My experience is that AI is just that, a “mech suit for your brain.” It has no creativity or volition but has superhuman memory, superhuman speed, and superhuman context in some narrow cases.

So it takes a thought and unfolds it, looks up relevant thoughts and information, elaborates, works through implications, and in some cases can execute.

You could do all that but like doing math manually it would take forever. You could manually calculate a spreadsheet too.

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dgellow a day ago | parent | next [-]

I disagree. LLMS take a human thought, simplify it, normalize it, remove it from its original context, inject it with their own biases and prejudices, assume an imaginary context. They bastardize human thoughts into something fairly generic.

The comparison with manual calculation or other mechanical operations doesn’t work, LLMs don’t work at the same level of abstraction, they take over the decision making human generally do. When you write code or write a text, us humans are continuously taking lots of small decisions, we don’t just translate 1:1 a thought to an artifact. And that’s the part that is taken over by LLMs.

	▲	Silagi a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That model simplifies thought into a painfully linear process, and overestimates the creativity people put into the "small decisions" that push a project forward. Most decisions are arbitrary and need to be reconsidered later anyway. And any real creative work has a "push it far enough to find the edge cases, then go back to the initial design and iterate" loop cycle anyway. AI significantly speeds up the "Find where this spec breaks down, then lets go back to the design stage" in a way that should enable any creative person to create more interesting and useful work. If the output is slop, that reflects on the operator, not the tool.
	▲	api a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If they do that you’re using them wrong, or trying to use them as a substitute for thinking which they’re not. You are the one in charge doing the primary thinking and guidance. The AI is an amplifier and a search engine basically.

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jdiff 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Won't you suffer from muscle atrophy in a such a low-G environment?

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bflesch 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Can't atrophy something that never existed.

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short_sells_poo 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Inevitably yes, the question is whether the combined cyborg is still better than the original human.

E.g. I'm sure we are generally less skilled in mental arithmetic since the advent of the calculator, but it has allowed us to solve vastly more complex problems in the end.

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trashb a day ago | parent [-]

> E.g. I'm sure we are generally less skilled in mental arithmetic since the advent of the calculator, but it has allowed us to solve vastly more complex problems in the end.

This is like saying we have been getting a lot worse at walking since the advent of the car but it has allowed us to practice global trade in the end.

Yes cars are a part of the solution but there are a lot more factors at play.

A calculator does not do math, a calculator (and computer) calculates or computes. The math is the study and understanding of the problem space (and the problem solving) that the human is doing behind the calculator.

"solve vastly more complex problems" the calculator has accelerated this but it is not really a cause effect relation. The advancements in the understanding of the complex problems could've also happened without calculators and the computation could have been done instead (for example) with 1000 people in a bunker.

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derektank a day ago | parent [-]

By vastly more complex problems, I think the parent is referring to engineering problems, not mathematical problems. And in this case quantity has a quality all its own. Yes, 1000 people in a bunker could in theory do the calculations necessary to refine airframes or planetary scale weather modeling, practically they would be impossible economically and would never be solved

	▲	fragmede a day ago \| parent [-]
		We did get to the Moon on slide rules and human women calculators, and we haven't been back in person since.