Outsourcing thinking

https://erikjohannes.no/posts/20260130-outsourcing-thinking/index.html

by todsacerdoti • 6 months ago

270 220 6 months ago

wut-wut• 6 months ago

Interesting read..

To his point: personally, I find it shifts 'where and when' I have to deal with the 'cognitive load'. I've noticed (at times) feeling more impatient, that I tend to skim the results more often, and that it takes a bit more mental energy to maintain my attention..

camgunz4• 6 months ago

This list of things not to use AI for is so quaint. There's a story on the front page right now from The Atlantic: "Film students who can no longer sit through films". But why? Aren't they using social media, YouTube, Netflix, etc responsibly? Surely they know the risks, and surely people will be just as responsible with AI, even given the enormous economic and professional pressures to be irresponsible.

pixl97• 6 months ago

We lose something when we give up horses for cars.

Have too many of us outsourced our ability to raise horses for transport?

Surely you're capable of walking all day without break?

andrepd• 6 months ago

It's a funnily relevant parallel you're making, because designing everything around the car has absolutely been one of the biggest catastrophes of 2nd half of the 20th century. Much like "AI" in the past couple years, the personal automobile is a useful tool but making anything and everything subservient towards its use has had catastrophic consequences.

camgunz4• 6 months ago

I am actually, we haven't owned car for years. We also rarely watch TV and eschew social media, so I can still pay attention and analyze things.

But this makes me super weird! This is the whole point of social media bans for kids: if you make it optional, it'll still be prevalent and people making healthy choices will be social weirdos. Healthy paths need to be free and accessible, and things need to be built around them (eg don't assume everyone has a smartphone, etc)

hippo22• 6 months ago

What is the lesson in the anecdote about film students? To me, it’s that people like the idea of studying film more than they like actually studying film. I fail to see the connection to social media or AI.

tolerance• 6 months ago

AI performs strictly in the Platonic world, as is the social media experience. As is the film student.

camgunz4• 6 months ago

Social media's rotted their attention span

squidbeak• 6 months ago

Perhaps the films were weren't worth sitting through?

awesome_dude3• 6 months ago

Recently a side discussion came up - people in the Western world are "rediscovering" fermented, and pickled, foods that are still in heavy use in Asian cultures.

Fermentation was a great way to /preserve/ food, but it can be a bit hit and miss. Pickling can be outright dangerous if not done correctly - botulism is a constant risk.

When canning of foods came along it was a massive game changer, many foods became shelf stable for months or years.

Fermentation and pickling was dropped almost universally (in the West).

achierius• 6 months ago

Fermentation and pickling was dropped almost universally (in the West).

What are you talking about? What do you think pickles are? Or sauerkraut, for that matter?

ahazred8ta• 6 months ago

surely people will be just as responsible with AI

That's exactly what worries us.

hamasho2• 6 months ago

  > Surely they know the risks, and surely people will be just as responsible with AI

I can't imagine even half of students can understand the short and long term risk of using social media and AI intensively. At least I couldn't when I was a student.

esperent2• 6 months ago

Film students who can no longer sit through films

Everyone loves watching films until they get a curriculum with 100 of them along with a massive reading list, essays, and exams coming up.

mettamage5• 6 months ago

I learned that when I decided to become a competitive Warcraft 3 player.

Apparently, my competitiveness lasts for a month.

Gaming is much more fun when you get to decide when to quit and how to play.

jemiluv8• 6 months ago

Outsourcing to thinking is exactly what I tell our developers. They are hired to do the kind of thinking I’d rather not do.

slfreference3• 6 months ago

Distributed verification. 8 billions of us can divide up the topics and subjects and pool together our opinions and best conclusions.

JamesTRexx• 6 months ago

What is that saying again, a person is smart, a group is dumb?

That's the risk involved with opinions and conclusions.

tines2• 6 months ago

"A person is smart, people are dumb." I heard this for the first time from Men in Black, lol.

slfreference3• 6 months ago

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42041926-the-scout-minds...

When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a soldier mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe--and shoot down those we don't. But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a scout mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout's goal isn't to defend one side over the other. It's to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what's actually true. In The Scout Mindset, Galef shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn't that they're smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It's a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world--which anyone can learn. With fascinating examples ranging from how to survive being stranded in the middle of the ocean, to how Jeff Bezos avoids overconfidence, to how superforecasters outperform CIA operatives, to Reddit threads and modern partisan politics, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.

slfreference3• 6 months ago

Linus's law is the assertion that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".

preston-kwei• 6 months ago

The “lump of cognition” framing misses something important. it’s not about how much thinking we do, but which thinking we stop doing. A lot of judgment, ownership, and intuition comes from boring or repetitive work, and outsourcing that isn’t free. Lowering the cost of producing words clearly isn’t the same as increasing the amount of actual thought.

gdulli2• 6 months ago

I'm grateful that I spent a significant part of my life forced to solve problems and forced to struggle to produce the right words. In hindsight I know that that's where all the learning was. If I'd had a shortcut machine when I was young I'd have used it all the time, learned much less, and grown up dependent on it.

Terr_4• 6 months ago

I'd argue that choosing words is a key skill because language is one of our tools for examining ideas and linking together parts of our brains in new ways.

Even just writing notes you'll never refer to again, you're making yourself codify vaguer ideas or impressions, test assumptions, and then compress the concept for later. It's an new external information channel between different regions of your head which seems to provide value.

zahlman4• 6 months ago

Looking at the words that get produced at this lowered cost, and observing how satisfactory they apparently are to most people (and observing the simplicity of the heuristics people use to try to root out "cheap" words), has been quite instructive (and depressing).

tomjen3• 6 months ago

I think a good workflow is to use the llm as a minimum to fix typo and grammar issues.

