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AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
21–30 of 202 posts
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#22Does anyone use LLMs in such a manner that they believe it always has the most up to date information (without web search tools?). Isn't this whole thesis negated by the fact that tool calling web search exists? This just feels like a whole lot of words to say, don't treat a LLM as an always up to date infallible statistical predictor.
> Does anyone use LLMs in such a manner that they believe it always has the most up to date information (without web search tools?). Probably just 95% of the users. You know, the non-techies.
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#23This was a bit word-salad-y but I share the same basic concern. I think more I worry about the tendency toward greater and greater cognitive off-loading to LLMs. My sister told me a story the other day about how she caught her plumber using chatgpt on his phone to fix an issue with her bathroom. I just think it's good for humans to know how to do stuff.
your sister offloaded to her plumber.
her plumber offloaded to chatgpt.
"i just think it's good for humans to know how to do stuff."
are we talking about your sister or her plumber?
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#24Doh. I went in expecting a really cool thesis — because the idea seems somehow intuitive, or at least really intriguing. But I have no clue what I read. Just totally odd and unconvincing. Greenland? Dialectal substrate? The idea is still super intriguing to me though!
Well, at least you know it's not AI-written because it's delightfully weird and evidently about some pet theory of the author. This day and age, that's something to unironically celebrate.
I love this! Especially the part about greenland. For quite some time the dashes were a good indicator of a text was written by AI - but now the best option is to write more human like by doing it a little less polished but weird - at least the message is being transported
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#25At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of…
Oh no, not that tired thing again. I suppose your point is: people once were critical of the technology of writing, so all criticism of the technology-at-hand is illegitimate. You don't actually make a point, so one has to assume.
Some points:
1. Technological inventions are not repetitions of the same phenomenon. Each invention is its own unique event, you cannot generalize the experience with previous inventions to understand the effects of the latest ones.
2. Socrates may have been in large degree right. Imagine that you and your society has been locked in the sewers, condemned to wade in shit for so long that you and your ancestors long ago forgot what fresh air feels like. What would you think about your life? Would you think "this is horrible" or "this is fine"? Or maybe "I enjoy smell of shit and we're so much better off because we don't have to worry about sunburn"?
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#26This was a bit word-salad-y but I share the same basic concern. I think more I worry about the tendency toward greater and greater cognitive off-loading to LLMs. My sister told me a story the other day about how she caught her plumber using chatgpt on his phone to fix an issue with her bathroom. I just think it's good for humans to know how to do stuff.
your sister offloaded to her plumber. her plumber offloaded to chatgpt. "i just think it's good for humans to know how to do stuff." are we talking about your sister or her plumber?
The plumber obviously. Not everyone needs to know how to be a plumber, but a plumber should know how to be a plumber
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#27This was a bit word-salad-y but I share the same basic concern. I think more I worry about the tendency toward greater and greater cognitive off-loading to LLMs. My sister told me a story the other day about how she caught her plumber using chatgpt on his phone to fix an issue with her bathroom. I just think it's good for humans to know how to do stuff.
I've always wanted to be more of a handy man, never knew where to start. I used LLMs to create a toolkit and then used it to fix various stuff around the house. I'm at the point where I'm comfortable with beginner projects moving onto intermediate, and I feel like the quality of my works beats those of hired help at my level of competence. So... I'm glad I could off-load some cognition to LLMs and get to the actual useful parts.
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#28At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of…
Impressive. Thanks for the share.
I was thinking about this recently: The difference between systemic (systematic) learning and opportunistic learning.
AI enables opportunistic learning, or Just-in-time (JIT) learning. It give the impression of infinite knowledge.
Most general concepts are well within the grasp of human understanding.
My curiosity RE the difference between systemic v opportunistic learning was the effect of longer-termed exposure/use to a tool that enables opportunistic learning.
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#29AI-assisted, I can see. I believe it doesn’t have to be that way, though. If you use AI as a grounding tool - essentially something that can take your stream of consciousness and parse it into a series of concerete and pointed search terms to do real-time research with instead of falling back on what’s in the weights - then it’s honestly hard to think of a technology that had the potential to be more useful in the history of the species - it gives you much more direct access to both your unknown unknowns and your unknown knowns.
That is, of course, provided that you pay attention it actually does research. In their current state, LLMs are practically useless for this purpose for the vast majority of users, as no one knows how they work, what to watch out for, what the failure modes look like, and how to keep nonsense apart from facts when both are presented with an equal amount of conviction. That’s not a user problem, it’s an education problem.
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#30Does anyone use LLMs in such a manner that they believe it always has the most up to date information (without web search tools?). Isn't this whole thesis negated by the fact that tool calling web search exists? This just feels like a whole lot of words to say, don't treat a LLM as an always up to date infallible statistical predictor.
Gemini can be asked about current events. I was quite surprised it was able to give structured information about love boxing event in realtime.
Most agent/chats have access to web search. I’m not overly surprised that it can do it but it is very nice when it actually works.