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"This blog post illustrates the importance of NEVER outsourcing your critical thinking or outsourcing decision-making to an LLM." This is a sentence that if wr

"This blog post illustrates the importance of NEVER outsourcing your critical thinking or outsourcing decision-making to an LLM." This is a sentence that if written just 5 years ago would result in you being seen as crazy. "LLM capable of any sort of critical thinking? Haha. Not in 50 years." It never ceases to amaze me how people are stuck in the here in the now and just accept the new reality as if it had always been this way, and will continue being this way in the foreseeable future. This is the worst LLMs will ever be. Not outsourcing critical thinking to LLM will be seen as a liability in the not so distant future. Just a year or two ago almost no one even took LLM seriously for coding. Now the status quo has moved for also critical thinking, and we hear comments like this. LLM's chances of making a mistake will be orders of magnitude lowers than humans. Slowly learn to let the wheel go. AI will be much better at holding and controlling it. "We should NEVER outsource number crunching to calculators. They are not 100% reliable and we can make mistakes when inputting the data." Someone in 1920's probably. I know it's a metaphor, and like all metaphors can't be compared 1-1. But it's to make a point how it illustrates my argument above.

palmotea 1mo ago
> This is the worst LLMs will ever be. Not outsourcing critical thinking to LLM will be seen as a liability in the not so distant future. Just a year or two ago almost no one even took LLM seriously for coding. Now the status quo has moved for also critical thinking, and we hear comments like this. LLM's chances of making a mistake will be orders of magnitude lowers than humans. Slowly learn to let the wheel go. AI will be much better at holding and controlling it. If that's true, you're fucked. Because then what good are you for? How long do you think they'll pay you to be useless meat-in-the-middle? Not outsourcing your critical thinking means trying to preserve a scrap of value-add for having you around. > "We should NEVER outsource number crunching to calculators. They are not 100% reliable and we can make mistakes when inputting the data." Someone in 1920's probably. I know it's a metaphor, and like all metaphors can't be compared 1-1. But it's to make a point how it illustrates my argument above. That's a dumb analogy. Automating one activity cannot be extrapolated justify automating all the activities, including some of the most human ones.
- ATMLOTTOBEER 1mo ago
  You need to git good The fact that you’re nervous means you will be the first to be replaced!
  - palmotea 1mo ago
    > The fact that you’re nervous means you will be the first to be replaced! Is that sarcasm? Cause it's not too different from something I'd say sarcastically (e.g. it's very 10X AI engineer, very overconfident while missing pretty obvious things).
- TrackerFF 1mo ago
  We're moving toward a future where intellectual workers are, indeed, fucked. At least intellectual work will be the first real casualty. I'm not AI maximalist. But with how things have progressed the past 4-5 years, I'm more confident on the above being true, than not. I don't think intellectual work will drop off overnight. There will be a long period, perhaps decade or two, where many jobs will just gradually disappear, where salaries will be suppressed, and humans will just become AI-babysitters and auditors. It is a uncomfortable scenario, but people - especially young ones about the enroll college or early in their career - should consider the possibility as realistic.
  - palmotea 1mo ago
    > I don't think intellectual work will drop off overnight. There will be a long period, perhaps decade or two, where many jobs will just gradually disappear, where salaries will be suppressed, and humans will just become AI-babysitters and auditors. What I'm sick of is this passive acceptance of technological determinism. Why build a technology that's so corrosive and so destructive to so many? You've got powerful people talking about creating a permanent underclass, and happily charging forward anyway. AI is literally the most anti-human thing ever, and should be opposed politically. But there's been so much indoctrination it will be very difficult. For instance, software engineers were so fucking smug for decades, foolishly adopting libertarian ideas while imagining themselves to be capitalists. We resisted any efforts towards unionization to create translate our (former) economic power into political power. Now we're literally the first on the chopping block.
SamuelAdams 1mo ago
It reminds me of the part in the film `I, Robot (2004)`. The protagonist, Detective Spooner, is driving down a freeway. Driving has been automated at this point in the future, however drivers can manually drive if they elect to do so. And the driver's passenger (the robot shrink) was utterly shocked that Detective Spooner engaged manual driving. Will we eventually be so accustomed to LLM's that we will be similarly shocked when someone elects to not use them?
ThrowawayR2 1mo ago
"This is the worst LLMs will ever be." does not logically preclude "This is the best LLMs will ever be." Telling people to count their chickens before they've hatched is the hallmark of the swindler.
anthuswilliams 1mo ago
The fact that LLMs (or their client-side harnesses, at any rate) have improved substantially in the last year does not, ipso facto, mean they will continue doing so forever. Nor does it imply, even if they do keep improving, that they will displace human judgment and decision-making and that they will reach a point where they have literally zero limitations. I don't agree with _never_ outsourcing decisions to an LLM, but the parent is right to point out the importance of thinking critically instead of blindly trusting LLMs. If only to understand their biases and common failure modes. The 1920s calculator metaphor is apt because practitioners using plugboards and Hollerith machines would have been avid early adopters but still keenly aware of the limitations of the device. They used that knowledge to decompose problems into units the device could solve, and to sanity-check the outputs of problems based on their understanding of mathematics and the capabilities of the machines. I am often amazed at the dismissiveness of AI skeptics given the remarkable results we have seen in the last few years. And the stunning inefficiency of major LLM models and inaccessibility of underlying data mean there are a lot more gains to be had. But despite that, I'm even more flabbergasted by those who claim that AI superintelligence is a thing, that LLMs of all things will outcompete humans on creative and critical thinking tasks. It's a naive extrapolation at best and is completely unsupported by any coherent model of technological evolution, economics, game theory, or human history. But all that said, I'm of course biased. I am of the belief that humans can do things that machines will never be able to no matter how advanced they become. A quasi-religious belief? Perhaps. But AI boosterism just as indefensible.

