I am sure many smokers in the 1950s also saw the health benefits of tobacco, that they were very happy to experience the increased energy after a smoke and could get more done as a result. I‘m pretty sure none of them felt their lungs and throats deteriorating either.

Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is. We don‘t have the research (yet) that AI is addictive and causes brain atrophy, but all the evidence is certainly pointing that way, the same way the evidence were pointing that way about tobacco in the 1950s. My only hope is that it doesn’t take us another 2 decades to prove the obvious.

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ndriscoll 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

One thing I've learned in life is to accept that I'm in many ways an outlier, which means that even if the research is done, it frequently doesn't apply to me anyway.

Like I wouldn't doubt that research could show that more time spent on youtube is inversely correlated with learning. But if you just use it to watch lectures or tutorials for some skill, obviously you will be an outlier.

Or when "research shows that dieting doesn't work," obviously the result there is "research shows that most people don't maintain a healthy diet," and it shouldn't dissuade you from doing so. Choosing to do so anyway is what makes you the outlier.

And so it will likely go with AI's effect on the brain. Most people will likely use it to avoid thinking, and the research will show it to be a disaster. A small group will use (or already is using) it to challenge them and expose them to new ideas. You can choose to be in the latter group if you'd like.

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voidhorse 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> One thing I've learned in life is to accept that I'm in many ways an outlier, which means that even if the research is done, it frequently doesn't apply to me anyway.

This is a complete logical fallacy. It is quite literally mathematically impossible for you to not be "typical" for at least some aspects of your life. If you weren't, you'd probably be dead, or immortal.

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ndriscoll 2 days ago | parent [-]

Sure, I expect that if you gave me the LD99 of some poison, I will die. But there are still many things (and my point is this is one of them) where all it takes to be an outlier is to decide to be one.

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runarberg 2 days ago | parent [-]

I am pretty sure that likewise in the 1950s many smokers did indeed decided to be the outlier who smokes occasionally, and for the right reasons, and using the “correct” method/brand of cigarettes. And that every one of them decided that they were not gonna get addicted to nicotine. I am also sure that every single one of them did indeed get addicted to nicotine, and many of them died from cancer.

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kragen a day ago | parent | next [-]

It sounds like you aren't very familiar with the research on tobacco addiction.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002204260203200220

https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-3-health-effec...

The majority of smokers did get addicted to nicotine, but significant percentages did not. However, it is true that even many "non-daily" smokers died from cancer as a result of their smoking.

	▲	runarberg a day ago \| parent [-]
		I know that research on tobacco is full of bad science and bad actors, and experts in different fields (such as social psychology) continued to publish bad science on the topic well into the 2000s. This includes your 2002 German paper (which I can’t read because of a paywall). Your second source says nothing about addiction in the chapter you posted, however they do talk about addiction in chapter 6, and they claim that most people agree that smoking is addictive, but heavy smoking is more addictive.

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ndriscoll a day ago | parent | prev [-]

A better analogy is probably TV. You could watch the Flintstones (along with smoking ads!), or e.g. Mr. Wizard.

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runarberg a day ago | parent [-]

I am specifically talking about this cognitive bias of believing that the mean behavior does not apply to you. Very few people believe this about cigarettes anymore because the evidence is simply overwhelming and public health experts along with anti-smoking activists were able to (despite incredible odds) shift the common rhetoric closer to what is true.

There is a similar phenomena going on with ads. Most people believe they are unaffected by ads, but in reality they absolutely are. And the advertising industry has vested interest in the general public believing this illusion (otherwise they risk being regulated).

We are seeing the exact same phenomena with AI usage as we did with smoking in the 1950s. All the evidence is pointing towards these products being bad for you and being addictive. Yet most users of AI believe they are not addicted, and that they have found a way to use AI in a way which is less harmful for them. This is bias, these users are wrong, so are you, and so is OP. This is addictive to you, and it is bad for you.

I know research is lacking, but eventually we will have the evidence to show the case as clearly as we do today with tobacco.

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ndriscoll a day ago | parent [-]

On the other hand there's the consensus bias where you believe that everyone else is like you, when in fact they are not (which is why I said this is something I've had to learn to accept).

Sure, for most distributions, most people will be statistically normal, by definition. On the other hand, I know that e.g. state standard test scores when I was a kid said I was 99th percentile academically (and there was some kind of IQ test for the gifted program? I remember I qualified in all 3 areas they tested me), so I have some evidence to hypothesize that I might be an outlier along other psychometrics too. And I'll go ahead and guess that many people here are also not the median in many ways.

