Reliance on artificial-intelligence tools degrades the abilities of physicians and software engineers, studies show.
Twenty-five years ago I drove taxi for a few years and during training they were very clear that relying on gps prohibits you from learning. Taxi people knew that.
For the last fifteen years I’ve been a software engineer and in this field, the ability to pick up and maintain knowledge are cornerstones of the job. Having someone do your tasks for you will degrade your abilities to get said tasks done. CS people knows that.
Management however thinks that we will not need those skills in the future.
“our”? Screw you too.
i mean look at reddit andf dev subreddit. since ai NONE of them look capable to code anything.
Wait, really? Oh damn. Maybe we should… Naaaaaah.
From the future:
AI was the stealthy nail in the coffin. We’d already experienced a century of loss of knowledge. Basic things like animal husbandry, growing crops, mining, smelting, forging…programming. all the things that used to be done by brute human strength or knowledge were now done by computers and AI. But profit was king, out with the old knowledge, in with the new lack of it.
So when the calamity finally happened, nobody was left with any of the knowledge to rebuild.
Breaking News: making robots do stuff for you destroys your ability to do stuff.
I think in five years — if the tools manage to stick around — finding coders that can work without AI assistance will be like finding skilled assembler developers.
The next question is, who is going to be looking for them?
Most of Africa, from what I heard from African developers.
There are still large patches where the internet has outages often, data centers there too suffer from it. Same with energy, depending on the region it is not a guarantee.
(This is of course a consequence of Africa still transforming and putting up infrastructure, and it varies vastly depending on the region).
It’s hard to code with remote LLMs if they can go dark for half a day, and it is pricey to have it running on a local stack (at good token output speed).
Sweet. I’m set for life, and I’ll get to be one of those devs that tells the bosses what I’ve decided to work on.
Or a life of fixing AI slop the AI sloppers generate but can’t fix.
And how much you’ve decided to work for.
It’s a good thing AI doesn’t rely on competent people for training its input and double-checking its output, because otherwise this would be very bad news.
Hell, even before AI there were signs. Half the mechanics in our shop can’t diagnose shit unless there’s an error code shown when they plug in the computer.
I googled the error code and it says you might have “network connectivity issues”
I can’t figure out what’s wrong. Every time I print a document, it says it prints, but I just get out a piece of white paper. It was getting lighter and lighter and lighter, and now it’s just gone entirely.
Lol
Ah, no, see if you demonstrate any capacity for troubleshooting printers you fail the intelligence test.
As an IT guy, I can confirm, it’s a trap.
It’s No Child Left Behind from Lil Bush…
They just stopped teaching critical thinking and empathy decades ago. People in their 30s and under were never taught critical thinking.
Even with video games, they grew up where a 5 second pause meant googling a walkthrough video. The Water Temple would have broken them.
Can confirm, water temple broke me
The intro of Idiocracy on overdrive. Well done.
What?
Walley if anything, but I hate how fucking no one understands Idiocracy but other idiot always upvote any comment containing it.
I’ve watched thst movie at least 4 times and can pretty much cite it.
The beginning shows the downfall of humanity due to the wrong people reproducing, true. That’s not exactly to what’s going on here. Still it’s a parallel.
Were voluntarily externalizing and hence losing knowledge.
So whats your issue. That it’s not identical? Gatekeeping the understanding of Idiocracy, man. Get a grip.
Why the fuck would anyone answer your questions when you ask them like that?
Why wouldn’t the other person just give up on helping you understand it?
Like, you memorized some quotes to a movie you didn’t understand, congrats bro, that’s what a fucking chatbot can do. That’s the level you’re on, but you undoubtedly think of yourself as Not Sure.
I feel like you’ve never seen the movie Idiocracy before. It’s about how the general population gets stupider over time and finally when the most average person in the world finds himself in the future with all of the dumbs, he’s the smartest person in the world. That’s the whole point of the movie. Sure the movie setup is different than this in that it’s about the only worst people reproducing and raising dumb children to perpetuate that cycle.
Your initial response was hostile to OP, and then you had your feelings hurt when they responded sternly? Then you throw fucking tantrum like a the dumbs in Idiocracy, which again, I think you should watch, so that next time you care to talk about the movie, you at least have a base understanding of what it’s about. Fucking grow up.
