Putting info into a spreadsheet is a higher level of abstraction that doesn't require thinking. There are many concrete representations like that.
LLMs don't use them much. This is a lack.
Can you point a LLM at a body of code, and tell it "give me a concise UML chart of what this does"? I'm not advocating humans writing UML, but some representation like that may be useful to AIs. Except that they don't really do graphs very well. We may need a specification language intended to be read and written by AIs, readable by humans but seldom written by them. Going directly from natural language specifications to code causes the LLM blithering problem to generate too much code.
I’m not sure you and the parent are talking about the same thing.
I think they were making a joke about us getting dumber that I am confused about the premise of.
You seem to be suggesting we are going to fill spreadsheets (which claude already does pretty well) and that spatial reasoning is an insurmountable problem instead of just something that doesn’t emerge naturally from training on text/code corpi.
The entire point of abstraction layers is that they require less thinking most of the time (and, usually as a tradeoff, more thinking a minority of the time).
I don't think I think less when writing Clojure or Rust than I would writing raw assembly code, I just broaden the scope of my projects to fill up my thinking capacity.
Can you point a LLM at a body of code, and tell it "give me a concise UML chart of what this does"? I'm not advocating humans writing UML, but some representation like that may be useful to AIs. Except that they don't really do graphs very well. We may need a specification language intended to be read and written by AIs, readable by humans but seldom written by them. Going directly from natural language specifications to code causes the LLM blithering problem to generate too much code.