palmotea 1mo ago

> This is the worst LLMs will ever be. Not outsourcing critical thinking to LLM will be seen as a liability in the not so distant future. Just a year or two ago almost no one even took LLM seriously for coding. Now the status quo has moved for also critical thinking, and we hear comments like this. LLM's chances of making a mistake will be orders of magnitude lowers than humans. Slowly learn to let the wheel go. AI will be much better at holding and controlling it. If that's true, you're fucked. Because then what good are you for? How long do you think they'll pay you to be useless meat-in-the-middle? Not outsourcing your critical thinking means trying to preserve a scrap of value-add for having you around. > "We should NEVER outsource number crunching to calculators. They are not 100% reliable and we can make mistakes when inputting the data." Someone in 1920's probably. I know it's a metaphor, and like all metaphors can't be compared 1-1. But it's to make a point how it illustrates my argument above. That's a dumb analogy. Automating one activity cannot be extrapolated justify automating all the activities, including some of the most human ones.

ATMLOTTOBEER 1mo ago
You need to git good The fact that you’re nervous means you will be the first to be replaced!
- palmotea 1mo ago
  > The fact that you’re nervous means you will be the first to be replaced! Is that sarcasm? Cause it's not too different from something I'd say sarcastically (e.g. it's very 10X AI engineer, very overconfident while missing pretty obvious things).
TrackerFF 1mo ago
We're moving toward a future where intellectual workers are, indeed, fucked. At least intellectual work will be the first real casualty. I'm not AI maximalist. But with how things have progressed the past 4-5 years, I'm more confident on the above being true, than not. I don't think intellectual work will drop off overnight. There will be a long period, perhaps decade or two, where many jobs will just gradually disappear, where salaries will be suppressed, and humans will just become AI-babysitters and auditors. It is a uncomfortable scenario, but people - especially young ones about the enroll college or early in their career - should consider the possibility as realistic.
- palmotea 1mo ago
  > I don't think intellectual work will drop off overnight. There will be a long period, perhaps decade or two, where many jobs will just gradually disappear, where salaries will be suppressed, and humans will just become AI-babysitters and auditors. What I'm sick of is this passive acceptance of technological determinism. Why build a technology that's so corrosive and so destructive to so many? You've got powerful people talking about creating a permanent underclass, and happily charging forward anyway. AI is literally the most anti-human thing ever, and should be opposed politically. But there's been so much indoctrination it will be very difficult. For instance, software engineers were so fucking smug for decades, foolishly adopting libertarian ideas while imagining themselves to be capitalists. We resisted any efforts towards unionization to create translate our (former) economic power into political power. Now we're literally the first on the chopping block.

SamuelAdams 1mo ago

It reminds me of the part in the film `I, Robot (2004)`. The protagonist, Detective Spooner, is driving down a freeway. Driving has been automated at this point in the future, however drivers can manually drive if they elect to do so. And the driver's passenger (the robot shrink) was utterly shocked that Detective Spooner engaged manual driving. Will we eventually be so accustomed to LLM's that we will be similarly shocked when someone elects to not use them?

ThrowawayR2 1mo ago

"This is the worst LLMs will ever be." does not logically preclude "This is the best LLMs will ever be." Telling people to count their chickens before they've hatched is the hallmark of the swindler.

anthuswilliams 1mo ago

The fact that LLMs (or their client-side harnesses, at any rate) have improved substantially in the last year does not, ipso facto, mean they will continue doing so forever. Nor does it imply, even if they do keep improving, that they will displace human judgment and decision-making and that they will reach a point where they have literally zero limitations. I don't agree with _never_ outsourcing decisions to an LLM, but the parent is right to point out the importance of thinking critically instead of blindly trusting LLMs. If only to understand their biases and common failure modes. The 1920s calculator metaphor is apt because practitioners using plugboards and Hollerith machines would have been avid early adopters but still keenly aware of the limitations of the device. They used that knowledge to decompose problems into units the device could solve, and to sanity-check the outputs of problems based on their understanding of mathematics and the capabilities of the machines. I am often amazed at the dismissiveness of AI skeptics given the remarkable results we have seen in the last few years. And the stunning inefficiency of major LLM models and inaccessibility of underlying data mean there are a lot more gains to be had. But despite that, I'm even more flabbergasted by those who claim that AI superintelligence is a thing, that LLMs of all things will outcompete humans on creative and critical thinking tasks. It's a naive extrapolation at best and is completely unsupported by any coherent model of technological evolution, economics, game theory, or human history. But all that said, I'm of course biased. I am of the belief that humans can do things that machines will never be able to no matter how advanced they become. A quasi-religious belief? Perhaps. But AI boosterism just as indefensible.