Like, Socrates may have been against writing because he thought it made your memory weak, but at least I, an individual, am perfectly capable of manufacturing my own writing implements with a modest amount of manual labor and abundantly-available resources (carving into wood, burning wood into charcoal to write on stone, etc.). But I ain't perfectly capable of doing the same to manufacture an integrated circuit, let alone a digital calculator, let alone a GPU, let alone an LLM. Anyone who delegates their thought to a corporation is permanently hitching their fundamental ability to think to this wagon.
Yes, but that horse has long ago left the barn.
I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS. I do know how to write a web site. But if I cede that skill to an automated process, then that is the feather that will break the camel's back?
The history of civilization is the history of specialization. No one can re-build all the tools they rely on from scratch. We either let other people specialize, or we let machines specialize. LLMs are one more step in the latter.
The Luddites were right: the machinery in cotton mills was a direct threat to their livelihood, just as LLMs are now to us. But society marches on, textile work has been largely outsourced to machines, and the descendants of the Luddites are doctors and lawyers (and coders). 50 years from new the career of a "coder" will evoke the same historical quaintness as does "switchboard operator" or "wainwright."
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.It's also a quote from a character who's literally immortal and so has all the time in the world to learn things, which really undermines the premise.
I think most farmers would be somewhat capable on most of that list. Equations for farm production. Programming tractor equipment. Setting bones. Giving and taking orders. Building houses and barns.
Building a single story building isn’t that difficult, but time consuming. Especially nowadays with YouTube videos and pre-planned plans.
Isn't that cheating? Shouldn't a properly self-reliant human be able to come up with the plans too?
That is exactly how our ancestors built houses. Also a traditional wooden house doesn't look complicated.
The only homes built by our ancestors that you see are those that didn't collapsed and killed whoever was inside, burned down, were too unstable to live in, were too much of a burden to maintain and keep around, etc.
That being said, buildings collapse a lot less frequently these days. House fires happen at a lower rate. Insulation was either nonexistent or present in much lower quantities.
I guess the point I'm making is that the lesson here shouldn't be "we used to make our houses, why don't we go back to that?" It also shouldn't be "we should leave every task to a specialist."
Know how to maintain and fix the things around your house that are broken. You don't need a plumber to replace the flush valve on your toilet. But maybe don't try to replace a load-bearing joist in your house unless you know what you're doing? The people building their own homes weren't engineers, but they had a lot more carpentry experience than (I assume) you and I.
>If a house builder built a house for a man but did not secure/fortify his work so that the house he built collapsed and caused the death of the house owner, that house builder will be executed.
If even professionals did get it wrong so often that there had to be law for it... Yeah, maybe it is not that simple.
"That I lived so much longer, just means, that I forgot much more, not that I know much more."
Memory might have a limited capacity, but of course, I doubt most humans use that capacity, or well, for useful things. I know I have plenty of useless knowledge ..
> Literally all progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization.
Then we don't really need plural examples, right?
Anyway - language, wheel, fire, tool-making, social constructs like reciprocity principle - I think gave us some progress as a species and a society.
Even in mankind's beginning specialization existed in the form of hunter and gatherer. This specialization in combination with team work brought us to the top of the food chain to a point where we can strive beyond basic survival.
The people making space crafts (designing and building, another example of specialization) don't need to know how to repair or build a microwave to heat there for food.
Of course everybody still needs to know basic knowledge (how to turn on microwave) to get by.
I'm not sure how you get from pre-agricultural humans developing fire, to dentists building cars.
I don't doubt that after fire was 'understood', there was specialisation to some degree, probably, around management of fire, what burns well, how best to cook, etc.
But any claim that fire was the result of specialisation seems a bit hard to substantiate. A committee was established to direct Thag Simmons to develop a way to .. something involving wood?
Wheel, the setting of broken bones, language etc - specialisation happened subsequently, but not as a prerequisite for those advances.
> Even in mankind's beginning specialization existed in the form of hunter and gatherer. This specialization in combination with team work brought us to the top of the food chain to a point where we can strive beyond basic survival.
Totally agree that we advanced because of two key capabilities - a) persistence hunting, b) team / communication.
You seem to be conflating the result of those advancements with "all progress", as was GP.
> The people making space crafts (designing and building, another example of specialization) don't need to know how to repair or build a microwave to heat there for food.
I am not, was not, arguing that highly specialised skills in modern society are not ... highly specialised.
I was arguing against the lofty claim that:
"All progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization."
Noting the poster of that was responding to a quote from a work of fiction - claiming it was awful - that the author had suggested everyone should be familiar with (among other things) 'changing a diaper, comfort the dying, cooperate, cook a tasty meal, analyse a problem, solve equations' etc.
If you're suggesting that you think some people in society should be exempt from some basic skills like those - that's an interesting position I'd like to see you defend.
> Of course everybody still needs to know basic knowledge (how to turn on microwave) to get by.
FWIW I don't have a microwave oven.