I don't think that this makes me somehow immune to lung cancer from smoking, but I might suspect that when I read about others' use of AI and how it rots their minds, they're perhaps not using it to learn Lean (the process of learning has mostly been the AI spits out crap proofs that seem way more complicated than they ought to be, and then I spend some time trying to find ways to simplify it. We have a back-and-forth about different encodings, or ideas for syntax macros, etc. Then I can compare with e.g. Mathlib's solution) or checking their understanding as they work through some notes. I don't know what most people use it for or what they get addicted to, but I believe it might be different from what I do.

With regards to ads, I live somewhere where outdoor advertising is banned, I block ads on my computer, I don't watch TV or movies or "news," and I don't install whatever apps, so there aren't a whole lot of channels for ads to reach me. I suspect again that this is not the typical experience. That said I do view ads as fraud-adjacent and damaging to markets, so fully support strongly regulating or outright banning paid advertising.

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runarberg a day ago | parent [-]

This comes across as an athlete excusing their smoking behavior because their superior physical abilities makes them immune to the bad effects of smoking.

I assure you a 99th percentile in 100 m dash may have believed that smoking did not affect them the same way it does an average person, but they would be wrong. And so are you about your AI usage.

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ndriscoll a day ago | parent [-]

You keep assuming that LLM usage is automatically harmful with literally zero reason to believe that, and several anecdotes from people on how they use it positively.

There's simply no reason to even draw a weak analogy to smoking. You'd do much better to draw an analogy to e.g. methylphenidate or amphetamine, which certainly you can abuse and get addicted to, and might even be harmful for the average person (even carrying the possibility of psychosis!), but which carry cognitive benefits with minimal side effects for others.

I'll give another concrete use: the other day I scanned a storybook with my phone and had codex OCR it and compare with a list I've started of words and sound patterns my kid knows how to read so that it could identify irregular words or new sounds for us to go over before we start the story.

Please, concretely, let me know what the adverse effects were there.

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runarberg a day ago | parent [-]

I keep saying it because all the evidence (while still not conclusive) is pointing in that direction, just like they were with tobacco in the 1950s (It took another two decades for the evidence of tobacco to become conclusive; and two decades still for regulators to catch up).

We do know that LLMs can cause psychosis, we do know it can cause people to behave in an unhealthy manner, etc. We are seeing more and more evidence that AI usages in education is at least correlated with bad grades. We are seeing people exhibit addictive behavior around AI. There is plenty of reasons to suspect that as we gather more evidence that they will become conclusive about the addictiveness and the unhealthyness of these products. For me this is obvious.

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ndriscoll a day ago | parent [-]

Evidence doesn't point in that direction though, even if we establish correlations.

Like the education effect is pretty obvious: most people will use it to cheat on their homework and avoid learning. Some people will use it to learn new topics or with more depth, and give them additional targeted probing questions to answer (basically, give them more homework). Average achievement will probably drop. The high achievers will probably do even better.

Boiling it down to "it harms your brain" when people are already telling you how to use it to learn more effectively is just silly. Most people are happy to rot their brains. They'll take any opportunity to do it. If you're an outlier, you're probably aware of that fact on some level, and it doesn't make sense for you to make decisions looking at the median who behave completely differently. You have to look at the mechanisms behind the data and interpret under what situations they could plausibly apply to you.

	▲	runarberg 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Like I said, the parallels to the 1950s tobacco usage is glaring. People used to say the exact same about cigarettes, that the way they specifically use cigarettes, the way their body is build, the way they control the habit, etc. etc. all leads to them being unique in some way or another making the habit healthy actually. The evidence were all pointing towards tobacco being both addictive and unhealthy, but it still took two decades for the evidence to become clear and public health experts to be proven right. Maybe in two decades I will be proven wrong and you will be proven right, but I doubt it. When the evidence are all pointing in one direction, it is usually because they are right.

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johnnyanmac 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>You can choose to be in the latter group if you'd like.

And now you inherit the burden of proving you are "one of the good ones" after a mass amount of disappointment from the normal use case. I don't think the "it's okay, I'm different" methodology ever works out unless you can prove you are so utterly beyond the competition that you can't be ignored.

But an outlier is just that. And as we see here, outliers cannot change society single-handedly. You at least need to be an outlier good enough to convince a lot of "normal" people that you are to their benefit and be willing to lead those "normal" people.

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ndriscoll 2 days ago | parent [-]

You don't need to prove anything or lead anyone or change society. You have a tool in front of you that can help you achieve your goals or distract you from them. You decide how you want to use it. Just do your thing.

