I think it's a given. OpenAI's product is their hype.

> ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand

On one hand I intuitively think this is correct, on the other hand these very concerns about technology have been around since the invention of... writing.

Here is an excerpt of Socrates speaking on the written word, as recorded in Plato's dialogue Phaedrus - "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom"

And you know, Socrates was right. We did lose our memory with writing! How many phone numbers do you remember now that you have a phonebook in your phone? Humans will lose skills due to LLMs. That's just obvious on its face by the fact that if you don't do a skill regularly, you will lose it (or lose to do it as well as you once had).

The real question is whether we're worse off or better off overall than we were in Socrates' Athens.

Regardless of how you feel about this question, it doesn't necessarily map to the current situation.

Just because the loss of one skill to a supplanting technology led to one kind of societal change, does not mean that the loss of any skill to a supplanting technology will lead to the same kind of societal change. Assuming that to be true is a faulty generalization.

I think it wouldn't be hard to argue that writing has changed human society more profoundly than any other invention. Whether or not the change was positive is a matter of taste and likely unanswerable. The point though is there are plenty of other examples of new technologies that changed technology and deskilled humans, both mentally and physically, that changed society in radically different ways, compared to writing (looms, tractors, sails, calculators, computers, guns, and so on).

There's certainly a case to be made that, of major past technological advancements, the kind of deskilling we'd see due to heavy AI use is most comparable to the deskilling due to writing: presumably there were many day-to-day and essential activities that made use of the mental acuity people would lose due to reading, just as there are many day-to-day activities that one can imagine people becoming less skilled in due to AI use.

To me, the most dangerous difference though may be in what gets deskilled. If we only relinquish our ability to do certain menial and intellectual drudgery, that is one thing. But if what we actually relinquish and deskill is our agency and discernment, as a result of constant "delegation" to AI systems, I think we're in for a much worse time.

There's a distinction to be made between "worse off" and "worse". Socrates was arguing that writing-users would be worse as people, not that they would experience lives they didn't like as much.

Agreed. And I think he was wrong. Literacy allows individual humans to be exposed to and understand far more of the world's culture and knowledge than the conveyance of knowledge through recitation of epic poems would ever have allowed.

Hell, I would never have had the pleasure of arguing with you without it! :)

Implying that JIRA is reliable is... something.

Grammarly and Squarespace. I have a Gost Pro newsletter I am replacing next with my own custom solution.

I'm sure it is. Thankfully I don't work for a company this large any more, but when I was employed by a multinational with 30K+ employees, our IT department was outsourced to India and you had to get through a couple layers of phone tree/webchat hell to actually talk to a real person. I could easily see companies of this size replacing their support with LLM nonsense.

> Have newspapers or magazines ever been financially sustainable on sale revenue alone?

Most certainly not. The hollowing out of classifies by Craigslist in 2000s is what killed most local newspapers.

I think this is a semantics thing. I feel the same way, but I wouldn't say that I feel like I'm good at programming. I'm most certainly not. What I am good at is product design and development, and LLM tech has made it so that I can concentrate on features, business models, and users.

Can verify. Am on a GLP-1 drug and I eat seek much more protein and fiber than before.

I never found it close enough, and it's expensive, and it's bad for you. So no thanks.

Steve Jobs may have been the ultimate editor. Jobs was an expert at saying "No" when it came to product decisions. He is sorely missed at modern Apple. It took a while for the cracks to pile up, but the dam has fully broken now.