[qsera]

We should be more worried what AI will due to the ability of an average human to think.

Not that I think there is a lot of thinking going on now anyway, thanks to our beloved smartphones.

But just think about a time when human ability to reason has atrophied globally. AI might even give us true Idiocracy!

[theirbrbeu7474]

You think smartphones are the cause of atrophy ?

No sir, there was nothing there to begin with - if you read recent history, you'll see that it's full of stupidity, and a few rabble rousers leaving entire nations by the nose.

With the mollification off the smartphone, we've merely taken off the edge of this killing machine.

[hoherd]

> We should be more worried what AI will due to the ability of an average human to think.

I had a wake up call on this yesterday. After a recent HN thread about Zed editor, I decided to give it another try, so I loaded it up, disabled AI, and tried writing some code from scratch. No AI completion, no intellisence. Two things came to mind. First, my editor seems so much more peaceful without being told what to do. Second, it was a bit scary how lost I felt. It was obvious that my own ability to communicate through code had declined a bit since I began using AI coding assistants. It turns out that as expected, coding assistants really are competitive cognitive artifacts. After that experience, I've decided that I am going to do at least part of my coding with all completions turned off. Unfortunately at work you are paid to produce quickly, so I think my AI free editor will have to be reserved for personal projects.

Further related to your statement about thought, the hallucinations persist, and even last night I got a response about 80's pop culture that was over 50% bullshit. Just imagine what intentional persuasion through LLM models will do to society. Independent thought has never been more important.

[t0bia_s]

Similar rhetoric was allways there with new technologies. Calculators, radio, cameras, phones, computers, smartphones, social networks...

Regulations do more harm than learning process from mistakes.

[getnewmaterial]

Yes we have this before and everytime it was correct.

[t0bia_s]

What was correct? That we became idiots with new tools?

[qsera]

>That we became idiots with new tools?

Yes, a little bit each time. But AI will finish the job.

Because earlier it was writing skills, or attention span that was at stake.

This time it is literally the ability to think.

[jason_oster]

Pray tell, what makes you impervious to the atrophy and mental decline caused by these inventions? Do you just not use "calculators, radio[s], cameras, phones, computers, smartphones, [or] social networks"? And so, you have avoided the trap of technologies through defiance?

[fennecbutt]

I mean we were seeing this even before AI. It's the same type of person. To slop is human.

It's like for some reason we thought that like some good percentage of us aren't just tribal worker drones who fundamentally just want fats, sugars, salts, dopamine and seratonin. People actively vote against things like UBI, higher corporate taxes, making utilities public. People actively choose to believe misinformation because it suits their own personal tribal narratives.

[chrisjj]

This is the way "AI" will deliver on the promise to become more intelligent than humans. Or at least than humans who believe in it.