The dumbification AI era, or how Lionel Shriver made me think about AI

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today I finished a book that I enjoyed quite a bit, Mania by Lionel Shriver. The book tells the story of a US-based dystopia, where there exists a social campaign seeking to eliminate the prejudice against low intelligence. The book narrates the story of two friends: one who stands her ground, defending what she thinks, while the other goes with the flow, trying to stay afloat and climb the corporate ladder to reach her dream job. An analysis of positive and negative reviews about the book can be found on the Wikipedia page (Please, support Wikipedia if you can 😀). While this might sound too extreme, then I found this blogpost, by Prof. Cristina Lopes. It tells an anecdote she had with a student, where they used Claude Code to develop a full research project, without having any knowledge of what was happening under the hood. The LLM made up the data, the software, and the tests, leaving the student to act as mere observer, with no control of that was happening at all. This is something that is really concerning in today’s education, and also in the corporate world (as I have ranted about in the past).

Do I even know what I am doing? Reflections on the use of AI coding assistants for ML work.

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI coding assistants are mainstream. They are used across industry, promising a boost in performance, showing you can achieve more, do more, even when you are not in front of the computer. Keep coding, keep producing, there is no time to loose. However, that makes me think about a small, but important question: Do I even know what I am doing anymore?

It is undeniable that AI coding assistants make us more productive. I can achieve now more in one day that what I could achieve in a week. In the past few months, I have been able to implement features to software packages that it would have taken me multiple web searches, bug fixing and probably many tears to implement. All with almost zero effort on my size, just minor supervision on the changes that were being made. Even though I have been working on ML for a while, I can feel that I am having a cognitive decline in terms of working capabilities. This has been widely studied 1, 2, and the data is there to show that AI, used without any type of critical thought, is decremental of our ability to produce either work, or improve our abilities (this makes me feel quite bad to be honest). This happens to both experts and non-experts. This poses for me the following question: Experts should be able to analyze the output of the model and detect flaws, what about non-experts?

On AI on Paco's Log

The dumbification AI era, or how Lionel Shriver made me think about AI

Do I even know what I am doing? Reflections on the use of AI coding assistants for ML work.