9:40 PM
The true cost of using AI is losing your mind. The more you use it, the worse your own critical thinking and research skills become. If we thought television and video games were brain rotting activities, AI takes this to a whole 'nother level. At least with television you are being entertained with a new story, and your brain is subconsciously thinking about the events and what's going on, possibly predicting what happens next, what happened so far, piecing everything together.
With video games too, you use and improve hand-eye coordination skills, as well as make choices, come up with strategies, so your mind is actively engaged the whole time (depending on the video game). Some video games are extremely bad though and take no thinking at all, such as many of the clickbaity viral games or the idle games.
I've been using AI to develop things for me the past few days, and it's insane how easy it is. The thing about programming is that it is a brain-intensive activity, you come up with solutions and ideas to things all the time, because you are given a blank canvas to create something, so you have to come up with everything. Despite tutorials usually following one route to do things, just like in math, there are multiple ways to solve a problem, no single way is better than another. In schools too, they usually just teach one method in solving math problems, when there are an infinite amount of ways to solve any math problem.
In programming, how does one implement a method in to add pagination to something? Pagination as in, when you visit the public journal entries page for example, at the very bottom of it are different buttons to go to the next page or the last page, and so on. How do you even do that? You have to come up with the solution to do that using your mind, and it might not be something obvious or easy. Whatever method you apply, as long as it works, it works. Again, there is no right way to do anything, as there are an infinite number of ways to do anything. Programming is essentially just problem solving, for those who like it, it's fun and challenging.
Using AI however, is cheating, even more-so than just looking up a tutorial or guide on how to do something (which I think in a way is cheating too). AI will just solve whatever problem it is that you want, it will do the thinking for you. Continually relying on AI to critically think for us, will eventually cause our own abilities to wither and fade. They did this study in MIT recently where they put 3 groups of people, one group could use AI, the other two couldn't, but one of those two groups could at least use search engines, while the last group could not use any external tools. Summing the whole study up as simply as possible, the AI group became dumber and the dumbest, while the no tools group became smarter and the smartest.
Right now, I admit that I am using AI to code. Am I going to become an idiot in the future (if I'm not already one now)? To be honest, a lot of programming is hard. The pagination problem is easy if you already know how to do it, but I admit, when I encountered it for the first time, I had no idea what to do. The more problems you solve the better you get, all the gained experience over years and decades will make one more competent in this programming ability. AI just takes all of that away since it knows how to do everything already.
A problem that might take a programmer hours or days to solve, the AI can just do it instantly. It already knows how to do it. A programmer might be given some task to implement something, and they would have to plan out how to do it. It might take them a long time to just think about the structure of the whole thing and how to connect the pieces together, and make new pieces, to solve that problem. You can just give AI that same problem, and it will just solve it in an instant, it already knows how to do it. No thinking involved at all. This six-figure career path is destroyed.
If I'm fearful for anything, it's losing ability and becoming incompetent. I enjoy tackling and solving problems, but it takes time, effort, energy, and it's frustrating. AI takes all that pain away. It solves any problem I want in an instant. Even if I knew every single step to solve a problem, and I have mastered a solution, it might take me an hour to type it all up and test it and everything. It still takes time for a human to translate their knowledge into a working program. AI can have it all done in a second, literally one second, or actually a few seconds if we are being more realistic.
Anyway, I think I have to rely on AI to be competitive in the modern world. Let me use AI to become competitive now, and then catch up my skills later. What I will never use AI for, ever, is writing. I will never have it take away this ability. Even if I am using AI to solve my coding problems, writing still requires using up a large amount of critical thinking, so I won't lose all my critical thinking abilities.
I will miss solving problems, but at least I will be able to get so much more done. Maybe I will abandon using coding AI in the future too, but for now it's something I want to use. I still use my brain for work by the way, no AI there. For my own personal projects and things though, I'm going to continue experimenting with coding AI since it makes everything a breeze.
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Pretty much the only thing I use AI for is difficult math (I literally hate math so when I need to figure out my monthly budget or plan for saving for something I use chatgpt) or finding resources to use. I will look for resources through chatGPT and will then go use those non AI resources to do things. For example, I wanted to figure out how to best do my research on medications before deciding to agree to take them or ask my Doctor about them, so I used chatGPT to find resources and found the official website with all information on medicines.