From there you can also go from first draft to feedback.

reducesuffering• 6 months ago

See Scott Alexander’s The Whispering Earring (2012):

https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2012-10-03-yva...

zahlman4• 6 months ago

Wasn't there a follow-up to this where Scott denied that the story was "about" the obvious thing for it to be about?

nsainsbury• 6 months ago

I actually wrote up quite a few thoughts related to this a few days ago but my take is far more pessimistic: https://www.neilwithdata.com/outsourced-thinking

My fundamental argument: The way the average person is using AI today is as "Thinking as a Service" and this is going to have absolutely devastating long term consequences, training an entire generation not to think for themselves.

jakubtomanik• 6 months ago

I believe that collectively we passed that point long before the onset of LLMs. I have a feeling that throughout the human history vast amounts of people ware happy to outsource their thinking and even pay to do so. We just used to call those arrangements religions.

peyton2• 6 months ago

That’s a bit cynical. Religion is more like a technology. It was continuously invented to solve problems and increase capacity. Newer religions superseded older and survived based on productive and coercive supremacy.

latexr2• 6 months ago

Religions may outsource opinions on morality, but no one went to their spiritual leader to ask about the Pythagorean theorem or the population of Zimbabwe.

roenxi2• 6 months ago

That would have devastating consequences in the pre-LLM era, yes. What is less obvious is whether it'll be an advantage or disadvantage going forward. It is like observing that cars will make people fat and lazy and have devastating consequences on health outcomes - that is exactly what happened but the net impact was still positive because cars boost wealth, lifestyles and access to healthcare so much that the net impact is probably positive even if people get less exercise.

It is unclear that a human thinking about things is going to be an advantage in 10, 20 years. Might be, might not be. In 50 years people will probably be outraged if a human makes an important decision without deferring to an LLM's opinion. I'm quite excited that we seem to be building scaleable superintelligences that can patiently and empathetically explain why people are making stupid political choices and what policy prescriptions would actually get a good outcome based on reading all the available statistical and theoretical literature. Screw people primarily thinking for themselves on that topic, the public has no idea.

gdulli2• 6 months ago

If you told me this was a verbatim cautionary sci-fi short story from 1953 I'd believe it.

tines2• 6 months ago

You'd make a great dictator.

noduerme7• 6 months ago

I think you hit the nail on the head. Without years of learning by doing, experience in the saddle as you put it, who would be equipped to judge or edit the output of AI? And as knowledge workers with hands-on experience age out of the workforce, who will replace us?

The critical difference between AI and a tool like a calculator, to me, is that a calculator's output is accurate, deterministic and provably true. We don't usually need to worry that a calculator might be giving us the wrong result, or an inferior result. It simply gives us an objective fact. Whereas the output of LLMs can be subjectively considered good or bad - even when it is accurate.

So imagine teaching an architecture student to draw plans for a house, with a calculator that spit out incorrect values 20% of the time, or silently developed an opinion about the height of countertops. You'd not just have a structurally unsound plan, you'd also have a student who'd failed to learn anything useful.

MrDarcy• 6 months ago

On the other hand the incorrect values may drive architects to think more critically about what their tools are producing.

hamasho2• 6 months ago

  > The critical difference between AI and a tool like a calculator, to me, is that a calculator's output is accurate, deterministic and provably true.

This really resonates with me. If calculators returned even 99.9% correct answers, it would be impossible to reliably build even small buildings with them. We are using AI for a lot of small tasks inside big systems, or even for designing the entire architecture, and we still need to validate the answers by ourselves, at least for the foreseeable future. But outsourcing thinking reduces a lot of brain powers to do that, because it often requires understanding problems' detailed structure and internal thinking path.

In current situation, by vibing and YOLOing most problems, we are losing the very ability we still need and can't replace with AI or other tools.

knollimar2• 6 months ago

It's funny, I'm working on trying to get LLMs to place electrical devices, and it silently developed opinions that my switches above countertops should be at 4 feet and not the 3'10 I'm asking for (the top cannot be above 4')

rco87864• 6 months ago

I'll say that I'm still kinda on the fence here, but I will point out that your argument is exactly the same as the argument against calculators back in the 70s/80s, computers and the internet in the 90s, etc.

zephen10• 6 months ago

To some extent, the argument against calculators is perfectly valid.

The cash register says you owe $16.23, you give the cashier $21.28, and all hell breaks loose.

kjkjadksj4• 6 months ago

The difference is a calculator always returns 2+2=4. And even then if you ended up with 6 instead of 4, the fact you know how to do addition already leads you to believe you fat fingered the last entry and that 2+2 does not equal 6.

Can’t say the same for LLM. Our teachers were right with the internet of course as well. If you remember those early internet wild west school days, no one was using the internet to actually look up a good source. No one even knew what that meant. Teachers had to say “cite from these works or references we discussed in class” or they’d get junk back.

vjvjvjvjghv• 6 months ago

You could argue that a lot of the people who few up with calculators have lost any kind of mathematical intuition. I am always horrified how bad a lot of people are with simple math, interest rates and other things. This definitely opened up a lot of opportunities for companies to exploit this ignorance.

benSaiyen• 6 months ago

Too late. Outsourcing has already accomplished this.

No one is making cool shit for themselves. Everyone is held hostage ensuring Wall Street growth.

The "cross our fingers and hope for the best" position we find ourselves in politically is entirely due to labor capture.

