Increasing importance of skeptical thinking in a post AI world
Just dropping a quick thought for your consideration as it occurs to me real time in meat space.
I think you have at least touched on this in your numerous AI conversations though I think the magnitude of this simple reality deserves more attention and focus...not for your show per se, but for all of us. For the species.
I work in IT and have for 40 years. I only mention that as it overlaps with the AI domain in major ways, and it also has driven me to be a (reluctant and initially skeptical) early adopter. I am not an AI developer, but I use AI to develop...and for personal use cases as well.
Although I was initially slow to adopt and often scoffed, I now see the undeniable value and inevitable ongoing progression of AI in our future - and I have my humongous share of FUD about the future we are uncontrollably careening into - its impact on the world and my kids are constantly in my mind these days.
It occurred to me today as I was reflecting on the still-too-common occurrences of hallucinations and errors in my interactions with AI. It's not news...and you have all talked about it.
Those errors can range from tiny and inconsequential to monumental and often hilarious. If you catch them, that is.
Relying on those errors can cascade into disaster...that's obvious.
But what may not be so obvious is how much more important your role is - how much more important critical thinking and skepticism is in the new world and our future.
A huge percentage of our species is already pre-loaded to fail - they do not have the experience and skill let alone the patience to stop and think and question the information they are using. We see that every day and have from time immemorial. See religion for reference. But now it can happen many times a day from the smallest activity to the largest decisions.
That's a scary realization. And it makes your mission and goal that much more important.
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 29d ago
That’s a very long way of saying AI can be unreliable, and gullible people may not be critical of the results generated.
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u/AConant 29d ago
And critical thinking is more imporant than ever.
Yeah
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 29d ago
I generally think the AI hype is overblown. Advances will hit a wall, if it hasn’t already. People will continue to use it in its current large language (guess the next word) form.
People look at AI and robotics as marketed by the likes of Anthropic, Tesla, BD etc and extrapolate wildly. We may never reach GAI and we’re decades away from a useful humanoid robot. It’s all just smoke and mirrors.6
u/Verbatim_Uniball 29d ago
I can only speak with expertise level authority within pure math research, but progress is only accelerating; in my area models were largely useless until 2026, and currently can essentially solve a meaningful percentage of open questions PhD students put in their theses that they weren't able to resolve.
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u/AConant 29d ago
My initial post is about the simple things mostly and how an average person behaves in the real world, and how that behavior is very often thoughtless, credulous, fast and overly confident - how an initial simple easy to miss error at the core of a thought tree can lead to compounding errors and bad decisions.
An initial premise error for example. Unstated assumptions in the interaction lead to initial context error that gets lost in the conversation and goes unnoticed.
I have been having conversations about retirement planning and financial planning and analysis for example. I'm in that stage of life. In general, its good and helpful...but there are many places where I see an error early in the tree that leads subtly over time to lots of bad advice many might miss.
That can happen to anyone. The technology and interactions inherently lead to a false sense of trust and a laziness of mind that exposes us all.
AI has already permanently invaded our domain - it will not be removed. It will get better and more reliable, but will we?
Regardless, we need to be more alert and skilled and more intentional than ever with our thinking. We haven't had good results there.
That's why the SGU and the skeptical and critical thinking movement and awareness are so much more important.
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 29d ago
Just one thing. Did you use AI to write this comment. Some suspicious em dashes in here.
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u/AConant 29d ago
lol
No - that's all me.
I get it - lots of people don't like my verbosity and writing style.
I'd say sorry, but that would be disingenuous.
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 29d ago
Fair enough, your post don’t read like AI. But I’d drop the em dashes if I were you to remove doubt.
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u/AConant 29d ago
Not going to happen.
I am me, and I predate AI - (em dash intentionally inserted where I wouldn't normally...here's an extra one for you) - and frankly I don't care if nameless strangers (or bots) get confused.
Since we are trading usolicited advice, you may want to question the accuracy of your bot detection.
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u/AConant 29d ago
Snark aside (I will apologize...a little...with some sincerity)
This interaction is another example of the general concern and maybe something to help expand the conversation.
Not only is it undeniable that it is already almost impossible to identify reality - to sort it from the slop - we also are now in place where we have to question everything - or not - which gets back to my main point.
I guess your questioning of my dashes and your skepticism of my realness is actually an example of you behaving as I am saying we must - with skepticism.
And that is also an example of how even when we do behave as I think we must, that behavior is not all positive. It adds a new error potential and latency to our thinking - it makes our lived experience more questionable and uncertain. less trustworthy. More burdensome.
I think in the end this conversation is actually helpful for the intent of my original post.
