WARNING ! AI rots your Brain

Hehe warning accepted! : ) 

dang74 good point, although for a child they can be "forced" : ) to be treated differently, because adults have made the decision there are things that all kids must learn, even if when thery grow up they don't need them if they have a tool, e.g. maths without a calculator until they reach a certain age. Parents already limit kid's TV time, turn off the Internet and so on. It's unlikely parents or teachers will embrace AI for kids to use at a young age, but I agree there's a danger, because not all parents will be aware.

Back to the article, I agree with what's likely the underlying reality, that there's something to be said for being in the practice of stretching your brain, and if you don't do it, you will struggle to do it. 

I bet this is why some people don't like long holidays. And I've mentally associated learning from lectures with writing notes, and I'm stuck if someone is teaching me something and I don't have a pen and paper to scribble on (even if I don't read the notes ever again; it's how my brain is learning).

It does feel to me that the experiment only reveals some things we would intuitively know.

If the AI was replaced by someone people were told was an expert on the subject at hand ready for their use, would people use them or not, and would then the brain work any different?

Incidentally, it feels like it would almost be wrong not to ask someone who you knew was an expert on a subject more than yourself (i.e., if indeed they were an expert and you have reason to believe they were).

Or (to simulate early AI), if the AI was replaced by someone the participants were told was definitely a non-expert, would the participants initially engage their brain more and not trust them? And there is a danger (for at least a period of time, probably not permanent - I don't think the study showed that!) that if you've not done the work yourself, or now realize it's a mundane task that someone else or a machine can do, maybe the brain is no longer all that keen to want to be used for such tasks!

Just some more random examples; I can see it in myself with books; if I don't read fiction for pleasure for a while, then it takes me half a dozen pages before it clicks that I'm not absorbing and am only scanning, and I have to go back and re-read and get back into the 'mode' of actually enjoying the book.

Another example of not being able to use the brain as much, is that I have a friend who is frustrated no end by a customer who regularly contacts him about basics which they could have figured out for themselves, e.g. to try a second cable if the first one appears to not work. The customer has mentally decided that he doesn't 'get' electricals, and offloads the thinking to his supplier (and I can totally believe it conditions the brain on that topic that he now needs that reliance, leaving him genuinely stuck if the supplier doesn't answer the phone). Maybe to get to that stage maybe there was initially also some inconsideration of the supplier (or maybe mentally thinking they have paid for the support by buying the product), but now even if he feels uncomfortable, he kind of needs that support always.

Also, interestingly, I also think some people will go to endless lengths (and brain effort) to reduce future brain effort. I've been on a (non-engineering) 8-week course, and on week 7, a colleague was having password renewal problems. I logged them in on another PC using my password (something totally acceptable according to the instructor) but it was clear it was still bugging him, he would keep turning to the first machine to reattempt, even after the instructor had told them it was very unlikely that they would need to log in on the 8th week. I wondered why it bugged him, he was a smart guy, so was it just for the challenge, to refuse to be defeated by a machine? I think the real reason is much simpler: Even if on the rare chance that he had to log in one last time, he would have to rely on humans to help him, which would take that bit longer, and would be a reliance on human variability! He would instead rather spend a lot of brain effort trying to eliminate that, for an easier log-in on the off-chance he did need to log in next week. I suppose a test could be if the participants in that study had the choice of using their brain to write the essay from scratch, or connecting up a PC and then using AI or Google, how many of them would have spent untold effort trying to fix IT issues first?

Are we saying CEOs, who rely on others to do the legwork, are becoming less intelligent?   

To me the conclusion seems to be that if you don't exercise your brain in ways that help you learn or problem-solve, then you may well struggle at the times you need to learn something or to problem-solve.

Bear in mind, people do other things that require mental work. Probably (speculating!) 90% of people using Chat GPT for coding are not developers, and are doing it to help them with some other problem they are trying to solve for their jobs or as a side thing.

Lots of businesses have problems in scaling, running their business purely by Excel (this is not unusual!). They don't have a way out because they have no IT staff, until they can grow enough to afford it - it's a circular problem.

