<story><title>AI and the Problem of Knowledge Collapse</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03502</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thesz</author><text>The reliance on the tool in front of you can constrain you.&lt;p&gt;Some tools are fads, some make you less of a thinking person.&lt;p&gt;When I faced a second wave of IDEs I figured that any IDE is a fad - there will be better IDE in near future and your boss will require you to use it.&lt;p&gt;The use of IDE can make you know less about project at hand, because you always can investigate, as opposed to internalize&amp;#x2F;remember. The difference? If you know internal relations, you can judge changes easier. You are better programmer that way and I would say a better person.&lt;p&gt;The same goes to LMs - they help you not to know&amp;#x2F;remember and&amp;#x2F;or create thoughtfully. LMs constrain you to not know fully.</text></item><item><author>mark_l_watson</author><text>I don’t disagree much with the paper’s premise, except that I am turned off whenever there is a handy new tool for us to use and then some people come up with reasons why using the new tool is a harmful thing to do.&lt;p&gt;We humans evolved to be very flexible and naturally use what is in front of us to solve whatever problems we need to solve. For some tasks LLMs are very useful and for other tasks they don’t offer much help. I feel sorry for people who don’t learn how to use common tools because they are stuck in place or have unreasonable fears.&lt;p&gt;It is reasonable to worry about how powerful actors might use AI for surveillance and removing privacy rights, but I strongly disagree that it is a bad thing for individuals to sometimes save time and sometimes get better results by manually using tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT, and automating things using LLMs as sources of general common sense knowledge, as language processors, data transformation, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chii</author><text>&amp;gt; The use of IDE can make you know less about project at hand&lt;p&gt;i disagree.&lt;p&gt;Someone who&amp;#x27;s not interested in the project might know less (but is still able to accomplish their task), where as without such an IDE, they will have to learn a lot first. It&amp;#x27;s one reason why beginner java courses at university asks you not to use an IDE (at least for the first few tutorials learning the basics).&lt;p&gt;But this isn&amp;#x27;t the fault of the IDE at all, and simply just reflect the motivations of the person using it.&lt;p&gt;An IDE makes someone motivated to learn be more capable. It&amp;#x27;s a multiplier&amp;#x2F;enabler.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;  less of a thinking person.&lt;p&gt;no, it makes you think less unimportant stuff, and thus have more to dedicate to the important stuff. Effortless navigation in an IDE (like intellij) means you can move through the call graph of an application without having to see&amp;#x2F;understand the entire application completely.&lt;p&gt;The same can be said for LLMs - may be not today&amp;#x27;s, since it&amp;#x27;s still early, but at some point these LLM tools will make trivial&amp;#x2F;unimportant things easy, leaving time for you to focus on the things the LLM can&amp;#x27;t do.</text></comment>
<story><title>AI and the Problem of Knowledge Collapse</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03502</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thesz</author><text>The reliance on the tool in front of you can constrain you.&lt;p&gt;Some tools are fads, some make you less of a thinking person.&lt;p&gt;When I faced a second wave of IDEs I figured that any IDE is a fad - there will be better IDE in near future and your boss will require you to use it.&lt;p&gt;The use of IDE can make you know less about project at hand, because you always can investigate, as opposed to internalize&amp;#x2F;remember. The difference? If you know internal relations, you can judge changes easier. You are better programmer that way and I would say a better person.&lt;p&gt;The same goes to LMs - they help you not to know&amp;#x2F;remember and&amp;#x2F;or create thoughtfully. LMs constrain you to not know fully.</text></item><item><author>mark_l_watson</author><text>I don’t disagree much with the paper’s premise, except that I am turned off whenever there is a handy new tool for us to use and then some people come up with reasons why using the new tool is a harmful thing to do.&lt;p&gt;We humans evolved to be very flexible and naturally use what is in front of us to solve whatever problems we need to solve. For some tasks LLMs are very useful and for other tasks they don’t offer much help. I feel sorry for people who don’t learn how to use common tools because they are stuck in place or have unreasonable fears.&lt;p&gt;It is reasonable to worry about how powerful actors might use AI for surveillance and removing privacy rights, but I strongly disagree that it is a bad thing for individuals to sometimes save time and sometimes get better results by manually using tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT, and automating things using LLMs as sources of general common sense knowledge, as language processors, data transformation, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>williamcotton</author><text>And the written word helps you to not remember anything, to paraphrase Socrates, so better get to memorizing the Odyssey so you can be an even better person.</text></comment>