I think it's a lot more complicated than that. I think it can be used as a tool for people who already have knowledge and skills, but I do worry how it will affect people growing up with it.
Personally I see it more like going to someone who (claims) to know what they're doing and asking them to do it for me. I might be able to watch them at work and maybe get a very general idea of what they're doing but will I actually learn something? I don't think so.
Now, we may point to the fact that previous generations railed at the degeneration of youth through things like pocket calculators or mobile phones but I think there is a massive difference between these things and so-called AI. Where those things were tools obligatorily (if you give a calculator to someone who doesn't know any formulae it will be useless to them), I think so-called AI can just jump straight to giving you the answer.
I personally believe that there are necessary steps that must be passed through to really obtain knowledge and I don't think so-called AI takes you through those steps. I think it will result in a generation of people with markedly fewer and shallower skills than the generations that came before.
AI will let some people conquer skills otherwise out of their reach, with all the pros and cons of that. It is exactly like the example someone else brought up of not needing to know assembly anymore with higher level languages: true, but those who do know it and can internalize how the machines operate have an easier time when it comes to figuring out the real hard problems and bugs they might hit.
Which means that you only need to learn machine language and assembly superficially, and you have a good chance of being a very good programmer.
However, where I am unsure how the things will unfold is that humans are constantly coming up with different programming languages, frameworks, patterns, because none of the existing ones really fit their mental model or are too much to learn about. Which — to me at least — hints at what I've long claimed: programming is more art than science. With complex interactions between a gazillion of mildly incompatible systems, even more so.
As such, for someone with strong fundamentals, AI tools never provided much of a boon to me (yet). Incidentally, neither did StackOverflow ever help me: I never found a problem that I struggled with that wasn't easily solved with reading the upstream docs or upstream code, and when neither was available or good enough, SO was mostly crickets too.
These days, I rarely do "gruntwork" programming, and only get called in on really hard problems, so the question switches to: how will we train the next generation of software engineers who are going to be called in for those hard problems?
Because let's admit it, even today, not everybody can handle them.
It is if the way to learn is doing it without a tool. Imagine using a robot to lift weights if you want to grow your own muscle mass. "Robot is a tool"
"Growing your own muscle mass" is an artificial goal that exists because of tools. Our bodies evolved under the background assumption that daily back-breaking labor is necessary for survival, and rely on it to stay in good operating conditions. We've since all but eliminated most of that labor for most people - so now we're forced to engage in otherwise pointless activity called "exercise" that's physically hard on purpose, to synthesize physical exertion that no longer happens naturally.
So obviously, your goal is strictly to exert your body, you have to... exert your body. However, if your goal is anything else, then physical effort is not strictly required, and for many people, for many reasons, is often undesirable. Hence machines.
And guess what, people's overall health and fitness have declined. Obesity is at an all time high. If you're in the US, there is a 40% chance you are obese. Your body likely contains very little muscle mass, you are extremely likely to die of side effects of metabolic syndrome.
People are seeing the advent of machines to replace all physical labor and transportation, not gradually like in the 20th century, but withing the span of a decade going from the average physical exertion of 1900 to the average modern lack of physical exertion, take a car everyday, do no manual labor do no movement.
They are saying that you need exercise to replace what you are losing, you need to train your body to keep it healthy and can't just rly on machines/robots to do everything for them because your body needs that exertion - and your answer is to say "now that we have robots there is no need to exercise even for exercise sake". A point that's pretty much wrong as modern day physical health shows.
>And guess what, people's overall health and fitness have declined.
Have you seen what physical labor does to a man's body? Go to a developing country to see it. Their 60 year olds look like our 75 year olds.
Sure, we're not as healthy as we could be with proper exercise and diet. But on the long run, sitting on your butt all day is better for your body than hard physical labor.
You've completely twisted what the parent post was saying, and I can't but laugh out loud at claims like:
> there is a 40% chance you are obese.
Obesity is not a random variable — "darn, so unlucky for me to have fallen in the 40% bucket of obese people on birth": you fully (except in rare cases) control the factors that lead to obesity.