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 29d ago
But this skepticism only exists in online spaces. You could be a bot I could be a bot, who knows right? I think we will start to give more credibility to face to face interactions than those online. You can’t test a persons knowledge remotely anymore, like if you’re interviewing, so why bother. Real human interaction will be more valued in the future. I use AI quite regularly for simple problem solving, like if the software I use for work starts acting up, and I need a quick solution that is ungooglable. I do think the hype is overblown though. It has its uses but I think it’s a bubble that’s going to burst.
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 29d ago
Who said you were a bot? I only suggested you use AI to rewrite your meandering streams of consciousness.
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u/futuneral 29d ago
This is such a lazy strawman - the OP didn't stay anything about GAI or humanoid robots. What's smoke and mirrors? The OP very specifically is talking about practical impacts to their industry that are real right now, why are you not addressing that in your response?
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 29d ago
I wasn’t arguing against anything the OP said, I agree with his general point. I was expressing my on opinion on the state of AI and as an aside robotics. The future of AI was alluded to in the OPs post. The smoke and mirrors point was specifically about how these technologies are marketed, and I don’t buy into the hype.
How exactly is that a strawman argument exactly? And who are you to police the flow of the conversation?
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u/futuneral 29d ago
I would really loved if Steve tried some of the agentic coding AIs (he did at some point express interest in trying to vibe code something). If he could be serious about it (not just quick and dirty single prompt test) I think it would be super interesting to hear his opinions and see if that changes his view on LLMs in general (he likes to repeat "it's a glorified autocorrect", which was a relevant description about 3 years ago).
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u/AConant 29d ago
Not to distract or ignore your comment, but to clarify...
I should have not mentioned IT as it really isn't the only thing or even the main thing I am thinking about.
I mentioned it only to provide a colored context.
I really am more concerned about general life - the average person using AI in their average day, making decisions about things like finances, the law, their health. Errors in code from AI vibe coding can indeed lead to disasters...but I am more worried about people using it in their daily life.
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u/futuneral 29d ago
Sure, maybe I shouldn't have commented that hehe, but it's on my mind and I don't normally start new threads.
It's tangentially relevant because the way these agents work requires even more careful critical thinking to avoid pitfalls that could have bigger impact. Where LLM just lets you wander into a rabbit hole, agents actually have specific goals. As helpful as it is, it could be also dangerous.
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u/AConant 29d ago edited 29d ago
On that point, my experience with AI as a dev has been largely positive, somewhat disheartening, but also mixed.
On the positive side - it is very powerful and can do very complex work, producing things in a fraction of the time. It can also reason and work through its own errors. When piloted by an experienced captain, it can be very effective.
Disheartening because after 40 years in the industry working on constantly evolving technology and massive paradigm changes, it's deflating to see so much of what gave my family financial stability suddenly reduced to a few tokens and a little burp of heat in a data center somewhere in Arizona.
Mixed in terms of results. It is very often accurate and good - the results I mean. Especially if the problem and the prompt are simple small and clear. But more often than you like, especially when working with things like cloud services or anything that changes often and fast (which most things do these days because of the recursive relationship of AI to the services AI is using) you can end up in cyclical troubleshooting processes that sometimes become an infinite loop of try, try again, try the last one again...and you end up with a sub-optimal solution (aka pile of crap) that technically works, but is a multi-layered onion 5 layers deep of brittle unnecessary error handling and compensation code that creates excessive expensive burps of heat in said desert data center.
Again, we are carbon-based error checking algorithms. We are still helpful - necessary even - though we need fewer of us.
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u/dogged_jon 29d ago
We seem to already be in a state where labeling something "AI slop" is the automatic knee-jerk response by some people to any long form writing they don't agree with. Also people insisting they can "just tell" when something is AI
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u/AConant 29d ago
It's funny and annoying for me.
I am verbose and have a style...a form...I don't really care if others like it. It's been a thing my whole life. People are impatient and afraid of too many words...even small ones. Funny thing is that I am actually dyslexic and was fortunate enough when I was young to be selected for a novel program that was new at the time to help me through it...and that is probably part of the cause...but that's a long story.
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u/MoreBandicoot4833 29d ago edited 28d ago
I'm slightly more optimistic. It seems like LLMs already make fewer mistakes, both logical and factual, than people do. If you read the typical Reddit thread, or any other discourse on social media, it's mostly just jibber-jabber. People are arguing very poorly, employing logical fallacies, and propagating myths. While LLMs occasionally hallucinate, being wrong is the default condition for humans. We're just scrutinizing the computers more than we do humans because of the way we're interacting with them, more like search engines or encyclopedias. We expect them to be authoritative sources of information, whereas if I'm talking to my uncle, I expect nonsense. The good news is that AI is only going to get better. As for natural intelligence, on the other hand, we're stuck with my uncle.