The US benefited from a social network topology of small businesses. No single business being a lynch pin that would implode everything.

Now the economy is a handful of too big to fails eroding links between human nodes by capturing our agency.

I argued as hard as I could against shipping electronics manufacturing overseas so the next generation would learn real engineering skills. But 20 something me had no idea how far up the political tree the decision was made back then. I helped train a bunch of people's replacements before the telecom focused network hardware manufacturer I worked for then shut down.

American tech workers are now primarily cloud configurators and that's being automated away.

This is a decades long play on the part of aging leadership to ensure Americans feel their only choice is capitulate.

What are we going to do, start our own manufacturing business? Muricans are fish in a barrel.

And some pretty well connected people are hinting at similar sense of what's wrong: https://www.barchart.com/story/news/36862423/weve-done-our-c...

jordanb• 6 months ago

There's an Isaac Asimov story where people are "educated" by programming knowledge into their brains, Matrix style.

A certain group of people have something wrong with their brain where they can't be "educated" and are forced to learn by studying and such. The protagonist of the story is one of these people and feels ashamed at his disability and how everyone around him effortlessly knows things he has to struggle to learn.

He finds out (SPOILER) that he was actually selected for a "priesthood" of creative/problem solvers, because the education process gives knowledge without the ability to apply it creatively. It allows people to rapidly and easily be trained on some process but not the ability to reason it out.

kej• 6 months ago

Do you remember the title of that story, by chance?

godelski3• 6 months ago

I think the comparison to giving change is a good one, especially given how frequently the LLM hype crowd uses the fictitious "calculator in your pocket" story. I've been in the exact situation you've described, long before LLMs came out and cashiers have had calculators in front of them for longer than we've had smartphones.

I'll add another analogy. I tell people when I tip I "round off to the nearest dollar, move the decimal place (10%), and multiply by 2" (generating a tip that will be in the ballpark of 18%), and am always told "that's too complicated". It's a 3 step process where the hardest thing is multiplying a number by 2 (and usually a 2 digit number...). It's always struck me as odd that the response is that this is too complicated rather than a nice tip (pun intended) for figuring out how much to tip quickly and with essentially zero thinking. If any of those three steps appear difficult to you then your math skills are below that of elementary school.

I also see a problem with how we look at math and coding. I hear so often "abstraction is bad" yet, that is all coding (and math) is. It is fundamentally abstraction. The ability to abstract is what makes humans human. All creatures abstract, it is a necessary component of intelligence, but humans certainly have a unique capacity for it. Abstraction is no doubt hard, but when in life was anything worth doing easy? I think we unfortunately are willing to put significantly more effort into justifying our laziness than we will to be not lazy. My fear is that we will abdicate doing worthwhile things because they are hard. It's a thing people do every day. So many people love to outsource their thinking. Be it to a calculator, Google, "the algorithm", their favorite political pundit, religion, or anything else. Anything to abdicate responsibility. Anything to abdicate effort.

So I think AI is going to be no different from calculators, as you suggest. They can be great tools to help people do so much. But it will be far more commonly used to outsource thinking, even by many people considered intelligent. Skills atrophy. It's as simple as that.

userbinator• 6 months ago

I briefly taught a beginner CS course over a decade ago, and at the time it was already surprising and disappointing how many of my students would reach for a calculator to do single-digit arithmetic; something that was a requirement to be committed to memory when I was still in school. Not surprisingly, teaching them binary and hex was extremely frustrating.

I tell people when I tip I "round off to the nearest dollar, move the decimal place (10%), and multiply by 2" (generating a tip that will be in the ballpark of 18%), and am always told "that's too complicated".

I would tell others to "shift right once, then divide by 2 and add" for 15%, and get the same response.

However, I'm not so sure what you mean by a problem with thinking that abstraction is bad. Yes, abstraction is bad --- because it is a way to hide and obscure the actual details, and one could argue that such dependence on opaque things, just like a calculator or AI, is the actual problem.

polyrenn• 6 months ago

Can you audit/review/identify issues in a codebase if you've never written code?

Actual knowledge about systems work much better more often than not, LLMs are not sentient and still need to be driven to get decent results.

nine_k2• 6 months ago

Thinking developed naturally as a tool that helps our species to stay dominant on the planet, at least on land. (Not by biomass but by the ability to control.)

If outsourcing thought is beneficial, those who practice it will thrive; if not, they will eventually cease to practice it, one way or another.

Thought, as any other tool, is useful when it solves more problems than it creates. For instance, an ability to move very fast may be beneficial if it gets you where you want to be, and detrimental, if it misses the destination often enough, and badly enough. Similarly, if outsourced intellectual activities miss the mark often enough, and badly enough, the increased speed is not very helpful.

I suspect that the best results would be achieved by outsourcing relatively small intellectual acts in a way that guarantees very rare, very small errors. That is, AI will become useful when AI becomes dependable, comparable to our other tools.

risyachka• 6 months ago

Outsourcing thinking is not a skill. It is the same as skipping gym. Nothing to practice here

nine_k2• 6 months ago

A lot of people practice not going to a gym! I bet it reflects e.g. on their dating outcomes, at least statistically.

I suspect that outsourcing thinking may reflect on quite some outcomes, too. We just need time to gather the statistics.

add-sub-mul-div• 6 months ago

If outsourcing thought is beneficial, those who practice it will thrive

It makes them prey to and dependent on those who are building and selling them the thinking.

I suspect that the best results would be achieved by outsourcing relatively small intellectual acts in a way that guarantees very rare, very small errors. That is, AI will become useful when AI becomes dependable, comparable to our other tools.