A solution to obesity is not to exercise but a varied diet, and eating less of it to match your energy needs (or be under when you are trying to lose weight). While you can achieve that by increasing your energy needs (exercise) and maintain energy input, you don't strictly have to.
Your link is also filled with funny "science" like the following:
> Neck circumference of more than 40.25 cm (15.85 in) for men ... is considered high-risk for metabolic syndrome.
Darn, as a 195cm / 6'5" male and neck circumference of 41cm (had to measure since I suspected I am close), I am busted. Obviously it correlates, just like BMI does (which is actually "smarter" because it controls for height), but this is just silly.
Since you just argued a point someone was not making: I am not saying there are no benefits to physical activity, just that obesity and physical activity — while correlated, are not causally linked. And the problems when you are obese are not the same as those of being physically inactive.
Hate to disagree with you over GP, with whose comment I mostly disagree too, but:
> you fully (except in rare cases) control the factors that lead to obesity.
Not really, unless you're a homo economicus rationalus and are fully in control of yourself, independent of physical and social environment you're in. There are various hereditary factors that can help or hinder one in maintaining their weight in times of plenty, and some of the confounding problems are effectively psychological in nature, too.
> A solution to obesity is not to exercise but a varied diet, and eating less of it to match your energy needs
I've seen reported research bounce back and forth on this over the years. Most recent claim I recall is that neither actually does much directly, with exercise being more critical than diet because it helps compensate for the body oversupplying energy to e.g. the immune system.
I mean, obviously "calories in, calories out" is thermodynamically true, but then your body is a dynamic system that tries to maintain homeostasis, and will play all kinds of screwy games with you if you try to cut it off energy, or burn it off too quickly. Exercise more? You might start eating more. Eat less? You might start to move less, or think slower, or starve less essential (and less obvious) aspects of your body. Or induce some extreme psychological reactions like putting your brain in a loop of obsessive thinking about food, until you eat enough at which point the effects just switches off.
Yes, most people have a degree of control over it. But that degree is not equally distributed - some people play in "easy mode", some people play in "god mode", helped by strong homeostasis maintaining healthy body weight, some people play in "hard mode"... and then some people play in "nightmare mode" - when body tries to force you to stay below healthy weight.
> I've seen reported research bounce back and forth on this over the years. Most recent claim I recall is that neither actually does much directly, with exercise being more critical than diet because it helps compensate for the body oversupplying energy to e.g. the immune system.
Hah, I've understood what I think is the same study you refer to as exactly that exercise does not help because people who've walked 60km a day regularly did not get "sick" because in people who did not "exercise" that much, excess energy was instead used on the immune system responding too aggressively when it didn't need to — basically, you'll use the same energy, just for different purposes. Perhaps I am mixing up the studies or my interpretation is wrong.
And there are certainly confounding factors to one "controlling" their food intake, but my point is that it's not really random with a "40% chance" of you eating so much to become obese.
Also note that restoring the equilibrium (healthy weight, whatever that's defined to be) is more prone to the factors you bring up, than maintaining it once there — as in, rarely people become obese and continue becoming more and more obese, they do reach a certain equilibrium but then have a hard time going through food/energy deficiency due to all the heavy adaptations the body and mind do to us.
And yes, those in "nightmare mode" have their own struggles, and because of such focus on obesity, they are pretty much disregarded in any medical research.
My "adaptation" for keeping a pretty healthy weight is that I am lazy to prepare food for myself, and then it only comes down to not having too many snacks in the house — trickier with kids, esp if I am skipping a family meal (I'll prepare enough food for them, so again, need to try not to eat the left-overs :D). So I am fully cognizant that it's not the same for everyone, but it's still definitely not "40% chance" — it's a clear abuse of the statistical language.
It could be a simple lifestyle that makes you "fit" (lots of walking, working a not-too-demanding physical job, a physical hobby, biking around...).
The parent post is saying that technological advance has removed the need for physical activity to survive, but all of the gym rats have come out of the woodwork to complain how we are all going to die if we don't hit the gym, pronto.