It is a very nuanced topic, honestly me personally AI scares me. I have heard that some people literally ask chatGPT to write responses for a text conversation they are having with a real human being. Also I have heard that a lot of companies are using AI to filter through applications when they list a job position, which is extremely discouraging because I wrote at least 25 cover letters myself. I opened a blank word document and typed them out for each position. And my resume, I used a template for the design on Canva, but I edited and wrote in the sections myself. And it is kind of discouraging to me to hear about this, because it seems a bit unfair that I am putting in all of this work only to get filtered out for a position by AI in favor of other people who most likely used AI to write their resumes or cover letters.
Of course it is a very nuanced topic. But I am speaking for me personally and from personal experience. I am not exactly excited about AI being used for more things.I also relate to the fear of losing ability. I already have severe ADHD and autism, so learning is hard for me but I still do my best and I have these mental exercises/mind games that I have on my phone that I do every day to try and strengthen my mind, plus the brain fog from fibromyalgia. I get worried if I use AI too much my brain will deteriorate even more, and it is already pretty bad. So I avoid using it unless for the things I said earlier I use it for.
I was wanting, and still really want, to eventually get my degree online in cybersecurity and eventually build a career with that. But I am getting worried reading about how AI can just instantly write programs. My dad is a software engineer. It is terrifying to think how many people could lose their jobs if companies start using AI to write programs instead of real human beings. AI may have all of this knowledge, but it can't look at it with an outside perspective. It doesn't have the creativity a human being has where yes, this one way may work and be very efficient, but this other way might be better because of X, Y, or Z.
I am not the smartest person, I struggled a lot in school and I have the brain fog plus ADHD, but I love learning. I was talking with someone online about quantum physics and the science of black holes and a lot of interesting things. I always say I may be stupid, but I'm not dumb. The critical thinking skills or the unique way a human can think that an AI can't. Intelligence isn't just knowing a lot or knowing everything.
Sorry for the long reply, your post was very interesting and it made me think. I am a very deep thinker. Sending lots of good vibes your way! :)
@rachelrae2003 I think there is still value in making your own resume instead of having AI do it for you. For the cover letters, before AI, since it took a long time to write a cover letter, you basically only wrote unique cover letters to jobs that you really wanted to get (for some people that was also every single job they applied to). I'm assuming that with AI now, everyone has an AI written cover letter for every job they apply to, which makes things tough for everyone. Then of course, the hiring managers use AI to read through the resumes and cover letters, since they may get hundreds for a position. Even hiring was a job that used to require dedicated hours, but AI can just do it in a second.
Sorry that you are going through so much. Although since you are able to concentrate and write unique cover letters, and apply to so many jobs manually, and even write such long comments, it doesn't seem like you have any trouble focusing. I also use mind games on my phone and play them every day, they are fun!
Unfortunately a lot of the "unique ways humans think and solve problems" has already been replicated by AI. It may not have human creativity, but there's very few "unique" problems that no one else has run into, and so AI basically knows how to solve any problem you give it. For example can you think of a math problem that AI can't solve? It's been trained on tens of thousands of math textbooks and billions of math problems, so even if you come up with a "unique problem" , it knows to refer to similar problems to solve it.
It's like that in programming too. There hasn't been anything I've asked it to do that it didn't know how to solve. The fastest changes I can make, for the simplest fixes or changes, will take me like a minute, while AI can do it in a second. The problems that might take me days to complete, AI will also take just a few seconds to do it. Pretty frightening stuff.
I hope that you can still get your degree in cybersecurity, just keep at it! Don't let AI distract you from your learning. You should know how to solve related problems and answer questions, without consulting AI (or you can use AI for research and help if you really need to).
Thank you for the awesome reply, sending good vibes your way too! :)
@JustMegawatt Thank you! Things have been getting a lot worse health wise but hopefully I can figure something out soon. I can barely think more recently. I am going to call my doctor tomorrow. Thanks! :)
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