That's like saying ultra processed foods provide the best results when eaten sparingly, so it will become useful when people adopt overall responsible diets. Okay, sure, but what does that matter in practice since it isn't happening?

gemmarate• 6 months ago

The interesting axis here isn’t how much cognition we outsource, it’s how reversible the outsourcing is. Using an LLM as a scratchpad (like a smarter calculator or search engine) is very different from letting it quietly shape your writing, decisions, and taste over years. That’s the layer where tacit knowledge and identity live, and it’s hard to get back once the habit forms.

We already saw a softer version of this with web search and GPS: people didn’t suddenly forget how to read maps, but schools and orgs stopped teaching it, and now almost nobody plans a route without a blue dot. I suspect we’ll see the same with writing and judgment: the danger isn’t that nobody thinks, it’s that fewer people remember how.

Insanity• 6 months ago

Yet it does feel different with LLMs compared to your examples. Yes, people can’t navigate without Apple/Google maps, but that’s still very different from losing critical thinking skills.

That said, LLMs are perhaps accelerating that but aren’t the only cause (lack of reading, more short form content, etc)

joshoink• 6 months ago

How is navigation not critical thinking? Anyone Should! Be able to use a map to plan a route. Navigation is critical to survival imo

esperent2• 6 months ago

it’s hard to get back once the habit forms.

Humans are highly adaptable. It's hard to go back while the thing we're used to still exists, but if it vanished from the world we'd adapt within a few weeks.

jfengel2• 6 months ago

Social media has given me a rather dim view of the quality of people's thinking, long before AI. Outsourcing it could well be an improvement.

bigbadfeline2• 6 months ago

Social media has given me a rather dim view of the quality of people's thinking, long before AI. Outsourcing it could well be an improvement.

Cogito, ergo sum

The corollary is: absence of thinking equals non-existence. I don't see how that can be an improvement. Improvement can happen only when it's applied to the quality of people's thinking.

jfengel2• 6 months ago

The converse need not hold. Cognition implies existence; it is sufficient but not necessary. Plenty of things exist without thinking.

(And that's not what the Cogito means in the first place. It's a statement about knowledge: I think therefore it is a fact that I am. Descartes is using it as the basis of epistemology; he has demonstrated from first principles that at least one thing exists.)

andsoitis• 6 months ago

Some of humanity’s most significant inventions are language (symbolic communication), writing, the scientific method, electricity, the computer.

Notice something subtle.

Early inventions extend coordination. Middle inventions extend memory. Later inventions extend reasoning. The latest inventions extend agency.

This suggests that human history is less about tools and more about outsourcing parts of the mind into the world.

ZenoArrow2• 6 months ago

If an AI thinks for you, you're no longer "outsourcing" parts of your mind. What we call "AI" now is technically impressive but is not the end point for where AI is likely to end up. For example, imagine an AI that is smart enough to emotionally manipulate you, at what point in this interaction do you lose your agency to "outsource" yourself instead of acting as a conduit to "outsource" the thoughts of an artificial entity? It speaks to our collective hubris that we seek to create an intellectually superior entity and yet still think we'll maintain control over it instead of the other way around.

Terr_4• 6 months ago

There's a parallel there to drugs. They are most definitely not "intelligent", yet they can still destroy our agency or free-will.

zahlman4• 6 months ago

we seek to create an intellectually superior entity and yet still think we'll maintain control over it instead of the other way around.

Intellect is not the same thing as volition.

p0w3n3d• 6 months ago

The main difference is that the computer you use for writing is not requiring you to pay for every word. And that's the difference in the business models being pushed right now all around the world.

jatora• 6 months ago

I like this imaginary world you propose that gives free computers, free electricity, a free place to store it, and is free from danger from other tribes.

Sign me up for this utopia.

beaker52• 6 months ago

I still read the LLMs output quite critically and I cringe whenever I do. LLMs are just plain wrong a lot of the time. They’re just not very intelligent. They’re great at pretending to be intelligent. They imitate intelligence. That is all they do. And I can see it every single time I interact with them. And it terrifies me that others aren’t quite as objective.

sidrag222• 6 months ago

I usually feed my articles to it and ask for insight into whats working. I usually wait to initiate any sort of AI insight until my rough draft is totally done...

Working in this manner, it is so painfully clear it doesnt really follow the flow of the article even. It misses on so many critical details and just sorta fills in its own blanks wrong... When you tell it that its missing a critical detail, it treats you like some genius, every single time.

It is hard for me to try to imagine growing up with it, and using it to write my own words for me. The only time i copy paste words to a fellow human that is ai generated, is for totally generic customer service style replies, for questions i dont totally consider worthy of any real time.

AI has kinda taken away my flow state for coding, rare as it was... I still get it when writing stuff I am passionate about, and I can't imagine I'll ever wanna outsource that.

zephen10• 6 months ago

When you tell it that its missing a critical detail, it treats you like some genius, every single time.

Yeah, or as I say, Uriah Heep.

To be fair, telling everybody they are geniuses is the obvious next step after participation awards.

Because people have figured out that participation awards are worthless, so let's give them all first place.

zahlman4• 6 months ago

And it terrifies me that others aren’t quite as objective.

I have been reminded constantly throughout this that a very large fraction of people are easily impressed by such prose. Skill at detecting AI output (in any given endeavour), I think, correlates with skill at valuing the same kind of work generally.

Put more bluntly: slop is slop, and it has been with us for far longer than AI.

techblueberry• 6 months ago

A lot of this stuff depends on how a person chooses to engage, but my contrarian take is that actually throughout history whenever anyone said X technology will lead to the downfall of humanity for y reasons, that take was usually correct.