Ha, jokes on you. I never had the skills to ruin. Now I can make my messes bigger.
And ever since I got a forklift my arm strength has gone down.
You use a forklift to do things you physically can’t do. This is a bad analogy. Even if you never used a forklift at all you’d still likely not have the muscle capacity to lift 500+ lbs pallets all day. You certainly couldn’t just lift a tonne.
And you wouldn’t use a forklift to increase your muscle tone, or build muscle.
I physically can’t refactor a codebase in 15 minutes.
Neither can AI, unless you want a garbage heap of a codebase.
The only codebase an agentic system could refactor in 15 minutes would be almost trivially small. I still couldn’t do it in 15 mins, but give me a couple hours and I’ll make much more meaningful improvements
I think you’re missing the forest for the trees here because the point is, you’re capable of doing the task, just not doing it in the same amount of time as a computer.
You chose a poor analogy to explain your POV. I’m pointing out the flaw in it.
And I could manually relocate all the contents of a palette, too. Just not anywhere near as quickly and easily as I can with a forklift. The analogy is still apt.
Ok. Look at it the other way. The person who can lift the heavy thing may not be able to continue to lift the heavy thing if they use the forklift all the time and don’t ever train their muscles. Which is what the article is pointing out. Doing the task by hand re-enforces knowledge and skill. Over-reliance on a tool is a well known phenomenon.
And yet the person with the forklift is moving more stuff than the guy who did it by hand could manage. The “over” in “over-reliance” is a subjective value judgment and I just don’t agree.
I’m not seeing the problem here. Technology is developed specifically for this purpose, to remove unnecessary burden from humans and enhance their capabilities. There’s nothing noble about laboring unnecessarily hard to accomplish goals in a suboptimal manner. I could write programs in assembly language but instead I use high-level languages and compilers. Does that result in over-reliance on compilers?
John Henry died in the process of “beating” the steam hammer and then got replaced anyway. Nowadays it’d be considered foolish to do that work by hand.
Ok, there are definitely a lot of trades where things are still taught by hand in the event that you have to do them by hand some day. Doing it by hand does more than just re-enforce knowledge. It also teaches you new things and allows a process, and the space to re-evaluate and innovate. We improve by doing those things by hand. That is very often worth the cost. You very often don’t get things quickly, cheaply, and with quality. The AI will degrade if we don’t provide it with quality information to work with. It is nothing without our skills. We won’t have those skills if we don’t use them.
You talk like a businessman rather than an artisan or a creator of things, so perhaps your mindset is different but what happens when the AI breaks something and nobody can fix it because they lack the ability to think about the problem constructively or understand what the problem actually is.
Are we going to pay to go to a mental gymnasium where we complete coding and critical reasoning tasks manually to stave off the atrophy?
I mean, people already do this. Lots of folks do crosswords or sudoku or other puzzles to keep their mind sharp. It’s pretty commonly recommended by doctors I think.
Hah. Leetcode becomes more popular among the employed. Software developers have AI agents run some big tasks while they get some Leetcode time in. Lol
Removed by mod
We don’t let people use calculators until they reach a certain level of maths proficiency without one. Also, we don’t let calculators decide what sums to do.
When software developers are using AI to assist them, that’s different than someone vibe coding something. It didn’t sound like that commenter was promoting vibe coding.
Is it different? I’d say “it depends” because if you are letting agents write most of the code for a start you aren’t developing any more and it very much is vibe coding. If they are reviewing and testing properly and not just taking the AIs word for it then fair enough, but I’ll bet time pressures and human laziness reduce the effectiveness of that.
Also, how are junior coders going to learn the craft to get good enough to make proper use of AI, they certainly shouldn’t be using it heavily fir the same reason kids aren’t given calculators in maths class to start with.
It’s not me making the claim, I just posted the link.
I’m shocked that a person who is touting AI so hard missed a pretty basic context clue. Maybe those basic tasks that they are using AI to skip could have helped them in this situation.
Yeah, but they can’t understand that because they use AI heavily…
You didn’t read the article or choose whether to post it?
Definitely degradation. Deskilling is a well-established phenomenon.
Here’s an AI comment and an AI link, showing you I use AI heavily. Since I can’t understand this, it means you’re wrong, otherwise it would mean you’re right and the AI brainrot is already why I can’t understand it. And my chatbot says I’m stunning and brave!
