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Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

https://www.artfish.ai/p/offloading-thinking-to-ai
I don't know if this is a good framing. "Too much" is subjective, and every heavy AI user will assert that they're just unlocking their potential, that calculators didn't make us dumber, etc.

But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. On the flip side, if you use an LLM do most of your thinking, what's left? We have people here who use LLMs to raise their children, to manage relationships, to design products. So what's your unique contribution to this world - is it the prompt you once wrote? You're standing in front of a token-generating machine, pulling a lever, sometimes receiving gifts. Is that your edge, your unique experience, your purpose in life?

Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect? Are you going to apply that knowledge of physics or computer science yourself, or will you just prompt the LLM again?

In my mind, it's pretty simple: I'm a human, LLMs are not. If a human writes a novel, it's inherently worth more because it's hard-earned and anchored to experiences we share. I want to support that. And I want to be a human who can write novels, the old-fashioned way. I'm not good at lifting weights or running, so my thinking is the only thing I have.

Have you read the "Whispering earring" essay? I love it for the LLM era.[1]

You can treat AI as a whispering earring - "What should we do now? How do we fix this? What do you think?" Or you can treat it like an exoskelton - "Implement kd-tree with metric space xyz for this problem, mapping this to that blah blah".

That's pre-thought execution automation that makes review much simpler - you already know the shape of the desired output. The whispering earring is atrophy.

1. https://croissanthology.com/earring

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