

You can bookmark the relevant doc page, and return to that whenever you need it. Instead you now have a buddy which you can bug and get answers in general, so you slowly wither your ability to do research, read more complex docs, and learn with collateral information (i.e. you learn something, and be aware of other features, so you slowly learn and internalize the whole subject).

Instead you ask, and get a nibble of information which is harder to connect to other bigger corpus you might have. You probably saved time this instance, but if you read the docs, you'll progressively spend less time on the subject, saving you tons of time down the road, plus you'll sharpen your ability to read docs and be faster at searching, reading and understanding them.

[saghm]

These arguments seem like they'd apply equally well to googling for the documentation to a specific function and then using the answer from the preview snippet (or clicking the link, reading exactly what you need, and then closing the tab without reading any further). I'm not saying that means they're wrong, but it's hard not to feel like it would be hyperbole to call that "rigging your foundations with explosives".

[williamcotton]

Here are the tools I will be using today:

F#, Jupyter, Python, R, MySQL, PostgresQL, ZSH (awk, sed, fill in the rest), VS Code, Excel, Word, git, and probably more.

This weekend I continued to work my way through Learn You a Haskell For Great Good, taking time to go over the functional programming concepts in both Haskell and F#. In addition I read most of Data Science at the Command Line, where I was introduced to ggplot2, so I then worked my through the online ggplot2 book.

I'm not very interested in memorizing the complete syntax, standard library, and common third-party libraries for the myriad of tools that I've listed above. I don't really see the point of learning how to read through the MySQL documentation.

Here's what I want to have in my brain: Most of Townes Van Zandt, Willie Nelson, and the Grateful Dead's catalog of songs so I can play them on acoustic guitar without a songsheet as I like to make eye contact with the audience.

So yeah, thank you for telling me that my approach is slowly withering my abilities.

I'll put this as nice as I can: You are very judgmental.

[CuriouslyC]

You're not giving up your ability to reason, you're just reasoning at a higher level. Think of AI like an employee, CEOs don't lose their reasoning ability because they have employees to make their directives into reality.

[vanviegen]

Are you sure about that? :-)

[locopati]

based on what I've seen of CEOs, i wouldn't be so sure of that

[indigo0086]

Seems like a choice to me, one that you can choose not to make. The first choice is choosing to see AI as a doomsday device

[vasco]

Depends what the alternative is. If on average people would lose that fleeting thought and never dig into it or research it more it can be a huge net positive to write them down, even disorganized and having a history of what you thought about. And actually debate the thought with the AI and get an outside perspective.

On the other hand if on average people would in fact dig into them, you might lose the ability to organize your thoughts yourself over time, but I always think that sort of fear is overblown.

[bayindirh]

I have found that writing everything down eroded my ability to remember a couple of important tasks for the day, so I started to exercise that part of the brain to get the ability back.

Any capability of the brain not exercised will certainly wither. While brain consumes the most energy, it tries to minimize it at the same time. Using AI extensively to accomplish mundane tasks will rob you of the ability in the long run.

This is the law of the body. Use it or lose it.

[stiiv]

> an increased willingness to defer my thought-organising process to the AI by just jotting down some random ideas and asking it to make it coherent

...and then accepting that outcoming as sufficient, and moving on, right? Is the alternative that without the AI, you would spend more time researching and thinking about your ideas, pursuing (or stumbling upon) related ideas, and maybe ending up with a more broad understanding at the end of the endeavor?

If so, working with a chatbot is good to extent that you value economy. That is a worthy outcome in many circumstances. But the "inflated" alternative sounds valuable in its way too.

From a broad social/behavioral perspective, I wonder the extent to which the "inflated" way will die off (or perhaps adapt and become something new?) given these new tools.

[sbarre]

> > jotting down some random ideas and asking it to make it coherent

Isn't this is more or less the same thing as spending a bunch of time going to a bunch of webpages from Google search, except it takes way less time, arguably leaving _more_ time for the critical thinking and subsequent research you espouse?

> ...and then accepting that outcoming as sufficient, and moving on, right?

Much like you can either immediately trust what you read on the Internet, or apply some critical thinking and dig into it more, you can do the same with whatever an AI returns to you.

AI can be an accelerator for mundane tasks and help you get to the high-value work quicker, or it can be a lazy shortcut that lets you do less.

The same can be said for almost any tool.

[unraveller]

You can't separate Will from attention, attention spans or human initiative was already shattered way before AI, which is now the best hope for more people to leverage time and control to expand their minds. I'm sure that centaur-mind will be the norm soon, if it really is as good as it promises to be it won't be needed for long.

[nunez]

This goes beyond flattening. Given that only a handful of companies have the financial means to do AI at scale, and that those financial means are provided mostly by ads, I think that allowing these systems to essentially "think" for people like this will be unbelievably destructive for society long-term.