>FWIW I don't have a microwave oven. That was just an example. You still know how to use them hence basic knowledge. Seem like this discussion boils down to semantics
I concur that semantics have a) overtaken this thread, and b) are part of my complaint with OP when they claimed all historical progress was the result of specialisation.
I too liked that quote and found it inspiring. Until I read the book, that is.
IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in the loop, whereas with other tools they are generally just a step in the process.
The (as yet unproven) argument for the use of AIs is that using AI to solve simpler problems allows us humans to focus on the big picture, in the same way that letting a calculator solve arithmetic gives us flexibility to understand the math behind the arithmetic.
No one knows if that's true. We're running a grand experiment: the next generation will either surpass us in grand fashion using tools that we couldn't imagine, or will collapse into a puddle of ignorant consumerism, a la Wall-E.
Seeing how the world is based around consumerism, this future seems more likely.
HOWEVER, we can still course correct. We need to organize, and get the hell off social media and the internet.
Given what I know of human nature, this seems improbable.
People who organize tend to be the people who are most optimistic about change. This is for a reason.
If education (schools) were to adopt a teaching-AI (one that will given them the solution, but at least ask a bunch of questions ), may be there is some hope.
I encourage you to take action to prove to yourself that real change is possible.
What you can do in your own life to enact change is hard to say, given I know nothing about your situation. But say you are a parent, you have control over how often your children use their phones, whether they are on social media, whether they are using ChatGPT to get around doing their homework. How we raise the next generation of children will play an important role in how prepared they are to deal with the consequences of the actions we're currently making.
As a worker you can try to organize to form a union. At the very least you can join an organization like the Democratic Socialists of America. Your ability to organize is your greatest strength.
Well, you know, we'd all love to change the world...
The social contract lives and dies by what the populace is willing to accept. If you push people into a corner by threatening their quality of life, don't be surprised if they push back.
And I can tell you from experience that "letting a calculator solve arithmetic" (or more accurately, being dependent on a calculator to solve arithmetic) means you cripple your ability to learn and understand more advanced stuff. At best your decision turned you into the equivalent of a computer trying to run a 1GB binary with 8MB of RAM and a lot of paging.
> No one knows if that's true. We're running a grand experiment: the next generation will either surpass us in grand fashion using tools that we couldn't imagine, or will collapse into a puddle of ignorant consumerism, a la Wall-E.
It's the latter. Though I suspect the masses will be shoved into the garbage disposal than be allowed to wallow in ignorant consumerism. Only the elite that owns the means of production will be allowed to indulge.
If the product is not commoditized, then capital will absorb all the increased labor efficiency, while labor (and consumption) are sacrificed on the altar of profits.
I suspect your assumption is more likely. Voltaire's critique of 'the best of all possible worlds' and man's place in creating meaning and happiness, provides more than one option.
You can solve stuff like:
> If you walk 1 mile in 7 minutes, how fast are you walking in kilometers per hour?
$ units -t "1 mile / 7 minutes" "kilometers per hour"
13.7943771428571
There are examples where you need much more advanced knowledge, too, meaning it is not enough to just have a calculator, for example in thermodynamics, when dealing with gas laws, you cannot simply convert pressure, volume, and temperature from one unit to another without taking into account the specific context of the law you’re applying (e.g., the ideal gas law or real gas behavior)", or for example you want to convert 1 kilowatt-hour (kWh) to watts (W). This is a case of energy (in kilowatt-hours) over time (in hours), and we need to convert it to power (in watts), which is energy per unit time.
You cannot do:
$ units -t "1 kWh" "W"
conformability error
3600000 kg m^2 / s^2
1 kg m^2 / s^3
$ units -t "1 kWh" "J"
1 kWh = 3600000 J
$ units -t "3600000 joules / 3600 seconds" "W"
3600000 joules / 3600 seconds = 1000 W
It applies to LLMs and programming, too, thus, I am not worried. We will still have copy-paste "programmers", and actually knowledgeable ones, as we have always had. The difference is that you can use LLMs to learn, quite a lot, but you cannot use a calculator alone to learn how to convert 1 kWh to W.
I believe there is some truth to it. When you automated away some time-consuming tasks, your time and focus is shifted elsewhere. For example, washing clothes is no longer a major concern since the massification of washing machines. Software engineering also progressively shifted it's attention to higher-level concerns, and went from a point where writing/editing opcodes was the norm to a point where you can design and deploy a globally-available distributed system faster than what it takes to build a program.
Focusing on the positive traits of AI, having a way to follow the Socratic method with a tireless sparring partner that has an encyclopedic knowledge on everything and anything is truly brilliant. The bulk of the people in this thread should be disproportionally inclined to be self-motivated and self-taught in multiple domains, and having this sort of feature available makes worlds of difference.
I agree that AI could be an enormous educational aid to those who want to learn. The problem is that if any human task can be performed by a computer, there is very little incentive to learn anything. I imagine that a minority of people will learn stuff as a hobby, much in the way that people today write poetry or develop film for fun; but without an economic incentive to learn a skill or trade, having a personal Socratic teacher will be a benefit lost on the majority of people.
