> “I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”

Well, this guy obviously didn't get the memo that Google search isn't what it was 10 years ago and is total junk.

It's not just AI brain rot. Brain rot is everywhere. Social media, linear TV, politics.

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SunshineTheCat 2 days ago | parent [-]

“I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”

This has a real “I’m afraid no one will know how to ride a horse when the motorcoach comes out” sense to it.

The answer is, who cares? Why would a better way of doing something “frighten” someone. Not to say it won't come with its own set of issues, but technology constantly evolving/improving should be expected by now, but humanity remains terrified at even the slightest upheaval of the status quo.

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xanderlewis 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> a better way of doing something

Your argument fails right here because you're supposing something that isn't true. LLMs are better than search engines for some things, but you're speaking as if they're a replacement for what came before. They're absolutely not. Reading books — going to the original source rather than relying on a stochastic facsimile — is never going to go away, even if some of us are too lazy to ever do so. Their loss.

Put another way: leaving aside non-practical aspects of the experience, the car does a better job of getting you from A to B than a horse does. An LLM does not 'do a better job' than a book. Maybe in some cases it's more useful, but it's simply not a replacement. Perhaps a combination is best: use the LLM to interpolate and find your way around the literature, and then go and hunt down the real source material. The same cannot be said of the car/horse comparison.

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hitarpetar 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

typical technological determinism. comparing AI to the motorcoach assumes something we cannot know yet, namely that the impact of AI on the next century will be comparable to the invention of the automobile. there's also a long list of negative externalities caused by automobiles. who cares? anyone hurt by climate change, or who lives in a grid organized around cars rather than people. anyone who has ever been killed in a car accident.

	▲	D-Machine 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, although in this case the premise is just entirely wrong. A "traditional Google search" doesn't work anymore as Google just ignores half of what you put in anyway, and even vigorous quoting and Google-fu still generally just returns SEO garbage. Whereas e.g. Kagi is another world (proving that "knowing how to search" is not actually the problem anyway).