The article he references gives this example:

“Is it lazy to watch a movie instead of making up a story in your head?”

Yes, yes it is, this was a worry when we transitioned from oral culture to written culture, and I think it was probably prescient.

For many if not most people cultural or technological expectations around what skills you _have_ to learn probably have an impact on total capability. We probably lost something when Google Maps came out and the average person didn’t have to learn to read a map.

When we transitioned from paper and evening news to 24 hour partisan cable news, I think more people outsourced their political opinions to those channels.

sidrag222• 6 months ago

We probably lost something when Google Maps came out and the average person didn’t have to learn to read a map.

Even in my mid 30s I see this issue with people around my age. Even for local areas, it seems like no one really understands what direction they are heading, they just kinda toggle on the GPS and listen for what to do... forever?

On pretty much every modern GPS, there is a button to show the full route instead of the current step the user is on(as well as keeping it in a static orientation). I feel like just that being the default most of the time, would help a ton of people.

0xbadcafebee2• 6 months ago

How many of you know how to do home improvement? Fix your own clothes? Grow your own food? Cook your own food? How about making a fire or shelter? People used to know all of those things. Now they don't, but we seem to be getting along in life fine anyway. Sure we're all frightened by the media at the dangers lurking from not knowing more, but actually our lives are fine.

The things that are actually dangerous in our lives? Not informing ourselves enough about science, politics, economics, history, and letting angry people lead us astray. Nobody writes about that. Instead they write about spooky things that can't be predicted and shudder. It's easier to wonder about future uncertainty than deal with current certainty.

Terr_4• 6 months ago

Executive function is not the same as weaving or carpentry. The scary problem comes from people who are trying to abdicate their entire understand-and-decide phase to an outside entity.

What's more, that's not fundamentally a new thing, it's always been possible for someone to helplessly cling to another human as their brain... but we've typically considered that to be a mental-disorder and/or abuse.

0xbadcafebee2• 6 months ago

What you described is what people do every single day. Every decision we make, choice, piece of information we think, has been selected for us by others. And we don't even stop to think about that, we just accept it.

Here's another cooking example: try to look up a recipe right now. It should contain meat, veggies, fiber. What will you get? A recipe that is generic and tailored to the masses in your general location. It's genuinely hard to find a recipe for food that isn't extremely familiar to the culture assigned to you (even if you're actually 1st generation Chinese, if you're browsing from Ohio with Google using English language, you aren't gonna get authentic Chinese dishes back). Because whatever system of systems is looking up recipes for you, is designed to do that; to think for you, and provide you a set of basic, canned responses.

The entire world is that. Nearly every part of our world, we abdicate. Our decisions are not really ours; they're a constructed set of possible decisions defined by other people, programmed into our brains by osmosis. And you go with it, because otherwise the world would be too hard to deal with.

This causes you to not only "lose" information and skills people had in the past, it defines who you are now and what you do. And it's been happening since civilization started. Actually before, since it's about your ecosystem, and systems of systems. AI is now a part of our ecosystem and will define who we are, and we don't really have a choice in the matter, because it's systemic.

toomuchtodo• 6 months ago

Systems used to be robust, now they’re fragile due to extreme outsourcing and specialization. I challenge the belief that we’re getting along fine. I argue systems are headed to failure, because of over optimization that prioritized output over resilience.

the_af2• 6 months ago

How many of you know how to [...] cook your own food?

That's a very low bar. I expect most people know how to cook, at least simple dishes.

fragmede5• 6 months ago

I know how to cook! You open the freezer, grab a Hot Pocket, Unwrap it, put it in the microwave, hit 2, and wait 3 minutes (it has to cool). That's what you meant, right?

Some people really don't.

b00ty4breakfast4• 6 months ago

What I am worried about (and it's something about regular internet search that has worried me for the past ~10 years or so) is that, after they've trained a generation of folks to rely on this tech, they're going to start inserting things into the training data (or whatever the method would be) to bias it towards favoring certain agendas wrt the information it presents to the users in response to their queries.

human_llm• 6 months ago

Absolutely. Like most things on the Internet, it will get enshittified. I think it is very likely that at some point there will be "ads" in the form of the chat bot giving recommendations that favor certain products and services.

chii3• 6 months ago

after they've trained a generation of folks to rely on this tech ... bias it towards favoring certain agendas

previously, this happened with print media. Then it happened with the airwaves. It only makes logical sense that the trend continues with LLMs.

Basically, the fundamental issue is that the source of information is under someone else's control, and that someone will always have an agenda.

But with LLMs, it's crucial to try change the trend. IMHO, it should be possible for a regular person to own their computing - this should include the LLM capability/hardware, as well as the model(s). Without such capabilities, the exact same will happen as has in the past with new technologies.

yetihehe2• 6 months ago

it should be possible for a regular person to own their computing

And regular persons will not care about this and will select a model with biases of anyone who they deem "works better for me at this one task that I needed".

Just like you said:

previously, this happened with print media. Then it happened with the airwaves. It only makes logical sense that the trend continues with LLMs.

I wish it wasn't so, but I have no idea how to make people care about not being under someone's control.

Gud• 6 months ago

This is already happening. People are conditioned to embrace capitalism, where a small percentage of the population are born into the owning class, and a majority who labour.

wafflemaker• 6 months ago

Being told how my grandma had problems and was eventually told to shut down her knitting production (done in free time in addition to regular work) by police in the Communist Poland, I believe that it's better to have somehow upgraded capitalism then try to build a good communism just one more time.

