There will always be some tradeoff between slow thinking and quick answers. Many questions merit quick answers (What is the weather now? Who was the president of XYZ country 10 years ago? What are the reviews for XYZ brand of skincare or sports equipment?). Many others, I think, would merit longer thinking.
when the author and their sister worked through a question together:
Eventually, we asked the same question to AI. Its response corroborated many of our theories and supplied several explanations we had missed. It also omitted a few possibilities we still found plausible. We had begun with a question, generated hypotheses, and only then used AI to test and extend our thinking. I relished the exercise.
One could argue that if you offload mundane thinking to AI so that you can do other, more important thinking, perhaps it is something that increases life satisfaction and productivity. Especially if AI is used to automate routine, repetitive, and tedious tasks (see the OECD’s report on the impact of AI on the workplace), tasks which previously human workers were paid a pittance to execute (see the International Labour Organization’s report, Digital Labour Platforms and the Future of Work), isn’t that a net positive to free up people to do other, more interesting, more fulfilling types of thinking? If we let the AI do the many menial tasks that encompass our jobs, to cheerfully execute hours of drudgery, don’t our lives become slightly more enjoyable?
Jenny, another character in Ken Liu’s story, aims to counterpoint the main character’s over-reliance on his AI assistant. She exclaims, “Tilly doesn’t just tell you what you want! She tells you what to think. Do you even know what you really want anymore?” Our autonomy depends, at least in part, on continuing to participate in forming our own desires. But when we offload thinking about what we want (What music should I listen to? What movies should I watch? What food should I eat? What shoes should I wear?), who do we become?
What are we automating? Human work or human agency? Human tasks or human thinking?
An interesting comment from hackernews:
- Most people don’t use AI to learn new stuff. They use it to do “the job” for them and they don’t even understand the result. What is the point of a person if they don’t bring any value to the table other than being a “resource” to generate prompts?
This is quite true in my case too. I have used AI to do the job for me without understanding the result, like the time I had it write a bash script for Nanobot. But that was for a throwaway project and the reasoning behind that can be found in Linus Torvalds on LLM assisted coding.
I think the compiler analogy by Hotz holds better here for LLMs than the “they’re the new calculator just like search was the new encyclopedia”. I want to go into how.