Technology

Why have our oligarchs or billionaires devised systems and work cultures of difficult tasks and productive struggle, when our government's documents claim we, all of us, have a right to pursue happiness?

Researchers recently found that spending just 10 minutes relying on an AI tool significantly impairs the user's ability to focus and persist with difficult tasks....

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The findings backed up what anecdotes and surveys have increasingly found in recent years: An overreliance on AI for answers erodes our cognitive fitness. When AI produces answers in seconds, we get used to that speed; anything that takes longer feels inefficient. And relying on AI also removes what the team called “productive struggle,” which can lead people to find their research strengths and passions.

It just makes me solve harder problems...

There's a flip side to this. I am persistent. But busy, and a realist. Since AI, I have been able to accomplish things I always wanted and planned to, but never got done before. I've been wanting a contractor's license to expand my business. But I'm busy. AI is the tutor that helped me get it done. I've been loving Linux and open source, had a handful of raspberry Pi projects, but was never quite confident enough to go full on self hosted. Thanks to AI, I am fully self hosted and loving it. Also, I own a service business, time is money. Guess who has more time since AI? Define persistence in the context of my experience with AI. Put in other synonymous terms, am I faltering, yielding, "going fallow", atrophying? I don't think so.

LLMs are useful for branching into certain areas I am unfamiliar with or that have a lot of content. I’ve got lots of regulations and white papers for my work, and it’s helpful to point me in the right direction very quickly or assist in coming up with topics/ideas when I have very short deadlines on projects. Recycling (plagiarism) of company products is actually promoted. We also have very corporate lingo and it helps me rephrase my content in that style. Basically it helps me do stuff that would probably otherwise be too hard or impossible for me to do in the timeframe I have, so kind of the opposite of the study? At least in the way I use it. But the study results kinda line up with the other studies talking about IQ decline in newer generations for the first time in history, if you buy that.

Driving a car for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to walk to the grocery store.