It still got her enough extra buck to build a house in the city after moving out from the village.

ThrowawayR22• 6 months ago

The opposition to capitalism have such a disastrous track record, economically and in terms of body count, that embracing capitalism is far more sensible.

yetihehe2• 6 months ago

I think that's called feudalism. Maybe our reality doesn't work like it's named and we are starting to have other system despite what we are calling it.

simonw2• 6 months ago

I worried about this a lot more at the tail end of 2003, when OpenAI's GPT-4 (since March) was still very clearly ahead of every other model. It briefly looked like control of the most useful model would stay with a single organization, giving them outsized influence in how LLMs shape human society.

I don't worry about that any more because there's so much competition: dozens of organizations now produce usable LLMs and the "best" is no longer static. We have frontier models from the USA, France (Mistral) and China now.

The risk of a model monopoly centralizing cultural power feels a lot lower now then it did a couple of years ago.

norir2• 6 months ago

Model competition does nothing to address monopoly consolidation of compute. If you have control over compute, you can exert control over the masses. It doesn't matter how good my open source model is if I can't acquire the resources to run it. And I have no doubt that the big players will happily buy legislation to both entrench their compute monopoly/cartel and control what can be done using their compute (e.g. making it a criminal offence to build a competitor).

b00ty4breakfast4• 6 months ago

I don't think model competition is necessarily the fix to this issue. We're not even sure if the setup as it exists today will be the norm. It could be that other entities license out the models for their own projects which then become the primary contact point for users and LLMs. They are obviously going to want to fine-tune the models to their use-case and this could result in intentional commercial or ideological biases.

And commercial biases wouldn't necessarily be affected by competition in the way that you're describing. For example, if it becomes profitable for one of these companies to offer to insert links to buy ingredients at WalMart (or wherever) for the goulash recipe you asked for that's going to become the thing that companies go after.

And all of this assumes that these biases will be obvious rather than subtle.

ben_w• 6 months ago

to bias it towards favoring certain agendas wrt the information it presents to the users in response to their queries.

Do you mean like Grok is already doing in such a ham-fisted way?

33712• 6 months ago

Ever since Google experimented LLM in Gmail it bothers me alot. I firmly believe every word and the way you put them together portrays who you are. Using LLM for direct communication is harmful to human connections.

nullsanity• 6 months ago

This comment has made me glad for LLM in Gmail. If someone is going to over analyze my every word because he firmly believes it portrays who I am, I'd appreciate the layer obfuscation between me and this creepazoid.

flyinglizard• 6 months ago

Assuming you did not use an LLM to craft your comment, I’d say “case in point”.

johnfn• 6 months ago

If your words don’t portray who you are, what does?

33712• 6 months ago

That's exactly the point. In your case, you don't want to show who you are, connection or not does not matter.

mettamage5• 6 months ago

It can be. It can also not be. A friend of mine had a PITA boss. Thanks to ChatGPT he salvaged his relationship with him even though he hated working with him.

He went on to something else but his stress levels went way down.

All this is to say: I agree with you if the human connection is in good faith. If it isn’t then LLMs are helpful sometimes.

lofties• 6 months ago

It sounds like that relationship was not supposed to be salvaged to begin with. ChatGPT perhaps prolonged your friend's suffering, who ended up moving on in the end. Perhaps unnecessarily delayed.

liveoneggs• 6 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPC_(meme)

gjadi• 6 months ago

IMHO, the real problem is that they create an even greater dissonance between online life and IRL.

Think about dating apps, pictures could be fake, and now words exchanged can be fake too.

You thought you were arguing with a gentle and smart colleague by chat and mails, too bad, when you meet then at a conference or at a restaurant you find them very unpleasant.

keepamovin• 6 months ago

One perspective I’m circling right now about this topic is that maybe we’re coming to realize as a society that what we considered intelligence (or symbolic intelligence whatever you wanna call that thing that we measure with traditional IQ tests, verbal fluency, etc) is actually a far less essential cognitive aspect to us as humans then we had previously assumed and is in fact, far more mechanical in nature than we had formerly believed.

This ties with how I sometimes describe current generation AI as a form of mechanized intelligence: like Babbage’s calculating machine, but scaled up to be able to represent all kinds of classes of things.

And in this perspective that I’m circling these days where I’m currently coming down on it is maybe the effect of this realization will be something like the dichotomy outlined in the Dune series: namely, that between mechanized intelligence embodied by mentats and the more intuitive and prescient aspects of cognition embodied by the Benni Jessarit and Paul’s lineage.

A simple but direct way to describe this transition in perspective may be that we come to see what we formally thought of as intelligence in the West/reductive tradition as a form of mechanized calculation that it’s possible to outsource to automatic non-biological processes, and we start to lean in more deeply to the more intuitive and prescient aspects of cognition.

One thing I’m reminded of is how Indian yogic texts describe various aspects of mind.

I’m not sure if it’s a one-to-one mapping because I’m not across that material but merely the idea of distinguishing between different aspects of mind is something with precedent; and central to that is the idea of removing association between self identity and the aspects of mind.

And so maybe one of the effects for us as a society will be something akin to that.

pveierland2• 6 months ago

One bothersome aspect of generative assistance for personal and public communication not mentioned is that it introduces a lazy hedge, where a person can always claim that "Oh, but that was not really what I meant" or "Oh, but I would not express myself in that way" - and use it as a tool to later modify or undo their positions - effectively reducing honesty instead of increasing it.

chii3• 6 months ago

where a person can always claim that "Oh, but that was not really what I meant"

that already happens today - they claim autocorrect or spell checks instead of ai previously.

