Asinine argument. Are you outsourcing your thinking to the compiler because it gives you warnings, instead of getting an error two hours into your punch card programs's runtime?

People have done this work by hand for years and years, and now when they've been using LLMs to do it 5x faster for a couple of years, suddenly they'd be unable to work the traditional way? Please

> My car broke down and now I'm late for work

> Well you shouldn't have outsourced your mobility to a machine

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latexr 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> People have done this work by hand for years and years, and now when they've been using LLMs to do it 5x faster for a couple of years, suddenly they'd be unable to work the traditional way?

Yes. Not completely unable all at once, but they certainly get worse at it fast.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1...

Losing skills due to over-reliance on technology is not a new phenomenon and not exclusive to LLM use, but they of course exacerbate it by so pervasively touching so many areas.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gps-weakens-m...

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streetfighter64 2 days ago | parent [-]

You take a clockmaker who's used to working with hand-operated lathes, mills etc. and let him work for a few years using CNC versions. For sure he'll probably be worse at using the traditional machines when he comes back to them, but that doesn't mean he's any dumber or worse at making clocks. He's just out of practice, same as if he'd have spent a few years staffing a convenience store or anything else.

That seems to be precisely what your study shows as well, though I only read the summary. Say the AI lowered the endoscopists' workload by (for illustration) 20%, so they got 20% less practice per unit of time, which made them have a performance that was 20% worse in the trial. I would expect the same to happen if they got assigned to do paperwork for 20% of their time as well.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, perhaps we're in agreement here, I'm just clarifying my point.

There's a famous talk about the importance of knowing when to use which level of automation, and maintaining currency at all levels you expect to need to use: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs

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latexr 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Analogies with physical tools don’t work well for LLMs because the former enable you to do things you couldn’t before, regardless how much you train and learn. A microscope and a needle allow us to see and work with precision beyond our human physical limitations. Furthermore they don’t make decisions, you are in control the whole time.

The talk looks interesting, thank you. I’ve added it to my list to watch later.

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rootnod3 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That only works because the clockmaker had the manual experience to begin with and only needs to remember to get back into the groove. If however he had always only worked with CNC machines the story would be very different.

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streetfighter64 a day ago | parent [-]

I'm not convinced that's true. If you have experience driving an automatic car with lane assist, you'll have an easier time driving a 1980s manual car than somebody with no driving experience at all.

Likewise, the machinist still knows the principles of construction even if he's only used CNC machines. The endoscopist still knows the principles of colonoscopy even if he's only done it with AI assistance.

Just anecdotally, back when I took courses in assembler and logic circuits, there seemed to be no great difference in success between people like myself that had previous experience with that, and people who'd at most done some high-level scripting.

If you have enough curiosity I doubt using AI will be a roadblock to true understanding, just like high-level programming languages weren't.

	▲	latexr a day ago \| parent [-]
		> If you have enough curiosity That’s a gigantic “if”. Anything can become a positive in the right hands, but we have to consider the societal impact of broadly available tools.

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rglullis 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My compiler does not require billions of dollars of opearational infrastructure to work, except for the electrical grid.

And even in the case of outage, I can keep my computer running on a battery or a backup generator.

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streetfighter64 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

If you're worried about the environment, you're better of stopping "outsourcing" your food gathering to factory farms or your walking to cars.

That's not what I'm talking about though, the question is whether the compiler does the thinking for you or not.

Or do you mean that the question of whether you're outsourcing your thinking to a LLM or not depends on whether you're running it locally? Would you claim you're outsourcing your thinking every time you run a script on a remote server?

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rglullis 2 days ago | parent [-]

My argument is specific to Claude, and it has nothing to do with "the environment".

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streetfighter64 2 days ago | parent [-]

It seems you didn't finish reading my comment before replying. Here's the relevant part in case you missed it:

> Or do you mean that the question of whether you're outsourcing your thinking to a LLM or not depends on whether you're running it locally? Would you claim you're outsourcing your thinking every time you run a script on a remote server?

In any case, your "argument" is more of an observation that

> Claude requires billions of dollars of operational infrastructure to work

Okay, so does a bunch of other things as well. So what?

Me and other commenters have tried quite hard to divine what you feel is relevant about this fact, without success. Perhaps it's time for you to try to articulate what significance you see in it.

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rglullis 2 days ago | parent [-]

My point is that your "outsourcing to a compiler" analogy does not make sense. And that running a hosted, proprietary LLM is not the same as "running a script in a remote server".

The whole "AI is a tool" argument only works if the "tool" is a commodity that is universally available and still exists even if the tool manufacturer disappears. Open-weights, locally hosted LLMs fit this criteria. Anything that depends on a cloud provider does not.

	▲	streetfighter64 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> The whole "AI is a tool" argument only works if the "tool" is a commodity that is universally available and still exists even if the tool manufacturer disappears. You have quite strange criteria for what constitutes a "tool", but sure, at least I see where you're coming from then.

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origini 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

One claude instance also doesn't need billions of dollars of operational infrastructure to work.

Its great that you can keep your computer running, 1/3 of my information is ithe cloud (which is not a problem at all, even today) and 100% of my infrastructure is in the cloud.

Its not a problem at all, that a service has an outage. My laptop also had an outage when the logic board broke. Took 2 days to fix so what

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rglullis 2 days ago | parent [-]

> One claude instance also doesn't need billions of dollars of operational infrastructure to work.

Of course it does. It's the marginal cost that is low.

> 100% of my infrastructure is in the cloud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion

> My laptop also had an outage when the logic board broke.

And if you had a local backup, you'd be able to resume your work immediately.

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streetfighter64 2 days ago | parent [-]

> My laptop also had an outage when the logic board broke.

> And if you had a local backup, you'd be able to resume your work immediately.

Immediately after buying a new laptop. Or perhaps you mean you keep a spare laptop around? In any case, it's also an object that requires a huge environmentally destructive supply chain to create. Quite like a LLM...

	▲	rglullis 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Immediately after buying a new laptop No. I could go by with an older one, or in a pinch I could repurpose my current media server. Or I could put my data in an SSD with a bootable partition and borrow my wife's laptop... > huge environmentally destructive supply chain to create. Sunk cost fallacy? If the major electronics factories explode today, the existing computers won't stop working. If any of the Anthropic's datacenters go under, the compute capacity would have to be rebuilt.