> It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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johnnyanmac 2 days ago | parent [-]

So you're just saying "it's okay I got mine" in that case, and don't care if the rest of society rots because "I can use it well". Fair enough.

And I assume you never need to worry about applying to a W2 job with that mentality

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ndriscoll 2 days ago | parent [-]

I mean sure I care. I'd love for my kids to grow into a world where everyone around them is a super jacked highly competent and motivated ubermensch, but what are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to get people to not let themselves rot other than to remind them that it's an option, and all they need to do is to decide to take it. If anyone doesn't care, it's the person who's resigned to the inevitability of rot even in the face of someone telling them they're looking at a tool for self-improvement.

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johnnyanmac 2 days ago | parent [-]

>I'd love for my kids to grow into a world where everyone around them is a super jacked highly competent and motivated ubermensch, but what are you supposed to do?

I just gave an example. Use your power to lead and improve your community, and society as a whole. Use your leadership to add guardrails so the tools assist the user, as opposed to the current state of unchecked capitalism that simply extracts funds with no care for results.

You dismissed it and said to focus in yourself. Which is exactly how we get to such a situation.

This contradictory feeling of powerlessness while simultaneously striving to use such tools to influence the community simply shows why the wider population is gaining mistrust for the tech. Telling people to be better people because ot works for you has never ended well.

	▲	ndriscoll a day ago \| parent [-]
		I influence where I can, and I have encouraged my team at work to use models as learning tools. Probe into their claims. Ask them to prove things with a quick demo/test/PoC. etc. They have tons of embedded knowledge that you can dig out. But running for president of the world so I can demand guardrails is a little out of my scope. Reminder that this reply chain was about someone saying how they use LLMs for personal growth, and someone replying that they're deceiving themselves. You don't have to get hung up on how to fix society (who were already happy to rot with TV, instagram, tiktok, etc.) and keep that from seeing a useful tool in front of you.

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kragen 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh, I definitely feel a strong pull toward the low-effort path of just letting the AI do everything. It's so much better than I am at writing code, after all! This code it wrote for me is beautiful! But it makes terrible mistakes constantly, and when I'm reduced to pleading with it to check whether it's made mistakes, basically there is no hope. And, of course, it would put me in the Homer Simpson position of declining to get up and walk just because there's a motorized wheelchair at hand.

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PorciiVorbesc 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is.

It is, but why is that a problem? Moving from physical labor on the farm, factory or construction site to sedentary work and lifestyles would also atrophy our muscles so now we pursue physical activities we actually enjoy like gym and sports instead of hanging on to those dangerous and strenuous physical labor jobs just to stay in shape.

Similarly, you will use the AI to churn through the repetitive mundane tasks the AI can do, and then work your brain on the activities you actually enjoy.

Now if you choose to not exercise your brain and dumb yourself down the same way sedentary people don't exercise their bodies and get obese, then I guess that's on you, but we can't force the world to technologically regress just because some people are lazy and don't exercise, the same way we haven't forced construction workers to use pickaxes instead of machinery to tear up a road just to make sure they stay in shape and don't get too fat from sitting in their air conditioned excavators.

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hombre_fatal 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed. I haven't written a line of code since last November when AI had the big shift into something good.

The average HNer would imagine me scrolling TikTok while I periodically swivel to Claude to type "continue" while my brain shrivels away.

That I can delegate lower level work like implementation means I spend my time at increasingly high leverage positions like deciding what gets built. And any time I want, I can get as granular and inquisitive as I'd like about the lower level work. After all, I probably chose it from a multiple choice AskUserQuestion tool call, each with a blurb and shortlist of trade-offs.

All this talk of de-skilling doesn't make a lot of sense to me because what are these skills people covet so much that defined most of the day to day of a software developer? What, the implementation details of some framework or the intimate details of your company's crappy legacy software stack?

Dunno, I have bigger plans for myself than that.

	▲	majewsky 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		That may very well be true, but as you're describing it, I think of all my fellow engineers, all of them very talented, who moved up into management, arguing exactly the same point of thinking at higher abstraction levels. And after one or two years go by, they will come to me with requests or opinions that are literally the dumbest shit I've ever heard. Like arguing that we (holding most of our data on MariaDB and Postgres) should move everything into Kubernetes custom resources because "the Kubernetes resource model is the best database ever". That's a real thing that I've had an engineering lead say to me. When I asked how you're gonna do an efficient table join on Kubernetes resources, I just got a blank stare.

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zero_shift 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It is, but why is that a problem?

I used to have several good answers, but now I use Claude for everything, I can't remember any

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johnnyanmac 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>then work your brain on the activities you actually enjoy.

