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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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Maybe if we keep the AI but loss the Oligarchy...
what ai!? there is no ai!
down with killing the oligarchs though.
We would still have to deal with the skill atrophy of AI use.
Even if AI is entirely green, publicly owned and widely accessible, it will negatively affect us.
Skill atrophy is an issue with nearly every technology though. Unless you want to go back to knapping your own hand axes and starting fires with sticks you will be dependent on some technology to cover the skills you don't have.
What if AI was only used for skill building?
what if twinkies were only used for critical nutrition? then they would be healthy!
It has potential, though I wonder if that's genuinely better than studying the old fashioned way.
It can definitely feel more dynamic, I'm not convinced the outcomes are provably better.
I imagine something like a tutor. You have an interactive system for 1 on 1 attention that teachers and parents can't always provide.
Nothing I've seen is nearly ready for this, but at the same time, its not completely useless.
This seems like a particularly expensive and resource hungry solution when we could just train more teachers and tutors.
and create better educational resources
Maybe the pace of development would've been slower, giving us more time to react to it. Or it wouldn't get shoved down our throats every second, or it'd be renoved from the places it's more harmful, if making money wasn't the only concern
Maybe yeah. There's certainly ways it could have played out better.
I don't think you need to worry about skill atrophy if you recognize the skills as necessary and useful.
We still teach basic arithmetic in elementary school, even though we have calculators.
Tools to rapidly parse, sort, aggregate, and distribute information aren't going to affect us any more negatively today than they did 40 years ago or 400 years ago.
We’re going to end up with civil engineers who don’t know how to calculate dynamic weight ratings, because they used Claude to get through their physics classes.
Skill atrophy is absolutely a concern, even if we continue teaching the fundamentals. Because without that higher level knowledge, there is nobody to check for hallucinations.
The desktop calculator is an amazing tool for people who do a lot of math, but those people still know how to do the math. AI is fundamentally changing that, because it is directing users on how to do the work, not simply taking in
{a}+{b}and returning{c}. It is a user going “hey chatbot how do I find the difference between {a} and {b}?” Then the AI confidently (and incorrectly) goes “Oh all we need to do is{a}+{b}to give us the result{c}.” But if the user already doesn’t know how to find a difference, they won’t notice that the AI is incorrect.And that is obviously a small example, but apply it to larger problems like calculating thermal expansion requirements for a suspended walkway. Calculating maximum wattage ratings for a circuit. Calculating maximum weight ratings for a highway overpass or bridge. Calculating medicine dosage based on a patient’s body weight and an interactive drug.
Any one of these could lead to disaster if done incorrectly. And the issue with AI is that it will happily hold your hand through the entire process, while confidently being incorrect the whole time.
I haven't seen any actual evidence of this.
I have, not in education (I have relatives who work in higher education and they claim as such, but both of these are anecdotes anyway) but the interview process. My work has struggled to hire anyone and its driving me bananas. They either get candidates who used AI to pass the non-technical phone screen and show up for the first interview clearly asking AI about industry standards and they flunk almost immediatly. The second group are full on tripple threats, they can sing, dance and act, but balk at the first talk of pay (my business daddy has not kept up with the competition in a narrow field, they can get a lot more across the street).
We are looking down the barrel of the last cohorts of classically trained professionals working through their careers, the world is about to be a much weirder and worse place because of [gestures broadly to everything] but mostly AI.
We teach arithmetic, but are people better or worse at it than before calculators were widely available?
I'm not sure what you mean by "if you recognise the skill as necessary or useful" - but taking a leap, I don't see how that matters.
If I allow a machine to code for me, and don't regularly use my own skills, when that machine becomes financially inaccessible, or just breaks down, it doesn't matter how important I think the skill is - I've given it away.
No question the average person is worse at arithmetic since the invention of the calculators. But we probably wouldn't have our current standard of living if we hadn't invented the calculator either. And calculators wre so ubiquitous and basic...
So... On balance it was a net benefit. On the other hand AI affects more than a single skill. Will the QoL improvements outweigh the negative behavioural effects? I think the jury is still out on that one.
Absolutely, I'm not necessarily making the argument that calculators are bad, just the point that technology can help us, and also create dependency, or at least a kind of laziness.
Why don't you try getting a new argument, yours is a bit dated.
Can't help but notice that in addition to being weirdly smug, all you did was show that someone else has come to similar conclusions.
Writing things down is a great way to offload the cognitive load of remembering things.
Fortunately, it's hard to paywall writing. The same isn't true for AI.
That was written when less than 10% of the population was literate because of how expensive and difficult it was to learn. There was no publicly funded literary education, and public opinion on literacy was at best contentious.
It's not a similar conclusion. You are literally parroting the same talking points. They are just as fundamentally misguided and divorced from reality now as they were 2000 years ago.
Thankfully, removing literacy from someone is cost prohibitive.
Better. Significantly better.
I once had to explain to a room of four other servers and a bartender (so you know, people who are more likely to do mental arithmetic at work than many others), that if each of five servers tips the bartender out ten percent of their earnings, then he’ll earn half of the average tips. Several of them did not believe me even after went through a couple examples.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I do despair if that’s the best we can do.
He's not really citing anything, just making a claim that happens to align with his existing argument.
People certainly don't seem better at arithmetic, and readily rely on calculators. Which isn't necessarily bad, but it speaks to my argument that technology can, and does, cause skills to atrophy.
Well yeah, but so are you and I’m just bringing up an anecdote. If we wanna bring numbers into this, they’ve probably got some evidence related to the Flynn effect, but I don’t know that there’s a good way to actually determine whether the average person got better at arithmetic after calculators came out, unless we want to reuse some oooooold tests.
While anecdotes are iffy sometimes, I think they're alright in this context.
If people feel the need to reach for calculators rather than doing simple maths in their heads, that at least nods in the direction that the technology has impacted our skill development, or at the very least, made us inclined to use the tool over our own facilities.
But also, there's emerging evidence of the issues with frequent AI use, so it seems pointless to split hairs.
Edit: just to clarify, I was agreeing with you in my first comment
I was saying the person you responded to was essentially saying "nuh uh!"
I mean, that's a curious anecdote. But it doesn't explain why they would have been better at the math prior to 1970
As with all anecdotes, it does not explain itself, but I can explain this one: repetition.
I don’t think that was really in question though and both you and the other person have already responded genuinely, which makes this interaction less fun than I was intending, because I had hoped my anecdote would be taken as the joke it was.
Them’s the breaks over text sometimes.
:-/
Again, nothing in this story explains why calculators are to blame. If anything, it illustrates how calculators are useful.
Several times vs several thousand times makes a difference 🤷
But hey, take it as a point for you if you want! Calculators are useful.
What is even the benefit
Advancing medicine, for one.
I think there's an issue with lumping them all together here. There is a functional difference between a machine that does your homework and is designed to endlessly praise you, and a model specifically designed to identify viruses or medications.
In this case it's basically the same technology (LLMs); you don't get one without the other.
Sure you do. We don't have to have every permutation of every technology.
That's like saying you can have space exploration without ballistic missiles. Once the technology is there power and/or the market will do whatever it wants with it.
Except even moreso with language models. Here it is not just a similar technology, but the exact same vehicle.
Translation: The way scaling laws and gradient descent work for language models means that there is NO functional difference between a machine that does your homework and is designed to endlessly praise you, and a model specifically designed to identify viruses or medications.