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647 points bradgessler | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.392s | source
1. nerder92 ◴[] No.44017552[source]
I feel something similar, mostly in the context of programming. Yesterday, I spotted a bug and instead of trying to understand the issue, I just typed a quick "why this doesn't work" into the Cursor Chat. A few seconds later, I got my answer and I tab around my solution. Of course it was a cool experience, yet another "wow" moment of working with AI, but that also gave me a strange feeling and made me wonder: will I lose my ability to think program independently?

After a bit of human reflection, my simple answer is no. I won’t lose these abilities; they'll evolve just as they've evolved many times during my lifetime. The critical difference this time is that the evolution will be much faster and more radical.

To clarify, a thought for me is an idea that comes to mind based on the things we know or have experienced. The bottleneck of thinking ability lies precisely there—how can you think about something you don’t know exists? An early human living inland couldn't possibly conceive of navigating the sea; the concept simply didn't exist for them. Their thinking was shaped entirely by their personal experiences and those of their peers, passed on around a campfire. Thinking evolved many time throughout history, from those campfire stories to sharing paper books, to browsing web pages and now this autocomplete on steroids.

The difference this time is that the paradigm is shifting. The bottleneck moves from accessibility of knowledge to the latency between your initial thought and the AI’s completion of it. With a Google search, you were a few clicks away from potential new knowledge. With AI, you're just a few keystrokes away from a fully developed thought.

Today, there is still a clear distinction between my thought and the AI’s, because you prompt it and then wait for the response. But what if that latency was virtually zero? What if merely thinking a prompt triggered the CoT within my brain? Would that thought still be mine? Would it belong to the AI?

My feeling is that what we are experiencing today is a transition phase until we completely "integrate" this AI thinking into our own thinking. What I don't see change or improve in AI anytime soon is curiosity, judgment, taste - those things are probably what we should double down on for now.