For those sorts of people it's probably quite empowering to be able to create simple projects to solve small problems, to make their normal job that slight bit more efficient with some automation through their coding. 

To me the conclusion seems to be that if you don't exercise your brain in ways that help you learn or problem-solve, then you may well struggle at the times you need to learn something or to problem-solve.

Bear in mind, people do other things that require mental work. Probably (speculating!) 90% of people using Chat GPT for coding are not developers, and are doing it to help them with some other problem they are trying to solve for their jobs or as a side thing.

Lots of businesses have problems in scaling, running their business purely by Excel (this is not unusual!). They don't have a way out because they have no IT staff, until they can grow enough to afford it - it's a circular problem.

For those sorts of people it's probably quite empowering to be able to create simple projects to solve small problems, to make their normal job that slight bit more efficient with some automation through their coding. 

Just remembered a few Excel stories..

My manager used Excel heavily.. He had built up a complex system of sheets and formulae, and he could generate a report sheet and charts, but only he could use it, and if senior management wanted to see something subtly different, then to produce the new output he would spend the day debugging his spreadsheet, because so many cells were chained together through the formulas. He wasn't a developer; he didn't know how to insert the information into a database and run queries. No business intelligence software was easy for an individual to set up or to subscribe to and use back then.

Another colleague used to generate product configuration files, i.e., technical content files, using Excel. That was massively complex too, to the point that whenever I saw him, he was more often than not sitting in front of his spreadsheet, forever tweaking it for any slight changes the customers asked for. It became his job, which was quite depressing because he could have done loads more if he could have offloaded it.

And yet, on the flip side, as mentioned, Excel has probably been responsible for being the key software for millions of businesses, too.

shabaz said:

They don't have a way out because they have no IT staff

Having IT staff doesn't necessarily solve the issue either, as they often don't have the resource to convert (and then actively maintain) each of the individual's spreadsheets into new database management systems.

I've seen IT departments actively dissuading people from attempting to use a DBMS, as it becomes an even bigger headache for them when it all goes wrong and they are then called upon to recover the data.

Sorry, I missed seeing this message earlier.

The answer doesn't have to be a database (although it's highly useful if one is involved [but I wouldn't recommend someone install and manage it themselves when cloud services are so cheap], my point is that it is limiting if your building-blocks are just cells and formulas and a flat file.

IT departments have to meet the business's IT needs since that's their one job in life. Whether they recommend a database or not is an implementation thing (but it's still pretty strategic! so personally, if it were me, I'd be wanting compelling reasons if their solution didn't involve a database whether it's managed by them or not.

Even batch processing could help if they can program (or get AI to help with this), or uploading to (say) any software-as-a-service system for sales or inventory, and hope your files are in the right format for upload. 

At least there's the possibility of several people collaborating on an Excel spreadsheet, but when it's complicated enough, the owner won't risk others touching it; they build the outputs themselves, and everyone is dependent on that one person.

I've visited a few small business meet-ups (mostly the ones I've seen are selling products, some specialist, some general consumer items, but they all have some common tasks they need to perform, and naturally they almost all unanamously started off with Excel because it made sense), and then they found people liked their products or their friendly service or reliability and came back, they grew, and now are hitting the bottleneck and that's almost always the sore point they talk about. They live for the yearly meet-ups so they can exchange feedback about what cloud services they have found helped them with particular problems, since no-one can afford to waste a lot of time/resources trying to make a go of a service only to realize it isn't working for them.  

shabaz said:

and naturally they almost all unanamously started off with Excel because it made sense

The spreadsheet is one step up from the pen and paper plus calculator scenario, which is the way most of us were probably taught at school. So it's a natural step to roughing out a problem quickly and it's quick for most people to set up and to change and update.

There perhaps appears to be a bit of a grey area as to how long you stick with this method though before you stop and think about it in terms of efficient data structures, which most of us probably weren't taught in school.

Also there perhaps is the return of investment - is the project even still going to exist by the time you complete the data migration, or was it shut down early because you appear to be spending all your time trying to automate the data management.