this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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Not quite an LLM, but I asked Siri the answer to 24*6, without thinking. When I saw the answer I realized if I actually took a moment using some critical thinking I would have easily gotten it. In short, I believe it.
So…you are concerned that you used a calculator instead of doing math in your head?
Did you know how to do that math before hand?
I think the biggest risk to using AI is that people don’t first learn how to do something before using tools to do the thing. In other words, our 7th grade teachers were right. You should understand the principles before accessing the short cuts.
I don't really agree with this take. The reason we teach kids mental calculus is to indeed understand basic principles, but only because their further education is based on those principles.
But it doesn't generalise to everything. I don't need to understand assembly or the basic principles that make a computer work to be a good software engineer using high level programming languages.
And this might be an unpopular take, but you don't even need to understand well low level development to be a good software engineer using high level languages.
So really, it's a choice to become stupider that's the problem not that a tool exists that could potentially make us stupider.
Perhaps we should look at the root cause as to why we choose to take these shortcuts instead of putting all blame on the idea of AI?
The answer here is always "capitalism," of course!
If the answer were as easy as one word or a simple concept, it'd certainly make a solutio easier to find. Sadly the world is not so simple.
Except we're not choosing this, it has already been chosen for us by a handful of billionaires who stand to make more money
So billionaires forced MediumSizedSnack to ask Siri a simple math question?
I'm not talking about the forced utilization of techbro wankery, I'm talking about people actually using that wankery on their own. "AI" just existing doesn't magically make people stupid, they have to use it.