1. As seen in this coountry, most people did not in fact "pursue physical activities they enjoyed". They got much less healthy and then the white collar machines started to churn their brains too. I do not see this ending any differently.

2. As many have noted (and has been known for decades pre-AI), getting more work done in a modern workplace does not reward you with more of your time back. It gives you more work and higher velocity plans. It may even end up compensating you less. There's only more benefit to this if you are your own boss, and so far a lot of those kinds of people are simply selling grifts, not truly disrupting the industry with newfound efficiencies.

>but we can't force the world to technologically regress just because some people are lazy and don't exercise

I didn't want to go too off topic, but since this is such a sticking point I need to make a big note about the US: most of the world is more sedentary than 100 years ago. But the obesity epidemic is mostly US-cerntric.

Which shows that, while we can't force a diet, we can definitely regulate incentives. But the US chose not to. We had all kinds of initatives to try and regulate what we put in our food and what to subsidize. We instead said corporations can do whatever we want and subsidized chemicals that are heavily taxes or banned in many other western countries.

I know that's a scary word for this community, but this analog of regulations can work here in AI as well. We don't need to ban AI (but I'm not opposed to it in primary schools), but we can shape policy to prevent "corporations can do whatever they want" yet again.

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PorciiVorbesc 2 days ago | parent [-]

>we can definitely regulate incentives.

We can't regulate incentives. Unless we can somehow go back to how the world was in the 1960s, the incentive today in a global competitive world economy, is to make more money than your economic rivals, otherwise if you only regulate yourself but if they don't, then they will economically dominate you in the long run and turn your government into their puppet, your country into their playground and your people in their sweatshop workers. It's economic neo-colonilism 2.0 electric boogaloo.

Regulations only work if all players in the world adhere to them, but history has proven they don't. They expect everyone else to adhere to the rules and slow down so that they can get ahead of you.

> But the US chose not to

Smart. Then US can be the survivor in this global race. As someone in the EU I am aware of more top EU-born tech companies relocating their offices/R&D to the US than vice versa.

> but we can shape policy to prevent "corporations can do whatever they want" yet again.

I fully agree. But again, this will work if all major nations regulate AI equally, otherwise, AI corporations will move where they have more freedom.

	▲	johnnyanmac 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		>We can't regulate incentives. We call tax subsidies "tax incentives" for a reason. You subsidize high-fructose corn syrup, you incentivize society to include cheap oils in their food. >the incentive today in a global competitive world economy, is to make more money than your economic rivals On a domestic level this is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how cheaply China makes corn syrup if there's still a cost of importing it into your country. And if it's still a problem, you add tariffs for more (dis)incentive. That was the original way they were supposed to be implemented, not as this massive general tax on doing any business with a country. And if it's still a problem despite that, direct regulations and bans from usage in market consumption products is a last option. We can , do, and have done all of these for hundreds of ingredients. >Then US can be the survivor in this global race I'm talking specifically about food here, you know? You were so focused on the obesity epidemic that I wanted to highlight the actual underpinnings of it instead of leave it at "the world got lazier and fatter, that's progress". Clearly tariffs don't so much to software. AI needs different solutions. >AI corporations will move where they have more freedom. If AI is a societally damaging tool, then I see this as a win. Let them move, let the US economy correct back to rationalism again, and let's improve society instead of CEO's bottom lines. I also do believe in the invisible hand. If big tech doesn't like potential US regulations, smaller startups will happily compete for that role in the country.

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fragmede 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

De-skilling is too broad though. Or maybe not broad enough. I've been using GPS sat nav since it came out, in the Tomtom days. I don't know how to get around to places without a gps to spoon-feed me instructions. My ability to multiply two digit numbers in my head has totally atrophied since my younger years. I also don't know how to ride a horse or grow corn though. Or how to milk a cow or goat. Yet somehow I'm still (for now) able to put food on the table. I can tell you subtle differences between the output of Fable vs Opus, or Sol and Astra. I'm real good at Linux, and it made my career, but honestly Claude is better at it than I am, and it's relentless. I get tired and distracted easily. When people lose one of their senses, the other ones sharpen. Maybe. I have a couple of practices I do to sharpen my mind on memory and recall and cognition. You're right on the brain atrophy, but like the gym replaced manual labor, we should do the same for our minds.

	▲	runarberg 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The de-skilling of AI includes your ability to express your thoughts, to communicate your ideas, to come up with new ideas, and creative solutions, to converse with other people. This is an entirely different category then the ability to navigate on highways and city streets. Also worth noting is that your GPS has probably not de-skilled your navigation abilities when you walk or bike in your local area.