There's also the problem of developing critical thinking skills. It's not very comforting to think of a time where your average Joe relies on an AI service to tell what he should think and believe, when that AI service is ran, trained, and managed by people pushing radical ideologies.
This is the existential crisis that appears imminent. What does it mean if humanity, at large, begins to offload thinking (hence decision making), to machines?
Up until now we’ve had tools. We’ve never before been able to say “what’s the right way to do X?”. Offloading reasoning to machines is a terrifying concept.
And what happens to those coders? For that matter--what happens to all the other jobs at risk of being replaced by AI? Where are all the high paying jobs these disenfranchised laborers will flock to when their previous careers are made obsolete?
We live in a highly specialized society that requires people take out large loans to learn the skills necessary for their careers. You take away their ability to provide their labor, and it now seriously threatens millions of workers from obtaining the same quality of life they once had.
I seriously oppose such a future, and if that makes me a Luddite, so be it.
Some will manage to remain in their field, most won't.
> Where are all the high paying jobs these disenfranchised laborers will flock to when their previous careers are made obsolete?
They don't exist. Instead they'll take low-paying jobs that can't (yet) be automated. Maybe they'll work in factories [1].
> I seriously oppose such a future, and if that makes me a Luddite, so be it.
Like I said, the Luddites were right, in the short term. In the long term, we don't know. Maybe we'll live in a post-scarcity Star Trek world where human labor has been completely devalued, or maybe we'll revert to a feudal society of property owners and indentured servants.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/bessent-fired-federal-workers-manuf...
>or maybe we'll revert to a feudal society of property owners and indentured servants.
We as the workers in society have the power to see that this doesn't happen. We just need to organize. Unionize. Boycott. Organize with people in your community to spread worker solidarity.
https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/united-...
It's remarkable that reading and writing, once the guarded domain of elites and religious scribes, are now everyday skills for millions. Where once a handful of monks preserved knowledge with their specialized scribing skills, today anyone can record history, share ideas, and access the thoughts of centuries with a few keystrokes.
The wheel moves on and people adapt. Who knows what the "right side" of history will be, but I doubt we get there by suppressing advancements and guaranteeing job placements simply because you took out large loans to earn a degree and a license.
Even humans have gotten shocks like this. Things like the Black Death created social and economic upheavals that lasted generations.
Now, these are all biological examples. They don't map cleanly to technogical advances, because human brains adapt much faster than immune systems that are constrained by their DNA. But the point is that complex systems can adapt and can seem to handle "anything," up until they can't.
I don't know enough about AI or LLM's to say if we're reaching an inflection point. But most major crises happen when enough people say that something can't happen, and then it happens. I also don't think that discouraging innovation is the solution. But I don't also want to pretend like "humans always adapt" is a rule and not a 300,000 year old blip on the timeline of life's existence.
Automating thinking and self-expression is a lot more dangerous. We're not automating the calculation or the research, but the part where you add your soul to that information.
Hmm, millions of humans are spending a bulk of their lives plugging away at numbers on a screen. We can replace this with an AI and free them up to do literally anything else.
No, let's not do that. Keep being slow ineffective calculators and lay on your death bed feeling FULFILLED!
Not anything, but something useful. And in exchange for that useful they'll get resources (which will become more abundant).
And if all needs are already satisfied... Why worry about work? The purpose of work is to satisfy needs. If needs are satisfied, there is no need for work.
No, I am not assuming that. "Together" are not required. It's just combination of needs, ability to satisfy them and ability to exchange - creates jobs. And nothing of this will be thwarted by AI.
>More likely is that the property owning class acquire AI robots to provide cheap labor
Doesn't matter. Your everyday person either will be able to afford this cheap AI labor for themselves (no problem that required solving) or if AI labor for them are unaffordable - will create jobs for other people (there will be jobs on market everywhere)
Where is the existing work these people would take up? If it doesn't exist yet, then how do you suppose people will support themselves in the meantime?
What if the new work that is created pays less? Do you think people should just accept being made obsolete to take up lower paying jobs?
Everywhere in human society. "Jobs" is literally when you do something that someone needs, so that in exchange they do something that you need. And in human society, because of AI, neither people’s needs, nor the ability to satisfy them, nor the possibility of exchanging them will suddenly disappear. So the jobs will be everywhere.
>Do you think people should just accept being made obsolete to take up lower paying jobs?
Let's start with the fact that on average all jobs will become higher paying because the amount of goods produced (and distributed) will increase. So the more correct answer to this question is "What choice will they have?".
AI will make the masses richer, so society will not abandon it. Subsidize their obsolete well-paid jobs to make society poorer? Why would anyone do that? So the people replaced by AI will go to work in other jobs. Sometimes higher paying, sometimes lower.
