This is one of the hardest points for me to articulate, trying to convince everyday folks including families and friends that these Technologies are actively making us dumber.
Wiring up a solar and battery array, and then wiring up an entire miniature rack mount full of tech myself using ‘AI’ was absolutely critical in understanding the Nuance between different products and between different wiring schemes, but I realized after about 3 months that I was spending at least 15 times a day asking about the ampacity of different wire gauges (“how much current can this gauge of wire carry safely? What about that gauge of wire?”) Before I finally just made a table of common wire gauges in both aluminum and copper, and then printed it out and tacked it onto my wall like it was still 1997.
I reduced my net time spent querying by at least 20% in the past month by looking at my patterns.
This isn’t a brag. This is me admitting that I got stupid and then I’m forgetting the power isn’t knowing stuff but in having that knowledge at our fingertips, and that asking some mega Data Center two states away to boil half their freshwater and brown out half their town so that I can be told that I really do have to up my wiring material, makes me feel gross.
I mean, I used an LLM to generate the ampacty chart when I couldn’t find one I liked with web searches, and then just cleaned it up in a spreadsheet for asthetics, before printing it out. 😅
At first I tried using one of the image generation functions but I noticed that it was making up imaginary values AFTER if printed it. And therein lies my core criticism of relying on LLM’s, that they will lie to me with impunity and with absolute confidence every fourth answer they give.
You and I agree that readily being able to drill down to information is the superpower that we have to leverage in our human world, and that pattern recognition as well as memorization are key tools on that path.
I also feel that delay you’re talking about, injecting latency into my day, as I type out the same question for the eighth time on the sixth day, and realizing this is something that could just be on my wall and that I should probably try to flashcard.
I have definitely seen smart people get dumb with AI though, because it coopts and changes behaviors on some weird and fundamental level. Not just dumb people like me. 😅