WARNING ! AI rots your Brain

I count myself amongst that group.  I always refer to existing code, examples, previous blogs and google.

If I haven't written a case: statement in the last few weeks, I need to google it.

We often forget, especially in human resources, that the purpose of hiring is to bring in people who can solve problems, not people who are just good at interviews.

Fair point! But will it affect the ability of people to focus on details? I am not saying they have to remember all the APIs. What I have seen is ( especially while taking interviews ) people who are so used to autocomplete struggles to put a fully functional code in place, even with some basic functions.    

That leaves more brain bandwidth for other things. There are so many APIs out there. It may make sense to memorise the ones you use daily. But all others: let the tools do the work?

Just makes me thinking..
Auto-complete has been playing a big role in people's ability to remember spellings and details.
Even while coding I have noticed that those who use auto complete don't tend to remember the details of the functions etc.

shabaz said:

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.

Interesting.  I have a similar problem with fiction.... where it takes me about 10 pages to get used to the 'author's voice.'

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.

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. 

AI puts research jobs at risk, especially in academics. That's the fear. AI is plausibility through structured reasoning and presentation.

I can see the issue. With this sort of tool there's less desire, and possibly need, in it's current form, to "study further and delve deeper". So higher education impacted. Hence the article termed it ultimately "dumbing down" of everything.

It's fine, for now, as those with experience can quickly spot anomalies and have the skills to ask the right questions. But, imo, this will soon unravel and then who knows what.

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