Ask HN: What happens when humans become as dumb as AI?

A Hacker News user warned that humans are increasingly outsourcing critical thinking to AI models, raising the risk that people may become as intellectually passive as the machines they rely on. The user, an economist, argued that while individual human errors tend to average out across diverse populations, a handful of state-of-the-art models concentrating all thinking would create far larger aggregate risks. The post questioned what happens when AI does not need to improve further to match declining human cognitive engagement.

The existential risk that has received much attention is machines eventually becoming as smart as people, and then smarter still. What I see in the news, and, anecdotally, around me is rather the opposite. Thinking is hard. People, even those who went through rigorous university training to develop their critical thinking, are increasingly outsourcing thinking to machines. SOTA models don't need to get any better to catch up with us, they just need to wait. And maybe not even that long. I wonder what happens then? As for my opinion, I am an economist by training. There are many people, many educational systems; the risks stemming from the mistakes people make are idiosyncratic, and they average out in aggregate to an extent . On the other hand, there are just a few SOTA models. If all thinking is done by them, the aggregate risks will be much larger, I'd suppose. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48398449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48398449 Points: 2 Comments: 0