I don't accept these as excuses as valid (even if it was real). It does not give them a valid out to change their mind regardless of the source of the text.

pveierland2• 6 months ago

Yep! However the problem will increase by many orders of magnitude as the volume of generated content far surpasses the content created by autocorrect mechanisms, in addition to autocorrect being a far more local modification that does not generate entire paragraphs or segments of content, making it harder to excuse large changes in meaning.

I agree that they make for poor excuses - but as generative content seeps into everything I fear it will become more commonly invoked.

Mordisquitos2• 6 months ago

Arguably, excusing oneself because of autocorrect is comparable to the classic "Dictated but not read" [0] disclaimer of old. Excusing oneself because an LLM wrote what was ostensibly your own text is more akin to confessing that your assistant wrote the whole thing and you tried to pass it off as your own without even bothering to read it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictated_but_not_read

kaffekaka6• 6 months ago

Never in my life would I accept that as a valid excuse. If you sent the mail, committed the code or whatever, you take responsibility for it. Anything else is just pathetic.

wiseowise• 6 months ago

You must be a delightful person to work with.

If you sent the mail, committed the code or whatever, you take responsibility for it. Anything else is just pathetic.

Have you discussed this with your therapist?

red75prime• 6 months ago

Are you embracing the fundamental attribution error?

OsamaJaber2• 6 months ago

This is something I noticed myself. I let AI handle some of my project and later realized I didn't even understand my own project well enough to make decisions about it :)

written-beyond• 6 months ago

But that's exactly what you should be doing, technically. Human in the loop is a dead concept, you should never need to understand your code or even know what changes to make. All you should be concerned about is having the best possible harness so your LLM can do everything as efficiently as possible.

If it gets stuck, use another LLM as the debugger. If that gets stuck then use another LLM. Turtles all the way down.

puelocesar• 6 months ago

No thinking allowed! Only vibes

(I don’t have the link to the video, but hopefully someone else remembers this joke)

kaffekaka6• 6 months ago

Great blog post, and I fully agree. The human touch in communication and reflection can not be emphasized enough.

oktcho• 6 months ago

We are going to be able to think plenty about other things than what we are doing, yes. That is called anxiety.

Animats2• 6 months ago

The author says it's too long. So let's tighten it up.

A criticism of the use of large language models (LLMs) is that it can deprive us of cognitive skills. Are some kinds of use are better than others? Andy Masley's blog says "thinking often leads to more things to think about", so we shouldn't worry about letting machines do the thinking for us — we will be able to think about other things.

My aim is not to refute all his arguments, but to highlight issues with "outsourcing thinking".

Masley writes that it's "bad to outsource your cognition when it:"

- Builds tacit knowledge you'll need in future.

- Is an expression of care for someone else.

- Is a valuable experience on its own.

- Is deceptive to fake.

- Is focused in a problem that is deathly important to get right, and where you don't totally trust who you're outsourcing it to.

How we choose to use chatbots is about how we want our lives and society to be.

That's what he has to say. Plus some examples, which help make the message concrete. It's a useful article if edited properly.

theodric• 6 months ago

This here is why I always read the comments /first/ on HN

vages• 6 months ago

I think that this summary is oversimplifying: The rest of the blog post elaborates on how the author and Masley has a completely different interpretation of that bullet point list. The rest of the text is not only examples; it provides elaborations of what thought processes led him to his conclusions. I found the nuancing of the two opposing interpretations, not the conclusion, the most enjoyable part of the post.

(This comment could also be shortened to “that’s oversimplifying”. I think my longer version is both more convincing and enjoyable.)

sebasv_• 6 months ago

I feel like your comment is in itself a great analogy for the "beware of using LLMs in human communication" argument. LLMs are in the end statistical models that regress to the mean, so they by design flatten out our communication, much like a reductionist summary does. I care about the nuance that we lose when communicating through "LLM filters", but others dont apparently.

That makes for a tough discussion unfortunately. I see a lot of value lost by having LLMs in email clients, and I dont observe the benefit; LLMs are a net time sink because I have to rewrite its output myself anyway. Proponents seem to not see any value loss, and they do observe an efficiency gain.

I am curious to see how the free market will value LLM communication. Will the lower quality, higher quantity be a net positive for job seekers sending applications or sales teams nursing leads? The way I see it either we end up in a world where eg job matching is almost completely automated, or we find an effective enough AI spam filter and we will be effectively back to square one. I hope it will be the latter, because agents negotiating job positions is bound to create more inequality, with all jobs getting filled by applicants hiring the most expensive agent.

Either way, so much compute and human capital will go wasted.

jakewins• 6 months ago

I don’t understand this summary - isn’t this a summary of the authors recitation of Masleys position? It’s missing the part that actually matters, the authors position and how it differs from Masley?

NateEag2• 6 months ago

Yep - it honestly reads like an LLM's summary, which often miss critical nuances.

layer82• 6 months ago

It actually isn’t very long. I was expecting it to be much longer after the author’s initial warning.

GeoAtreides• 6 months ago

I am curious if you understand how disrespectful your comment is.

It's a dismissive as a spitting in someone's face.

simianwords3• 6 months ago

Not to nitpick but I find his point on automating vacation planning on AI so silly.

Apparently he think of planning a vacation as some artistic expression.

pseufaux• 6 months ago

I really enjoyed and agree with the majority of the article, but this was my nit as well. My hatred of vacation planning is often the reason I don't go on more vacations. It seems like automating a task that is experienced by the individual as completely monotonous ( and only affects that individual) would be a great example of something worth handing off to a text generator.

simianwords3• 6 months ago

For me there’s a lot of risk in vacationing in a new area I have no idea about. ChatGPT helps me here.

