“It's making me dumber for sure,” the fintech software developer told me. “It's like when we got cellphones and stopped remembering phone numbers, but it's grown to me mentally outsourcing ‘thinking’ in general. I feel my critical thinking and ability to sit and reason about a problem or a design has degraded because the all-knowing-dalai-llama is just a question away from giving me his take. And supposedly I tell myself ill just use it for inspiration but it ends up being my only thought. It gives you the illusion of productivity and expertise but at the end of the day you are more divorced from the output you submit than before.”
https://www.404media.co/software-developers-say-ai-is-rotting-their-brains/
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@tante Speaking of remembering phone numbers, I make a point of ALWAYS manually dialing the one number that is my emergency contact number, so I will remember it if I ever had to call without access to my phone.
@tante I try to avoid chatbots.
And yet, just knowing that they would exist and might (with a lot of luck) help solving problems faster is paralysing my own ability to logically reason.
Honestly, it feels like an addiction.
@tante My friend at work moved totally out of coding because this took all the fun out of it.
I'm stuck myself but totally with him. It's hard to quit and harder to care anymore, it took all the dopamine out of what used to be a fulfilling job.
@tante this week I tried to solve a complete undocumented problem, and I actually had fun whacking my way through the problem with a machete.
In the end I asked a more knowledgeable colleague, and he returned with a solution. Yay \o/
Later he told me he solved that problem with AI 😒
That felt so bloody unsatisfying.
It felt as if neither of us had learned anything from it, and as if I can't even be sure that this is a good solution :-(
@tante they re making a joke out of intellect from raw power
@tante short form video is rotting my brain. Or at least contributing mightily to it.
I'm sorry but this is such total nonsense:
" “It's making me dumber for sure . . .It's like when we got cellphones and stopped remembering phone numbers"
how is having to remember useless stuff like numbers smart ?
it is just using up your brain on stuff you no longer have to worry about
THAT IS CALLED PROGRESS LIKE YOU NO LONGER HAVE TO REMEMBER ALL THE DIRECTIONS TO A PLACE CAUSE THERE ARE FUCKING MAPS
@tante Oh dear what an excellent summary of the AI business model!
> "at the end of the day you are more divorced from the output you submit than before."
Et voila folks: the POINT.
@tante
I haven't had the same experience as this programmer.
Even though I use AI a lot, I find myself mostly going through it's suggestions and developing my own idea in the end.
@tante
This observation just keeps on repeating.
"Predictably, the huge spike in productivity that these companies claim their own AI products have enabled hasn’t resulted in more or better products, shorter work weeks, or better consumer experiences."
@tante Yeah. I tried vibe coding an app just for fun, and I felt completely empty at the end.
It didn’t mean anything to have completed tha app. I learned close to nothing.
But of course I can also see there are many people who have never had the skills to make an app, who don’t have the same experience.
@tante seems pretty normal.
Dude ain't giving up his mobile and I imagine and is surviving ok not having a phonebook in his head.
It's like writing, the old tribes of Thailand still explain the writer word makes people and brains lazy...but much like computers, writing is pretty cool imo.
To put it another way.
Capitalism alienating a new sector of workers from the means of production. their own thought.
@tante Every tool when used wrongly can become a disaster. Be it a kitchen knife, a screw driver, a baseball bat or an AI chatbot. A case could be made against tech giants for making their stuff addictive on purpose. Tristan Harris et al said it more in The Social Network
Using this knowledge, the way Nicholas Carr argued Google was making us stupid, we can hone our skills and reap the best of both worlds. Reading books and articles should be the norm as well as listening to deep conversations!
