Its hard to understand how exactly these AI people mean it.
When i say "AI is changning the world" its more like "I can already see how this technology will continue to become better and better and has more impact every single day. It already affects people and it will have fundamentally changed A LOT in 3-15 years"
But lets be very realistic and clear: My computer systems at home were exploitable a lot more often this year than any year before JUST because of GPT or Claude.
look to past examples. when the greeks developed writing, people complained that the youth were losing the ability to memorize much content. and that is true, but with writing they were able to do better still and that old skill -- though useful -- was lost.
Plato wasn't against just "writing" in a general sense, or that he felt it was going to hold humanity back. He was against treatises and felt that someone could "memorize facts" without having to actually think about them on a deep level. Which I think, ironically, is not all that off the mark especially in the age of the internet and now LLMs, right? He also felt that memory could decay if we relied on written facts instead of having dialogues, which again, not all that off the mark, either. He underestimated the compounding capability of technology and our ability to record data and information, but people remember a lot less these days than they used to because we'd largely given up that ability in exchange for the instant information machines.
Of course, he's just one man (or two, if you consider he was conveying Socrates' thoughts, as well) who lived in ancient times and couldn't possibly foresee how technology would evolve...but when I went back and read his concerns, it was ironic to admit that much of what he warned about still applies to this day. People are far less informed despite having access to more information than we've ever had because we've exchanged the ability to remember for the ability to just look things up. And, we also have less meaningful dialog than ever before; people just sit on social media, copying and pasting "facts" to each other, instead of having actual productive discourse.
AI tooling can be a boon to learning, but it requires us to stop using them for code generation as a primary purpose (at least for juniors) and instead advocate for Socratic workflows that still require manual coding practices. When someone decides to code something, it's not just learning syntax; it engages a variety of mental disciplines from critical thinking to planning to creative problem solving to logic and math, even.
I agree the tradeoffs are real but consider it obvious that reading and writing were in net a boon and I also expect the same for AI / programming. Of course having some understanding is still required in both cases to make good use of the tools.
one thought: AI can often help us solve a problem once posed. E.g., try to prove that X is True. But formulating good conjectures is something altogether different. right now we have a backlog of interesting / good conjectures that ai can grind on. but once those are done, will we still need people to sniff out interesting new ones?
38% of people also think opposing fascism is very unfavourable according to that. Assuming it's real, I'm not going to put much faith in the opinions of the American public.
> Assuming it's real, I'm not going to put much faith in the opinions of the American public.
You’re talking about Amazon’s actual customers here. Is Amazon supposed to ignore the opinion of their customers for the opinion of some commenter on HN?
The method of identifying authorship isn’t new. I guess the main new thing here is to ensure Claude has a specified word distribution so you can identify its writing.
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