It all comes down to people who have comfort in their own workflows and it takes mental load to change it. And then find reasons to work backwards to justify not liking AI.

nzgrover• 6 months ago

You might want to read this then: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/top/585370/ai-on-australian-trave...

Isamu• 6 months ago

Surely we can do better than reading TFA and manually commenting on it.

jonmagic• 6 months ago

I really liked this piece, and I share the concern, but I think “outsourcing thinking” is slightly the wrong frame.

In my own work, I found the real failure mode wasn’t using AI, it was automating the wrong parts. When I let AI generate summaries or reflections for me, I lost the value of the task. Not because thinking disappeared, but because the meaning-making did.

The distinction that’s helped me is: - If a task’s value comes from doing the thinking (reflection, synthesis, judgment), design AI as a collaborator, asking questions, prompting, pushing back. - If the task is execution or recall, automate it aggressively.

So the problem isn’t that we outsource thinking, it’s that we sometimes bypass the cognitive loops that actually matter. The design choice is whether AI replaces those loops or helps surface them.

I wrote more about that here if useful: https://jonmagic.com/posts/designing-collaborations-not-just...

js8• 6 months ago

I think we can make an analogy with our own brains, which have evolutionary older parts (limbic system) and evolutionary younger parts (neocortex). Now AI, I think it will be our new neocortex, another layer to our brain. And you can see limbic system didn't "outsource" thinking to neocortex - it's still doing it; but it can take (mostly good) advice from it.

Applying this analogy to human relationships - neocortex allowed us to be more social. Social communication with limbic system was mostly "you smell like a member of our species and I want to have sex with you". So having neocortex expanded our social skills to having friends etc.

I think AI will have a similar effect. It will allow us to individually communicate with large amount of other people (millions). But it will be a different relationship than what we today call "personal communication", face to face, driven by our neocortex. It will be as incomprehensible for our neocortex as our language is incomprehensible for the limbic system.

jsattler• 6 months ago

Very interesting, thanks for sharing this. After reading Karpathy's recent tweet about "A few random notes from claude coding quite [...]" it got me thinking a lot about offloading thinking and more specifically failure. Failure is important for learning. When I use AI and they make mistakes, I often tend to blame the AI and offload the failure. I think this post explores similar thoughts, without talking much about failure. It will be interesting to see the long-term effects.

throwaway2037• 6 months ago

For those unaware, this phrase: "The lump of cognition fallacy" is a derivative of the classic economic fallacy: Lump of Labor Fallacy (or Lump of Jobs)

Google AI describes it as:

    This is the most common form, often used in debates about technology, immigration, or retirement. 
    Definition: The belief that there is a set, finite amount of work to be done in an economy.
    The Fallacy: Assuming that if one person works more, or if a machine does a job, there is less work left for others.
    Reality: An increase in labor or technology (like AI or automation) can increase productivity, lower costs, and boost economic activity, which actually creates more demand for labor.
    Examples:
    "If immigrants come to this country, they will take all our jobs" (ignoring that immigrants also consume goods and create demand for more jobs).
    "AI will destroy all employment" (ignoring that technology typically shifts the nature of work rather than eliminating it).

sumul• 6 months ago

This part really caught my attention (along with the rest of the preceding paragraph):

Our inability to see opportunities and fulfillment in life as it is, leads to the inevitable conclusion that life is never enough, and we would always rather be doing something else.

I agree with the article completely, as it effectively names an uneasy feeling of hesitation I’ve had all along with how I use LLMs. I have found them tremendously valuable as sounding boards when I’m going in circles in my own well-worn cognitive (and sometimes even emotional) ruts. I have also found them valuable as research assistants, and I feel grateful that they arrived right around the time that search engines began to feel all but useless. I haven’t yet found them valuable in writing on my behalf, whether it’s prose or code.

During my formal education, I was very much a math and science person. I enjoyed those subjects. They came easily to me, which I also enjoyed. I did two years of liberal arts in undergrad, and they kicked my butt academically in a way that I didn’t realize was possible. I did not enjoy having to learn how to think and articulate those thoughts in seminars and essays. I did not enjoy the vulnerability of sharing myself that way, or of receiving feedback. If LLMs had existed, I’m certain I would have leaned hard on them to get some relief from the constant feeling of struggle and inadequacy. But then I wouldn’t have learned how to think or how to articulate myself, and my life and career would have been significantly less meaningful, interesting, and satisfying.

port11• 6 months ago

As the quotes go, before you judge others make sure your affairs are in order. I’m not judging the young that are now trying to make sense of this hectic and overwhelming world.

But… I do agree with you, that had these things been there, I/we’d all be leaning on them. It’s the manageable hardship of life that makes it worth it, we better ourselves through the pain. My 18-year old self would complain, as would any me up to mid-30s. I’d have to insist to him that things will get better, but that he must work on what needs improving. Can’t just ask a language model for validation.

acedTrex• 6 months ago

The category of writing that I like to call "functional text", which are things like computer code and pure conveyance of information (e.g., recipes, information signs, documentation), is not exposed to the same issues.

I hate this take, computer code is just as rich in personality as writing. I can tell a tremendous amount about what kind of person someone is solely based off their code. Code is an incredibly personal expression of ones mental state, even if you might not realize it. LLMs have dehumanized this and the functional outcomes become FAR more unpredictable.

Outsourcing thinking

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