Can this be put in analogy to arithmetic and calculators? People had to be a lot better at mental math and calculator removed the pressure. You could imagine making similar arguments that losing the ability would be disastrous. The reasons it wasn’t was 1) people still learn and get tested in school without calculator 2) they still need to do enough mental math in day to day life without a calculator at hand so the ability hasn’t just gone to zero. Net result is people are mostly fine and there is a net improvement in arithmetic correctness across economy. Other similar aids: spellcheck, google translate, …. I feel some hesitation that these concerns are time invariant. The argument is probably that writing is different.
Yes. The argument is that writing is different and I don't think the analogy holds. Calculators are not tools for mathematical thinking or communication. Writing is a form of processing thoughts and communication.
The "people are mostly fine" is true. People were mostly fine at the time when only the elites could write, but the society will not be the same. We are moving towards those old times.
Maybe you deal with intellectual elite from the best schools and haven't noticed[1], but adult literacy even among college educated has been on a downward trend for some time and we can see some results. Normal interactions in the corporate world are more difficult. People in middle-level management can't explain and articulate things as well as they used to. There is more communication, but it's not as efficient. One well-written report in every two weeks used to be enough. You need to be on a Zoom call 2-3 hours weekly for the same thing.
Mediocre or low quality writing is mentally taxing to read. If what you read is grammatically correct AI-slob it really kills all interest in reading and communicating in writing.
[1] Only about 10% of adults have PIAAC adult literacy level 4 or 5.
The difference is that with arithmetic and calculators I am simply playing the rules of a formal game without regard to the semantics of those numerical symbols. I don't care so much what the numbers mean as much as I care that I have executed the rules correctly and arrive at the "right number."
With language however we are attempting to refer to some kind of underlying meaning or reality, and an LLM will not give you the understanding of the things being referred to - only the outward representations themselves. If you are indeed interested in meaningless exchange of symbols a la Searle's Chinese Room then perhaps there is some utility in this; otherwise it's the act of digesting and comprehending meaning, and the internal cognitive processes that go into the production of the written artifact that matter, not just the written artifact itself.
Calculators don't really help you think. You need to have a concept of the calculation beforehand and you only run the technical steps on the calculator.
Writing is different. It is more akin to the left leg, when the right leg is your thinking. I am a weird combination of an author and a mathematician-turned-programmer, and both these skills are very useful in either activity; I wouldn't be able to program half as well if I didn't dump my messy ideas to a doc first, especially when the model is far from straightforward.
Writing things down is a huge feedback loop for thinking. Plenty of edge cases stick their head out of the doc once you write everything down.
I wonder if some people would argue that it _was_ disastrous though?
We seem to struggle with things like putting people on the moon and not making airplanes fail compared to 50 years ago.
Maybe there was some critical mass of mental maths skills that engineers had in the 60s that we've lost now? Are we still inventing things at the same rate as before?
Arithmetic tends to be a one-shot thing to perform a step in a daily activity. Writing tends to be about planning or communicating more complex things.
Not that, say, doing long division in your head isn't a valuable skill, mind.