If we are talking about real solutions, the best alternative they will have is to form a cult like the Amish did (God bless America and capitalism), in which they can pretend that AI does not exist and live as before. The only question in this case is whether they will find willing participants, because for most, participation in such a cult will mean losing the increase in income provided by the introduction of AI.
This remains to be seen. Inequality is worse now than it was 20 years ago despite technology progressing. This is true across income and wealth.
No, that's just logic. AI doesn't thwart the ability of people to satisfy their needs (getting richer).
>Inequality is worse now than it was 20 years ago despite technology progressing.
And people are still richer than ever before (if we take into account the policies that are thwarting society's ability to satisfy each other's needs and that have nothing to do with technologies)
I would happily support automation to free myself, and others, from having to work full-time. But we live in a capitalist society, not StarTrek. Automation doesn't free up people from having to work, it only places people in financial crisis.
Of course lots of speculation, but I am not particularly worried by the fields we can wipe out in future with automation and AI.
There is endless amounts of cheaply produced slop in stores today. By and by I don't give a fuck about affording those kinds of goods. I care about being able to afford a home, having access to good healthcare, being able to travel, etc. These are the kinds of goods and services that I doubt will come down significantly in price.
All the things you mention have a certain objective quality that can be reduced to an approachable minimum. A house could be a simple cabin, a tent, a cave; a piece of cloth could just be a cape; metal can be screwed, glued or cast; a transistor could be a relay or a wooden mechanism etc. ...history tells us all that.
I think when there's a Homo ludens that wants to play, or when there's a Homo economicus that wants us to optimize, there might be one that separates the process of learning from adaptation (Homo investigans?)[0]. The process of learning something new could be such a subjective property that keeps a yet unknown natural threshold which can't be lowered (or "reduced") any further. If I were to be overly pessimistic, a hardcore luddite, I'd say that this species is under attack, and there will be a generation that lacks this aspect, but also won't miss it, because this character could have never been experienced in the first place.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_human_species#Li...
And even at work, the coworkers that don’t have a lot of general knowledge seem to work a lot harder and get less done because it takes them so much longer to figure things out.
So I don’t know… is avoiding the work of learning worth it to struggle at life more?
I started way back in my 20s just figuring out how to write websites. I'm not sure where the camel's back would have broken.
It has, of course, been convenient to be able to "bootstrap" my self-reliance in these and other fields by consuming goods produced by others, but there is no mechanical reason that said goods should be provided by specialists rather than advanced generalists beyond our irrational social need for maximum acceleration.
There is no single human alive that can understand or build a modern computer from top to bottom. And this is true for various bits of human technology, that's how specialized we are as a species.
I'm not saying some degree of specialization isn't desirable in the world, just that it's overrated.
Do we need a modern computer?
Reminds me of the Nate Bargatz set where he talks about how if he was a time traveler to the past that he wouldn't be able to prove it to anyone. The skills most of us have require this supply chain and then we apply it at the very end. I'm not sure anyone in 1920 cares about my binary analysis skills.
Why not? I mean that, quite literally.
I don't know how to make an ASIC, and if I tried to write an OS I'd probably fail miserably many times along the way but might be able to muddle through to something very basic. The rest of that list is certainly within my wheelhouse even though I've never done any of those things professionally.
The peer commenter shared the Heinlein quote, but there's really something to be said for /society/ of being peopled by well-rounded individuals that are able to competently turn themselves to many types of tasks. Specialization can also be valuable, but specialization in your career should not prevent you from gaining a breadth of skills outside of the workplace.
I don't know how to do any of the things in your list (including building a web site) as an /expert/, but it should not be out of the realm of possibility or even expectation that people should learn these things at the level of a competent amateur. I have grown a garden, I have worked on a farm for a brief time, I've helped build houses (Habitat for Humanity), I've taken a hobbyist welding class and made some garish metal sculptures, I've built a race car and raced it, and I've never built a toaster but I have repaired one (they're actually very electrically and mechanically simple devices). Besides the disposable income to build a race car, nothing on that list stands out to me as unachievable by anyone who chooses to do so.
Being a well-rounded individualist is a great, but that's an orthogonal issue to the question of outsourcing our skills to machinery. When you were growing crops, did you till the land by hand or did you use a tractor? When you were making clothes did you sew by hand or use a sewing machine? Who made your sewing needles?
The (dubious) argument for AI is that using LLMs to write code is the same as using modern construction equipment to build a house: you get the same result for less effort.
Sure. But somebody has to know these things. For many jobs, knowing these things isn’t beneficial, but for others it is.
Sure, you might be able to get a job slinging AI code to produce CRUD apps or whatever. But since that’s the easy thing, you’re going to have a hard time standing out from the pack. Yet we will still need people who understand the concepts at a deeper level, to fix the AI messes or to build the complex systems AI can’t, or the systems that are too critical to rely on AI, or the ones that are too regulated. Being able to do those thing, or to just better understand what the AI is doing to get better more effective results, that will be more valuable than just blindly leaning on AI, and it will remain valuable for a while yet.
