I thought this was a pretty good video. Frankly, I disagree with what a lot of people in anti-AI communities say about the superiority of doing things the hard way. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the easy way if it gets you the same result, and I don’t think we’ve lost anything meaningful just because, say, the average person no longer has any phone numbers memorized. I think technology making life easier is a good thing.
But, as Rebecca Watson points out, so-called AI doesn’t just replace things like rote memorization. It replaces thinking. That’s dangerous, and therein lies the difference between AI and other tools.
No one knows the exact effects yet, because obviously there aren’t any long term large scale studies. As much as I dislike AI some of these claims are very misleading, though they might turn out to be true. This is all speculation. We simply don’t know yet.
I think there’s a really important distinction between “getting the same result” when that outcome is guaranteed and when it isn’t. Using a brick instead of a hammer to squash something will get you the same result every time. But with an LLM there’s no guarantee you’re going to get any specific outcome - will it hallucinate this time or not? - and so even if it gives you what you wanted this time, you have to account for the probability that existed it would not have done (and that you wouldn’t have known it let you down)
i am glad she’s still hitting home runs. i have listened to her for years but when she left Skeptic’s Guide, i lost track. only catching her when someone else suggests it… mostly because I had to stop consuming so much logically well thought opinions, that made me realize how horrible people are… I still have lots of respect for RW, she’s got a lot of balance to her train of though
