198
AI chatbots could be making you stupider (www.bbc.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
63 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In addition to making people stupid, I wonder what affect will LLMs like Claude will have on programmers? How will new programmers learn if companies start using Claude?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 2 points 6 months ago (7 children)

Not quite an LLM, but I asked Siri the answer to 24*6, without thinking. When I saw the answer I realized if I actually took a moment using some critical thinking I would have easily gotten it. In short, I believe it.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 7 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    So…you are concerned that you used a calculator instead of doing math in your head?

    Did you know how to do that math before hand?

    I think the biggest risk to using AI is that people don’t first learn how to do something before using tools to do the thing. In other words, our 7th grade teachers were right. You should understand the principles before accessing the short cuts.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago*

    You should understand the principles before accessing the short cuts.

    I don't really agree with this take. The reason we teach kids mental calculus is to indeed understand basic principles, but only because their further education is based on those principles.

    But it doesn't generalise to everything. I don't need to understand assembly or the basic principles that make a computer work to be a good software engineer using high level programming languages.

    And this might be an unpopular take, but you don't even need to understand well low level development to be a good software engineer using high level languages.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (4 children)

    So really, it's a choice to become stupider that's the problem not that a tool exists that could potentially make us stupider.

    Perhaps we should look at the root cause as to why we choose to take these shortcuts instead of putting all blame on the idea of AI?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Except we're not choosing this, it has already been chosen for us by a handful of billionaires who stand to make more money

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    So billionaires forced MediumSizedSnack to ask Siri a simple math question?

    I'm not talking about the forced utilization of techbro wankery, I'm talking about people actually using that wankery on their own. "AI" just existing doesn't magically make people stupid, they have to use it.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent