alt Hacker NewsI have been thinking about this for a while. I'm not a Luddite, I can see the amazing value that modern AI brings, and how useful it can be.
At the same time I can't help but wonder that this is almost too much for us to cope, the LLMs are _too_ easy to use. I think we're very good at pretending there isn't a problem here but there is definitely going to be some cognitive decline happening.
We want to pretend like reading over the output of an LLM is nearly the same as us making those changes ourselves but I think there's a lot of value in those boring and manual steps. And most people (including me) will be too lazy to not eventually offload most things to the LLMs.
In a way this is similar to how watching a lecture tends to give one an "impression" of understanding that doesn't correlate with reality. We need hands-on work and some course work to get our monkey brains engaged.
I can only imagine what effects this is going to have in education.
We've surrendered many uses of our cognitive power throughout the centuries while replacing by others.
Our cognition didn't evolve to produce arguments for online discussions, but for making crude tools and hunting. As we stopped applying our intelligence towards these uses as a result of our tools, we simply shifted it to new problems that were unthinkable previously.
A caveman probably wouldn't care too much about algebra, a topic most children learn today.
We should stop thinking about the problems AI trivialized and, under the assumption that AI won't fully replace human capability (a key assumption), start thinking about the problems that were previously out of reach. Education would then start focusing on that.