- Physical back-breaking work has not been eliminated for most people.
- Physical exercise triggers biological reward mechanism which make exercise enjoyable and, er, rewarding for many people (arguable for most people as it is a mammalian trait) ergo it is not undesirable. UK NHS calls physical exercise essential.
> Physical back-breaking work has not been eliminated for most people.
I said most of it for most people specifically to avoid the quibble about mechanization in poorest countries and their relative population sizes.
> Physical exercise triggers biological reward mechanism which make exercise enjoyable and, er, rewarding for many people
I envy them. I'm not one of them.
> ergo it is not undesirable
Again, I specifically said "and for many people, for many reasons, is often undesirable" as to not have to spell out the obvious: you may like the exercise benefits of a physically hard work, but your boss probably doesn't - reducing the need for physical exertion reduces workplace injuries, allows worker to do more for longer, and opens up the labor pool to physically weaker people. So even if people only ever felt pleasure from physical exertion, the market would've been pushing to eliminate it anyway.
> UK NHS calls physical exercise essential.
They wouldn't have to if people actually liked doing it.
Equally, if you just point to your friend and say "that's Dave, he's gonna do it for me", they won't give you the job. They'll give it to Dave instead.
That much is true, but I've seen a forklift operator face a situation where pallet of products fell apart and heavy items ended up on the floor. Guess who was in charge of picking them up and manually shelving them?
The claim was that it's lazy to use a tool as a substitute for learning how to do something yourself. But when the tool entirely obviates the need for doing the task yourself, you don't need to be able to do it yourself to do the job. It doesn't matter if a forklift driver isn't strong enough to manually carry a load, similarly once AI is good enough it won't matter if a developer doesn't know how to write all the code an AI wrote for them, what matters is that they can produce code that fulfills requirements, regardless of how that code is produced.
> once AI is good enough it won't matter if a developer doesn't know how to write all the code an AI wrote for them, what matters is that they can produce code that fulfills requirements, regardless of how that code is produced.
Once AI is that good, the developer won't have a job any more.
The whole question is if the AI will ever get that good?
All evidence so far points to no (just like with every tool — farmers are still usually strong men even if they've got tractors that are thousands of times stronger than any human), but that still leaves a bunch of non-great programmers out of a job.
Tool use is fine, when you have the education and experience to use the tools properly, and to troubleshoot and recover when things go wrong.
The use of AI is not just a labour saving device, it allows the user to bypass thinking and learning. It robs the user of an opportunity to grow. If you don't have the experience to know better it may be able to masquerade as a teacher and a problem solver, but beyond a trivial level relying on it is actively harmful to one's education. At some point the user will encounter a problem that has no existing answer in the AI's training dataset, and come to realise they have no real foundation to rely on.
Code generative AI, as it currently exists, is a poisoned chalice.
The point he's making is, we still have to learn to use tools no? There still had to he some knowledge there or else you're just sat sifting through all the crap the AI spits out endlessly for the rest of your life. The op wrote his comment like it's a complete replacement rather than an enhancement.
Tools help us to put layers of abstraction between us and our goals. when things become too abstracted we lose sight of what we're really doing or why. Tools allow us to feel smart and productive while acting stupidly, and against our best interests. So we get fascism and catastrophic climate change, stuff like that. Tools create dependencies. We can't imagine life without our tools.
"We shape our tools and our tools in turn shape us" said Marshall McLuhan.
For learning it can very well be. And also it really depends on the tool and task. Calculator is fine tool. But symbolic solver might be a few steps too far. If you don't already understand the process. And possibly the start and end points.
Problem with AI is that it is often black box tool. And not even deterministic one.
AI as applied today is pretty deterministic. It does get retrained and tuned often in most common applications like ChatGPT, but without any changes, you should expect a deterministic answer.
Copying and pasting from stack overflow is a tool.
It’s fine to do in some cases, but it certainly gets abused by lazy incurious people.
Tool use in general certainly can be lazy. A car is a tool, but most people would call an able bodied person driving their car to the end of the driveway to get the mail lazy.
