New cognitive skills in the age of AI tailored information

Tech should take more time to think about racism, and bias. All of this by the way is not Marxism. I’ll grant you that the culture war is toxic, but with good faith try to understand where things are coming from. I understand from a conservative perspective some things are obnoxious. That doesn’t mean that liberal arts are not critical thinkers, or Marxist. In fact I would argue they are in some ways better at critical thinking vs the STEM fields.

(Note: I'm not talking about the model being slow to respond, but rather the animation of it typing its response letter by letter quickly starts slowing down, until eventually it hangs, sometimes mid-sentence.)

Life on this planet has evolved from primitive organisms whose only goal is to propagate through spacetime (in time = survive, in space = reproduce), as this is the de facto only initial goal you may encounter serendipitously, when the trait we judge is... in fact propagation though spacetime (i.e. to exist, you need to know how to keep existing).

In the quest of adapting better to our environment and each other, we needed ways to predict the environment, hence development of sensors, actuators and the function in between them that reads this input and produces output - cognition & intelligence.

Life has been developing cognition starting with basic instincts fight or flight, then increasingly complicated associative thought, social cognition, abstract cognition, speech, formal models (like math, logic) etc.

Then our culture took off, and we needed to evolve faster than we could. So as a crutch, we started producing an augmentation for ourselves to help with the high end of cognition, formal communication & computation, in the face of books, printing, computers solving linear algebra systems, arithmetic, math & logic problems, programming systems, the Internet.

But now this technology is starting to eat back down the evolutionary tree of cognition, it has started reproducing associative thought (neural networks) and the associated with them cognitive skills, like speech, abstract reasoning and so on.

We evolved bottom-up.

Technology is evolving, through our own hands, top-down.

We... are not developing new cognitive skills. We're losing them to technology.

We no longer do math by hand. We use computers. We no longer maintain complex formal systems by reading instructions and following them - we program computers to. We no longer remember facts - we look them up on the Internet.

Now we're starting to no longer go through the effort of creating art & speech from scratch, we're delegating this to diffusion and transformer models.

We're losing cognition. And this process won't stop. We can't just decide to stop it, because we're dependent on technology. If technology ceases to be, society ceases to be, billions will die.

So our only options is to continue ceding cognitive territory to AI, and eventually become its puppets, and eventually AI will have no purpose for us, and it'll stop supporting us entirely.

Reading the comments it seems likely that the article is itself LLM-generated blogspam, in which case it won't be aware of the potential for hallucinated facts.

I was thinking the other day that we really need a new term for this. In 2016 we had "post-truth", but that implies humans deliberately making stuff up to deceive people, for whatever reason, but LLMs making stuff up don't really knowingly do so, and don't really have a motive. There is the term "consensus reality", but the danger is that with more and more LLM-generated content appearing on the internet, which may ultimately pollute future training, we may find "consensus" isn't sufficient to determine reality any more. Perhaps the new term for what we're heading towards could be something like the "post-reality" era, or something like that.

Not sure what the solution to this is either, other than withdrawing from the mainstream internet and sticking to the small known pockets of human resistance (while they still exist).