My father encouraged me to avoid elevators and escalators to the extent possible. He worked in a high rise and used the stairs for the first 6 floors of the building. People would see him come out of the stair well on the sixth floor to catch the elevator the rest of the way. Some coworkers eventually picked up this habit. He's 87 and is one of the healthiest people I know.
It's not just elevators and LLMs, we should regularly question all our technology usage. I needed to solve a statistical problem recently and it is easy to brute force an approximation by running a few million iterations on a computer. But I forced myself to attempt a theoretical solution first. It only took a few minutes to rejuvenate concepts and "foundational cognitive ability" that would otherwise be fading.
I end up thinking _more_ about many subjects, analyzing them more deeply, using AI. Before search engines, if I wondered about subject X, it was unlikely I'd have a resource at hand that could really tell me about X. Maybe ask around, see if anyone in my circle had some knowledge or an opinion. But for most topics, there were no options. No one would know what that company makes, or why tungsten in light bulbs, or whatever. And for most questions, I was not going to go to the library or start a full research project. Just too effort-intensive. Post search engines, I could do a little research, if I was really interested. Maybe 50% or 60% of the time get a reasonable answer.
Now using AI I ask a lot more questions: Why tungsten? What is this "yarn works" thing on the map? What is my local high school's per-student budget, and how does that compare to the other school districts in the state? What is this thing? What's its history? Why this not that?
I'm curious and interested in a lot of the world around me. AI doesn't seem to be making me dumber; it seems to be enabling a much higher degree of curiosity and, better yet, a much higher degree of "finding out."
Your curiosity is enabled but is it being best served? You are being fed a single perspective on every question, a singular world view. You do not have the serendipitous exposure to a broad range of ideas and opinions we experience as we meander through information.
You Google about why tungsten is in light bulbs, you find yourself on a website about the history of lightbulbs written by a hobbyist that has spent decades thinking about lightbulbs. You click around, link after link, your world is expanded to include this lightbulb fanatic’s.
Personally, I find LLM answers to questions completely devoid of the substance that actually matters to my curious mind. Sure, when I’m working and need a concrete answer to a specific problem, an LLM can be a great help, but for personal curiosity, to expand my world, they suck.
To me, what you’re describing sounds like learning lots of trivia, not expanding your understanding of the world.
Quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools such as brain slugs.
When smart glasses get adopted and Ai is always 100% right ... do humans become know it alls with the answer to everything always seen in front of them? Also, how does that change the way we learn in terms of going to school for 13 to 14 years as we do now....
What terrifies me is the thought that knowing the answer everyone sees is wrong and everyone being incapable of thinking critically about it. Maybe this is a timeless problem, but I fear it getting worse.
Or it's controlled by Dr. Evil tho the initial phase of it that's completely and 100% correct so we get sucked in and then Dr. Evil in five or ten years starts manipulating humanity. Sounds not good ... to the point of even evil ;-)
It's not just elevators and LLMs, we should regularly question all our technology usage. I needed to solve a statistical problem recently and it is easy to brute force an approximation by running a few million iterations on a computer. But I forced myself to attempt a theoretical solution first. It only took a few minutes to rejuvenate concepts and "foundational cognitive ability" that would otherwise be fading.
I end up thinking _more_ about many subjects, analyzing them more deeply, using AI. Before search engines, if I wondered about subject X, it was unlikely I'd have a resource at hand that could really tell me about X. Maybe ask around, see if anyone in my circle had some knowledge or an opinion. But for most topics, there were no options. No one would know what that company makes, or why tungsten in light bulbs, or whatever. And for most questions, I was not going to go to the library or start a full research project. Just too effort-intensive. Post search engines, I could do a little research, if I was really interested. Maybe 50% or 60% of the time get a reasonable answer.
Now using AI I ask a lot more questions: Why tungsten? What is this "yarn works" thing on the map? What is my local high school's per-student budget, and how does that compare to the other school districts in the state? What is this thing? What's its history? Why this not that?
I'm curious and interested in a lot of the world around me. AI doesn't seem to be making me dumber; it seems to be enabling a much higher degree of curiosity and, better yet, a much higher degree of "finding out."
You Google about why tungsten is in light bulbs, you find yourself on a website about the history of lightbulbs written by a hobbyist that has spent decades thinking about lightbulbs. You click around, link after link, your world is expanded to include this lightbulb fanatic’s.
Personally, I find LLM answers to questions completely devoid of the substance that actually matters to my curious mind. Sure, when I’m working and need a concrete answer to a specific problem, an LLM can be a great help, but for personal curiosity, to expand my world, they suck.
To me, what you’re describing sounds like learning lots of trivia, not expanding your understanding of the world.