Maybe some day the AI can do everything, including ASICs and growing crops, but it’s got a long way to go still.
I think you're missing the point of my comment. I'm not saying that human knowledge is useless. I'm specifically arguing against the case that:
> The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions.
My logic being that we are already irreversibly dependent on supply chains.
Maybe it’s fewer people, yes, but it’ll take quite a leap forward in AI ability to replace all the specialists we will continue to require, especially as the less-able AI makes messes that need to be cleaned up.
Kind of like how an ignorant electorate makes for a poor democracy, an ignorant consumer base makes for a poor free market.
So if you're not bothering to learn how to farm, dress some wild game, etc, chances are this argument won't be convincing for "why should I learn calculus"
I’m still garbage at arithmetic, especially mental math, and it really hasn’t inhibited my career in any way.
I'm no Turing or Ramanujan, but my opinion is that knowing how the operations work, and as example understanding how the area under a curve is calculated, allows you to guesstimate whether numbers are close enough in terms of magnitude to what you are calculating, without needing to be exact in figures.
It is shocking how often I have looked at a spreadsheet, eyeballed the number of rows and the approximate average of numbers in there and figured out there's a problem with a =choose-your-forumula(...) getting the range wrong.
SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.
PHAEDRUS: You are absolutely right about that, too.
SOCRATES: Now tell me, can we discern another kind of discourse, a legitimate brother of this one? Can we say how it comes about, and how it is by nature better and more capable?
PHAEDRUS: Which one is that? How do you think it comes about?
SOCRATES: It is a discourse that is written down, with knowledge, in the soul of the listener; it can defend itself, and it knows for whom it should speak and for whom it should remain silent.
[link](https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...)
I think it makes a very relevant point to us as well. The value of doing the work yourself is in internalizing and developing one's own cognition. The argument of offloading to the LLM to me sounds link arguing one should bring a forklift to the gym
Yes, it would be much less tiresome and you'd be able to lift orders of magnitude more weights. But is the goal of the gym to more efficiently lift as much weight as possible, or to tire oneself and thus develop muscles?
The issue is that, when presented with a situation that requires writing legibly, spelling well, or reading a map, WITHOUT their AI assistants, they will fall apart.
The AI becomes their brain, such that they cannot function without it.
I'd never want to work with someone who is this reliant on technology.
Look, I agree with you, I'm just trying to articulate to someone why they should learn X if they believe an LLM could help them and "an LLM won't always be around" isn't a good argument, because lets be honest, it likely will. This is the same thing as "you won't walk around all day with a calculator in your pocket so you need to learn math"
People who can't do simple addition and multiplication without a calculator (12*30 or 23 + 49) are absolutely at a disadvantage in many circumstances in real life and I don't see how you could think this isn't true. You can't work as a cashier without this skill. You can't play board games. You can't calculate tips or figure out how much you're about to spend at the grocery store. You could pull out your phone and use a calculator in all these situations, but people don't.
On the other hand my master 2 students, most of which learned scripting in the previous year, can't even split a project in multiple files after being explained multiple times. Some have more knowledge and ability than others, but a signifiant fraction is just copy-pasting LLM output to solve whatever is asked from them instead of trying to do it themselves, or asking questions.
This is something I see with other tools. Some people get highly dependent on things like advanced IDE features and don't care to learn how they actually work. That works fine most of the time but if they hit a subtle edge case they are dead in the water until someone else bails them out. In a complicated domain there are always edge cases out there waiting to throw a wrench in things.
Technology is rapidly changing humanity. Maybe for the worse.
Or is pioneering 200 years ago an in-demand skillset that we should be picking up?
I could see a future where pioneering might be useful again.
> The issue is that, when presented with a situation that requires writing legibly, spelling well, or reading a map, WITHOUT their AI assistants, they will fall apart.
The parent poster is positing that for 90% of cases they WILL have their AI assistant because its in their pocket, just like a calculator. It's not insane to think that and its a fair point to ponder.
I do agree that it's a fair point to ponder. It does seem like people draw fairly arbitrary lines in the sand around what skills are "essential" or not. Though I can't even entertain the notion that I shouldn't be concerned about my child's ability to spell.
Seems to me that these gains in technology have always come at a cost, and so far the cost has been worth it for the most part. I don't think it's obviously true that LLMs will be (or won't be) "worth it" in the same way. And anyways the tech is not nearly mature enough yet for me to be comfortable relying on it long term.
Or do you have perfect vision and get all your work done during the sunlight hours?
Technology is everywhere, nobody is independent from it.
This is not conjecture by the way. As a TA, I have observed that half of the undergraduate students lost the ability to write any code at all without the assistance of LLMs. Almost all use ChatGPT for most exercises.
Thankfully, cheating technology is advancing at a similarly rapid pace. Glasses with integrated cameras, WiFi and heads-up display, smartwatches with polarized displays that are only readable with corresponding glasses, and invisibly small wireless ear-canal earpieces to name just a few pieces of tech that we could have only dreamed about back then. In the end, the students stay dumb, but the graduation rate barely suffers.
