When Plato complains about writing diminishing our faculties for memorizing things, it's sometimes treated as an example of how we've always pointlessly worried about these things, but he was absolutely correct and the transition from an oral culture to a written culture has absolutely demolished those capabilities.
Writing as a technology ended up having strong upsides that mostly made up for that (in particular our ability to communicate across distances and time, to read Plato's concerns without 100 generations of Chinese whispers), but it was a trade-off, as most technologies tend to be.
How else could mind-virus like philosophy or religion or science or political legitimacy transit highly-variable humans for generations?
Religious organizations, governments, corporations all far outlive their founders and maintainers. Heroes at best only stretch or squeeze the dogma or methodology to grow the organization by better fitting to the culture.
And because organizations accumulate control over resources, individuals can have little effect outside them.
We are disposable by design.
Somehow we need to contend with killdozers, school shooters, anthrax mailers, and so on being much more capable than anything even a particularly yoked antiquity nerd like Plato ever could be.
Not my idea though, greater minds than I have talked about this a lot: Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, etc..
We will recover when we realize the valuable workers in a field are the ones who want to be there and actively increase their knowledge rather than offload work.
But a modern engineer has computers, math software, can code, has all the knowledge of the internet at their fingertips. With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable.
That isn't what was asked. The capabilities of "human + machine" clearly are increasing, but the comments above posit that as a result the average capabilities of "human (sans machine)" may decrease. The relative value of each change is far from clear.
But pre-LLM developers were bogged down in mountain of boiler plate code and unfamiliar APIs. LLM enable to abstract away a lot of the unnecessary complexity that made developers improductive
I work in the embedded space, and I routinely have to work with technologies I'm initially not familiar with. Internet searches are very hit and miss. So, is "AI". I generally use every tool at my disposal to try to get my foot in the door so I can understand better questions to ask and get the technical information I need to do my job.
I absolutely have no problem with someone replying to my question with a response from Claude. I appreciate them telling me the source, so I can assign an appropriate level of trust in the information.
This is somewhat good news because it means the end (to some extent) of the Peter Principle. My hope, though, is that this doesn't turn into an actual caste system, but I'm not holding my breath. I think that's where this all goes: we're in the process of the world's intelligence being strip-mined and resold back to the world at a premium. The only ones who "survive" long-term are the ones who refuse to submit all of their mental faculties to AI.
That inevitably leads to a rapid degeneration of the species. Only way to avoid that outcome entirely is to remind people that their brain is valuable and they need to exercise it just like they would the rest of their body.
I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.
If you look at old test papers - the lack of intelligence in modern times is very stark.
The claim of a "lack of intelligence in modern times" is flat out contradicted by the data. It'd take a lot of regression to get back to 1956 levels.
"Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?"
Not LLMs specifically.
Insofar as I believe there is value in IQ tests, this is a technology-driven effect, most likely due to the impact of distraction and search result immediacy on sustained thinking.
IQs used to just rise, year on year, because living in the world required more and more of the thinking that IQ tests measure. And now they don't.
https://www.pressenza.com/2025/07/the-decline-of-the-intelli...
Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
I’d like to add that for hardware development (in my experience) it’s been non-stop double checking because of hallucinations. To the point where I don’t use it for weeks.
Some machines are capability amplifiers.
Other machines are shit puking buck passing time sinks.
Motorising any of those machines could be considered lazy, though.
Of course it is, at equivalent distance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance
On my own bike, I don't think there is a pace that isn't easier. Even at slow speeds, it's not a whole lot of work. (And you can always change to a gear where it just isn't a lot of work to go slow. The challenge is more remaining upright, but a low gear and the barest of forward momentum will help that.)
If cycling were just about laziness then you'd see people cycling at walking speed everywhere, which you never see.
Since we're kinda talking about LLMs too, it's interesting to note that while cycling really does enable you to go faster than you can run, LLMs do not enable you to type at 1000 words per minute. LLMs are more like a teleport that only lets you describe your desired destination, you cannot simply enter a coordinate to get exactly where you want to go.
Framed another way - Is laziness defined as only 'spending less energy on it', or could there also a time commitment component?
Saving time by cycling isn't creating any problems, it's just cleverly using a machine to give you more time to do other things.
The bicycle has been credited as being a part of the liberation of women. It gave them independence they didn't have before. They weren't just being lazy.
Same with coding agents. I could do it by hand. It just would take much longer. Often so long that it would be impractical.
The stitching comment is just pedantic. People don't hand stitch like a machine not because they are lazy, it's because it's ineffective and impractical. It's not impossible to drive screws directly into softwood by hand, but you'd never get anything done that way. It's not lazy to choose another method, it's just being an effective worker.
As for coding agents, it's clearly effective to write software without them because we have been doing it for decades so far. It still remains to be seen whether they are laziness (ie. it's just a motor) or if they are actually enabling new possibilities (ie. we get software that really wouldn't have been possible before).
At a time when I was in better shape than the average person, the most I ever worked up to was 40 miles, and it was brutal. In my entire middle-aged life, I have met exactly one person who believably claimed to have done 100 miles in a day. I'm sure it's easier than many/most people think, but not 'anyone' easy, with just 'a bit' of training.
It's the same issue. You can walk 100 miles. Just not in a day. And you can create 10k LOC without a coding agent. Just not in a day.
I don't think that coding agents enable technical possibilities. They just allow things that wouldn't be economically possible without them.
Easily, by writing a code generator. Or disassemble a 1k C program.
> They just allow things that wouldn't be economically possible without them.
It’s not economical to have more code. It’s economical to have correct code and the way to do that is with the power of abstraction. Instead of dealings with opcodes, you have assemblers and macros. Then it’s C, next it’s python, and what would have been a 10k program is now just a few lines.
What? Have you, uh, ridden a bicycle before...?
That may be true, but the fact is that cycling is a more energy-efficient form of transport than walking. It takes literally less effort to go the same distance.
When your bike is rolling also on flat ground, you have literally zero effort to move your position. With walking it is effort, your muscles must work for every meter you make.
Anyway this is just silly, we are splitting hairs. A lot of machines have a functional purpose and do not exist for the lazy. The LHC, ships, thousands of examples.
You could consider it a class of predator on people who have vulnerabilities that can give way to dependence on the LLM and an inability to function. It could be seen in that light. The underlying problem is being described in that light.
A de-evolution of culture for the sake of efficiency, sure. The entire culture will shift to a greater degree of superficiality, not just because of the lack of deep understanding of what they're doing, but because AI will condition (and is conditioning) people to want the more superficial stuff.
This isn't a phenomenon exclusive to AI - but AI is at the apex of it and is the worst we've seen so far because it, much more than anything else, targets the mental domain whereas most previous automations have targeted the physical but the mental as well to a lesser extent.
The end result is a huge amount of technical debt that simply can't be recovered and a huge increase in myopia that will prevent us from truly understanding and solving serious problems that will undoubtedly occur.
Most people can't see this because they're already addicted to the dopamine hit of the tech, but it's one reason I'm 100% anti-AI and I hate it with an immense passion.