I hate that LLMs have fucked my ability to find decent documentation. The Internet is done for. I'm learning to garden and do basic electronics from text books now.

we all do, m8

Let's go, I also fucking hate this shit, feel like I'm drowning in it. Is this the future we wanted? I fucking hate it.

If this annoys you, watch the cartoon WALL-E. Sooner or later, humanity will come to something like this, and then they will self-destruct.

It's not about AI; it's about how people are USING AI.

Take for example this recent video from Language Jones, showing how to use AI to leverage your native intelligence for language learning (Yes, it's from PhD in linguistics and yes, he cites research. "Always bring receipts" is logic 101). He shows how AI works best as a Socratic tutor, forcing you to generate answers rather than replacing thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQXiSGDXknA

When used properly, AI is a force magnifier par excellence. When used in the way you're likely encountering (young cohort? poor attention span? no training in formal reasoning, logic?) then yeah... "shit's fucked" (in the Australian vernacular).

I use to teach biomed, just before AI took over (so, circa 2013-2019). Attention spans were already alarmingly low and we'd have to instigate movement breaks, intermissions, break outs etc. I had to fucking tap dance out there - anything to keep "engagement" high and avoid the dreaded attrition KPIs.

The days of students being able to concentrate for 60+ mins in a row are likely gone. Hell, there's an oft repeated meme stat that average attention span on digital devices has dropped from two and a half minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds today. Whether you consider the provenance of that dubious, it does point to "people have trouble paying attention".

But...that's not AI's fault. The "shit was already fucked".

I think there's something (still) to be said about Classical Education Method. We need things like that. We need to teach our young ones about things like "intuition pumps" and "street epistemology", reasoning etc. And we can use ShitGPT to do it.

Take a simple example: a student uses ChatGPT to write an essay on climate policy. The AI generates a claim. Now ask: "What would prove this wrong?" If they can't answer - if they can't articulate what evidence or logic would falsify it - they don't understand it.

They've outsourced the reasoning. That's the difference.

It's not easy out there; it never was. But there's a confluence of factors (popular culture, digital devices, changing demographics, family dynamics, "education" being streamlined as vocational pre-training etc etc ad infinitum) that certainly seem to be actively hostile towards developing thinkers.

Here endth the pro clanker sermon.

Ramen; may we be blessed by his noodly appendage.

PS: I’m actually pretty hostile to AI myself and have been working on an open source engineering approach to mitigate some of these issues. Happy to share it if curious (not selling anything, Open source: just something I'm trying to use to solve this sort of issue for myself)

You are so right about how important the process of thinking and learning is, and that is where AI fails.

I am not a teacher, but a couple weeks ago, I was a guest speaker in a high school IT class. I told them all about how critical it is to be an effective communicator by documenting their steps in their tickets in a way that others can follow, and told them, straight up, that communication is a skill. If you can't communicate, I will not hire you. Told them I have actively declined to hire or promote because they don't communicate effectively.

I am not sure how to do something similar with, say, an English class, but I wonder if you could figure out how to expose them to the future professional repercussions of not understanding the topic deeply. I think it hit differently when the repercussion wasn't just that their instructor would be unhappy.

When I try to do a general search for help on how to solve a problem the top results in most search engines aren’t the old Academy style videos of guides anymore. They are sponsored links, paid tutoring websites, and YouTube videos of people playing at influencer instead of teaching.

Just wait until the AI companies move on from the onboarding phase and into the enshittification one.

It's because humans naturally want to avoid unpleasant work, and public schools teach us that learning is hard and work for some reason, rather than something fun. For instance, I used to read for fun an unbelievable amount, but then I was forced to do book reports with a required list of books to "prove" I was reading them, and it was just absolutely no fun at all. Why not have a discussion about it and the teacher can check the spark notes? This changes at community college back to learning is fun, but just years of being told to do busywork and be a drone kills learning for a lot of people I feel.

One, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free... But this only allowed for other men with machines to control them.

same. Spirograph was cool the first 3 times.

It's only going to get worse. We're going to encounter people who are basically being piloted by AI throughout their lives, with everything they do.