I wonder whether pre-2022 degrees will become the academic equivalent to low-background radiation steel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
What I don't like are all the hidden variables in these systems. Even GPS, for example, is making some assumptions about what kind of roads you want to take and how to weigh different paths. LLMs are worse in this regard because the creators encode a set of moral and stylistic assumptions/dictates into the model and everybody who uses it is nudged into that paradigm. This is destructive to any kind of original thought, especially in an environment where there are only a handful of large companies providing the models everyone uses.
It's been my experience that LLMs are only better than me at stuff I'm bad at. It's noticeably worse than me at things I'm good at. So the answer to your question depends: can your child get good at things while leaning on an LLM?
I don't know the answer to this. Maybe schools need to expect more from their students with LLMs in the picture.
This may eventually apply to all human labor.
I was thinking, even if they pass laws to mandate companies employ a certain fraction of human workers... it'll be like it already is now: they just let AI do most of the work anyway!
It’s not that LLM’s are particularly different it’s that people are less able to determine when they are messing up. A search engine fails and you notice, an LLM fails and your boss, customer, ect notices.
I'm the polar opposite. And I'm AI researcher.
The reason you can't answer your kid when he asks about LLMs is because the original position was wrong.
Being able to write isn't optional. It's a critical tool for thought. Spelling is very important because you need to avoid confusion. If you can't spell no spell checker can save you when it inserts the wrong word. And this only gets far worse the more technical the language is. And maps are crucial too. Sometimes, the best way to communicate is to draw a map. In many domains like aviation maps are everything, you literally cannot progress without them.
LLMs are no different. They can do a little bit of thinking for us and help us along the way. But we need to understand what's going on to ask the right questions and to understand their answers.
The other part I imagine was largely entertainment, social and memory is a good skill to build.
Children will lack the critical thinking for solving complex problems, and even worse, won't have the work ethic for dealing with the kinds of protracted problems that occur in the real world.
But maybe that's by design. I think the ownership class has decided productivity is more important than societal malaise.
Because understanding how addition works is instrumental to understanding more advanced math concepts. And being able to perform simple addition quickly, without a calculator is a huge productivity boost for many tasks.
In the world of education and intellectual development it's not about getting the right answer as quickly as possible. It's about mastering simple things so that you can understand complicated things. And often times mastering a simple thing requires you to manually do things which technology could automate.
Do you google if 5 is less than 6 or do you just memorize that?
If you believe that creativity is not based on a foundation of memorization and experience (which is just memorization) you need to reflect on the connection between those.
Bullshit! You cannot do second order reasoning with a set of facts or concepts that you have to look up first.
Google Search made intuition and deep understanding and encyclopedic knowledge MORE important, not less.
People will think you are a wizard if you read documentation and bother to remember it, because they're still busy asking Google or ChatGPT while you're happily coding without pausing
Mental math is essential for having strong numerical fluency, for estimation, and for reasoning about many systems. Those skills are incredibly useful for thinking critically about the world.
Not to mention discernment and info literacy when you do need to go to the web to search for things. AI content slop has put everybody who built these skills on the back foot again, of course.
I think all of the above do one thing brilliantly, built self confidence.
Its easy to get bullshitted if what youre able to hold in your head is effectively nothing.
And those people are wrong, in a similar way to how it's wrong to say: "There's no point in having very much RAM, as you can just page to disk."
It's the cognitive equivalent of becoming morbidly obese (another popular decision in today's world).
As to writing, just the action of writing something down with a pen, on paper, has been proven to be better for memorization than recording it on a computer [1].
If we're not teaching these basic skills because an LLM does it better, how do learn to be skeptical of the output of the LLM. How do we validate it?
How do we bolster ourselves against corporate influences when asking which of 2 products is healthier? How do we spot native advertising? [2]
[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/531573a
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00016...
[2]: Example: https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/netflix/women-inmates-separ...
I don't know. I really feel like the auto-correct features are out to get me. So many times I want to say "in" yet it gets corrected to "on", or vice-versa. I also feel like it does the same to me with they're/their/there. Over the past several iOS/macOS updates, I feel like I've either gotten dumber and no longer do english gooder, or I'm getting tagged by predictive text nonsense.
Imagine always having Tex autocorrect to Texaco
1. You won’t always have an LLM. It’s the same reason I still have at least my wife’s phone number memorized.
2. So you can learn to do it better. See point 1.
I wasn’t allowed to use calculators in first and second grade when memorizing multiplication tables, even though a calculator could have finished the exercise faster than me. But I use that knowledge to this day, every day, and often I don’t have a calculator (my phone) handy.
It’s what I tell my kids.
Au contraire! It is quite wrong and was wrong then too. "Rote memorisation" is a slur for knowledge. Knowledge is still important.
