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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...