Atrophy

This is a good blog post:

In the Age of AI, Don’t Let Your Skills Atrophy

With ChatGPT, it’s too easy to implement ideas without understanding the underlying concepts or even what the individual lines in a program do. Doing so for unfamiliar tasks means failing to learn something new, while doing so for known tasks leads to skill atrophy.

This is the same way Google has made the published encyclopedias irrelevant, and general reading skills have become scarce. Librarians are at the other end of the stick, where users question their relevance.

The author concludes with a brilliant philosphical argument:

The age of AI has also very much caused an existential crisis. Need I argue why humans should remain skillful, why I choose to continue learning? I suppose I do. Instead of attempting to argue from a utilitarian standpoint (even though we are nowhere near the fully automated communist utopia), I will cede all utility and skip directly to joy. I am an existentialist: I am perfectly comfortable in a world with no inherent meaning. Sheer existence and action brings me joy. I spend hours of my day tinkering with computers not because of utility, but for the pleasure it brings. It’s the same reason one plays piano: enjoyment rather than practicality. This is how I’m drawing the line. If that’s not convincing to you, find some other way to draw it, but do draw it. Don’t let the negotiation between AI and humans happen without you.

Think about it.