Knowledge is the basis for skill. You can't have skill or understanding without knowledge because knowledge is illustrative (it gives examples) and provides context. You can know abstract facts like "addition is abelian" but that is meaningless if you can't add. You can't actually program if you don't know the building blocks of code. You can't write a C program if you have to look up the function signature of read(2) and write(3) every time you need to use them.
You don't always have access to Google, and its results have declined procipitously in quality in recent years. Someone relying on Google as their knowledge base will be kicking themselves today, I would claim.
It is a bit like saying you don't need to learn how to do arithmetic because of calculators. It misses that learning how to do arithmetic isn't just important for the sake of being able to do it, but for the sake of building a comfort with numbers, building numerical intuition, building a feeling for maths. And it will always be faster to simply know that 6x7 is 42 than to have to look it up. You use those basic arithmetical tasks 100 times every time you rearrange an equation. You have to be able to do them immediately. It is analogous.
Note that I have used illustrative examples. These are useful. Knowledge is more than knowing abstract facts like "knowledge is more than knowing abstract facts". It is about knowing concrete things too, which highlight the boundaries of those abstract facts and illustrate their cores. There is a reason law students learn specific cases and their facts and not just collections of contextless abstract principles of law.
>For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers),
Writing legibly is important for many reasons. Note taking is important and often isn't and can't be done with a computer. It is also part of developing fine motor skills generally.
>spell very well (spell check keeps us professional),
Spell checking can't help with confusables like to/two/too, affect/effect, etc. and getting those wrong is much more embarrassing than writing "embarasing" or "parralel". Learning spelling is also crucial because spelling is an insight into etymology which is the basis of language.
>reading a map to get around (GPS), etc
Reliance on GPS means never building a proper spatial understanding. Many people that rely on GPS (or being driven around by others) never actually learn where anything is. They get lost as soon as they don't have a phone.
>but I think my children will have a different perspective (similar to how I feel about memorizing poetry and languages without garbage collection).
Memorising poetry is a different sort of thing--it is a value judgment not a matter of practicality--but it is valuable in itself. We have robbed generations of children of their heritage by not requiring them to learn their culture.
I try to explain by shifting the focus from neurological to musculoskeletal development. It's easy to see that physical activity promotes development of children's bodies. So although machines can aid in many physical tasks, nobody is suggesting we introduce robots to augment PE classes. People need to recognize that complex tasks also induce brain development. This is hard to demonstrate but has been measured in extensive tasks like learning languages and music performance. Of course, this argument is about child development, and much of the discussion here is around adult education, which has some different considerations.
You still needed to know what to ask it, and how to interpret the output. This is hard to do without an understanding of how the underlying math works.
The same is true with LLMs. Without the fundamentals, you are outsourcing work that you can't understand and getting an output that you can't verify.
With previous technological advancements, humans had places to intellectually "flee", and in fact, previous advancements were often made for the express purpose of freeing up time for higher level pursuits. The invention of computers, for example, let mathematicians focus on much higher level skills (although even there an argument can be made that something has been lost with the general decrease in arithmetic abilities amoung modern mathematicians).
Large language models don't move humans further up the value chain, though. They kick us off of it.
I hear lots of people prosletizing wonderful futures where humans get to focus on "the problems that really matters", like social structures, or business objectives; but there's no fundamental reason that large language models can't replace those functionalities aswell. Unlike, say, a Casio, which would never be able to replace a social worker no matter how hard you tried.
Really? We invent LLMs, continue to improve them, and that's the end of our intellectual capability?
> a Casio, which would never be able to replace a social worker no matter how hard you tried
And LLMs can't replace a social worker no matter how hard you try today.
Take rote memorization. It is hard. It sucks in so many ways (just because you memorized something doesn't mean you can reason using that information). Yet memorization also provides the foundations for growth. At a basic level, how can you perform anything besides trivial queries if you don't know what you are searching for? How can you assess the validity of a source if you don't know the fundamentals? How can you avoid falling prey to propaganda if your only knowledge of a subject is what is in front of your face? None of that is to say that we should dismiss search and depend upon memorization. We need both.
I can't tell you what to say to your children about LLMs. For one thing, I don't know what is important to them. Yet it is important to remember that it isn't an either-or thing. LLMs are probably going to be essential to manage the profoundly unmanagable amount of information our world creates. Yet it is also important to remember that they are like the person who memorizes but lacks the ability to reason. They may be able to impress people with their fountain of facts, yet they will be unable to create a mark on the world since they will lack the ability to create anything unique.
That's actually pretty doable. Almost every resource provides more context than just the exact thing you're asking. You build on that knowledge and continue asking. Nobody knows everything - we've been doing the equivalent of this kind of research forever.
> How can you assess the validity of a source if you don't know the fundamentals?
Learn about the fundamentals until you get to the level you're already familiar with. You're describing an adult outside of school environment learning basically anything.
Not that these aren't noble things or worth doing, but they won't impact your life too much if you're not interest in penmanship, spelling, or cartography. <<<
For me it is the second order benefits, notably the idea of "attention to detail" and "a feel for the principles". The principles of each activity being different: writing -> fine motor control, spelling -> word choice/connotation, map -> sense of direction, (my own insert here) money handling -> cost of things
All of them involve "attention to detail" because that's what any activity is - paying attention to it.
