I read an HN (comments) on the impacts of generative AI on critical thinking...https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484224
I have thoughts up front....yes there is likely a loss of the inquisitive nature of some things. I think, I don't need to think too much about this until the AI fails then I'll figure it out. But then again, at some point maybe AI will stop failing, and then we have a utility.
Just because a calculator can add numbers doesn't automatically remove our critical thinking in math, but as I'm writing this I do think....how much of math is doing things that calculators are doing or using critical thinking to either solve proofs/etc or design computing systems to solve proofs, or conjectures or whatever.
So what does that mean for generative AI?
I also sometimes think about things like this as forms of abstractions. Like because we can write in python it changes the critical thinking we can and do, do, because we don't need to worry or care about which assembly operation we need to perform to move some data to memory or whatever, we just say, python do, and it does. Does that make us think less critically? Maybe? But also maybe not? Maybe it gives us other things to think critically about.
I do plan to read (or listen) to the PDF referenced by the HN link, maybe I'll have different opinions after that.