But having built up the experience in paying attention to [xyz], you can now be capable when things go wrong.
IE catch disputable transaction on the credit card, or note being told by the shop clerk "No Returns" when their policy says otherwise, un-losting yourself when the phone runs out of battery in the city.
Notably, you don't have to be trained for the details in traditional ways like writing the same sentence 100 times on a piece of paper. Learning can be fun and interesting.
Children can write letters to their friends well before they get their own phone. Geocaching/treasure hunts(hand drawn mud maps!)/orienteering for map use.
As for LLM ... well currently "attention to detail" is vital to spot the (handwave number) 10% of when it goes wrong. In the future LLMs may be better.
But if you want to be better than your peers at any given thing - you will need an edge somewhere outside of using an LLM. Yet still, spelling/word choice/connotations are especially linked to using an LLM currently.
Knowing how to "pay attention to detail" when it counts - counts.
However, I am going to hazard a guess that you still care about your child's ability to do arithmetic, even though calculators make that trivial.
And if I'm right, I think it's for a good reason—learning to perform more basic math operations helps build the foundation for more advanced math, the type which computers can't do trivially.
I think this applies to AI. The AI can do the basic writing for you, but you will eventually hit a wall, and if all you've ever learned is how to type a prompt into ChatGPT, you won't ever get past that wall.
----
Put another way:
> So how do I answer my child when he asks "Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me"
"Because eventually, you will be able to do X better than any LLM, but it will take practice, and you have to practice now."
The same way you answer - "Why should I memorise this if I can always just look it up"
Because your perceptual experience is built upon your knowledge and experiences. The entire way you see the universe is altered based on these things, including what you see through your eyes, what you decide is important and what you decide to do.
The goal of life is not always "simply to do as little as possible", or "offload as much work as possible" but lots of the time includes struggling through the fundimentals so that you become a greater version of yourself, it is not the complete task that we desire, it is who you became while you did the work that we desire.
For instance your point about: > reading a map to get around (GPS)
https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/16/alzheimers-disease-resea...
After reading the above it dawned on me that the human brain needs to develop spatial awareness and not using that capability of the brain very slowly shuts it off. So I purposefully turn off the gps when I can.
I think not fully developing each of those abilities might have some negative effects that will be hard to diagnose.
If the expectation is X, and your tool gives you Y, then you’ve failed - no matter if you could have done X by hand from scratch or not, it doesn’t really matter, because what counts is whether the person checking your work can verify that you’ve produced X. You agreed to deliver X, and you gave them Y instead.
So why should you learn to do X when the LLM can do it for you?
Because unless you know how to do X yourself, how will you be able to verify whether the LLM has truly done X?
Your kid needs to learn to understand what the person grading them is expecting, and deliver something that meets those expectations.
That sounds like so much bullshit when you’re a kid, but I wish I had understood it when I was younger.
It's not true even though it's accepted. Rote memorization has a place in an education. It does strengthen learning and allow one to make connections between the things seen presently and things remembered, among other things.
It absolutely isn't.
That sounds like setting-up your child for failure, to put it bluntly.
How do you want to express a thought clearly if you already fail at the stage of thinking about words clearly?
You start with a fuzzy understanding of words, which you delegated to a spellchecker, added to a fuzzy understanding of writing, which you've delegated to a computer, combined with a fuzzy memory, which you've delegated to a search engine, and you expect that not to impact your child's ability to create articulate thoughts and navigate them clearly?
To add irony to the situation, the physical navigation skills have, themselves, been delegated to a GPS..
Brains are like muscles, they atrophy when not used.
Reverse that course before it's too late, or suffer (and have someone else suffer) the consequences.
At first glance, knowing how to spell a word and understanding a word should be perfectly orthogonal. How could it not be? Saying that it is not so would imply that civilizations without writing would have no thought or could not communicate through words, which is preposterous.
And yet, once we start delegating our thinking, our spelling and our writing to external black boxes, our grasp on those words and our grasp of those words becomes weaker. To the point that knowing how to spell a word might become a much bigger part, relatively, of our encounter with those words, as we are doing less conceptual thinking about those words and their meaning.
And therefore, I argue that, in a not too far-fetched extremum, understanding a word and knowing how to spell a word might not be fully orthogonal.
Realistically it comes down to the idea that being an educated individual that knows how to think is important for being successful, and learning in school is the only way we know to optimize for that, even if it's likely not the most efficient way to do so.
Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately.
For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc
Not that these aren't noble things or worth doing, but they won't impact your life too much if you're not interest in penmanship, spelling, or cartography.
I believe LLMs are different (I am still stuck in the moral panic phase), but I think my children will have a different perspective (similar to how I feel about memorizing poetry and languages without garbage collection). So how do I answer my child when he asks "Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me"