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AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
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Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#52This 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 issue here is that the sister could have used ChatGPT herself, so why bother hiring the plumber. The plumber has provided less value than was expected. But make no mistake: the value the sister was looking for was to have someone else deal with it, and there's a price that the sister was willing to pay for the service of having someone else deal with it.
In the comments of this HN post, there is a dead comment from someone who posted an LLM's summary of another comment. It's dead because it offers very little/no value: that summary could be obtained directly from ChatGPT by anyone who wants a summary.
The sister offloaded plumbing to the plumber under the economic principle of comparative advantage. The plumber undermines the value they provide by outsourcing yet again. What value is provided by the middle man who does nothing but proxy the issue? Is the person who does this really a plumber? Is a plumber merely someone who has plumbing tools like wrenches and pipe tape?
That the plumber also wanted to outsource it is the concern: right now, the plumber is able to make money because of the difference between what is charged to deal with a problem and what it costs for them to deal with it. Knowledge and experience has become a commodity, which we probably can't do anything about, but along with that comes all the drawbacks (and advantages) of things, and humans, being comoditized.
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#53At 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…
You're misinterpreting the quote. Socrates is saying that being able to find a written quotation will replace fully understanding a concept. It's the difference between being able to quote the pythagorean theorem and understanding it well enough to prove it. That's why Socrates says that those who rely on reading will be "hard to get along with" - they will be pedantic without being able to discuss concepts freely. L…
I mean Socrates said enough stuff that was wrong or didn't have any scientific understanding either.
Simply put at humanity wide scales written information is by far the most important thing you can have. There is kind of a Sortie's paradox occurring where you have individual knowledge that can be held by one person conflicts with systems knowledge that has to be redundant and can be easily transferred.
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#54At 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…
regarding #2: how many serfs came home after re-digging the toilet hole to eat a meal of hand-milled grain bread and old vegetables with the members of the family that survived infancy and thought "life just doesn't get any better than this"? Probably almost all of them
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#55Does 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.
without a doubt yes. I'd encourage you to just try a session on a free chatgpt account, asking questions you think a parent or someone unfamiliar with the space would probably ask.
It will not only answer confidently incorrect, but it will not web search in obvious scenarios where it should.
The words here, aren't meant to be a warning for people in this type of community falling victim to this type of thing, its more for the general public that doesn't grasp the tools they are using, the people that wont ever wander across this article.
This i think is a huge reason we really need to jump into LLM basics classes or something similar as soon as possible. People that others consider "smart" will talk about how great chatgpt or something is, then that person will go try it out because that person they respect must be right, they'll hop on the free model and get an absurdly inferior product and not grasp why. They'll ask something that requires a web search to augment info, not get that web search, and assume the confidently incorrect agent is correct.
The thesis is also I think not entirely about not having that modern info at query time, its more scattered. Someone asks what product they should use to mash potatoes, a tool is suggested. Everyone that asks then receives that same recommendation and instead of having a range of different styles of mashing potatoes, we end up all drifting closer towards one style, and the range of variance in how food is prepared is slowly getting lost.
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
While I agree with your rebuke of the GP, Socrates was materially wrong about writing (or at least, about the ability to persist information beyond any single human lifetime). Cumulatively, knowledge work (including, in particular, curating knowledge) is exceptionally energy intensive from an evolutionary standpoint. It does pay dividends, clearly, but to get compounding effects from it, being able to efficiently pas…
The larger win from writing is passing down things that are not commonly needed. If you hunt antelope every year I can teach my kids. If we know there are antelope "over there", but they are easy to over hunt to so we only hunt in 100 year droughts - nobody in the village will know how to hunt them when we need to and so we need writing. (never mind how we figure out that they are easy to over hunt)
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#57This 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.
Sure, but.. I've been coding for 40 years and I don't know everything. To me, a LOT depends on what the plumber asked chatgpt about. For example: building codes in that city, to figure out what his options are - like, is he allowed to just put in any old toilet, or is there a gpf restriction? What's the replacement part number for faucet XYZ's gasket? Those seem reasonable. "how do I fix a clogged toilet?" would be b…
Presumably in his jurisdiction he should know what official resources to consult. But the point about it depending on his question is definitely fair.
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#58[dead]
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#59"Cognitive inbreeding" is an interesting (though maybe not entirely accurate) term for something I dislike a lot about LLMs. It really is a thing. You're recycling the same biases over and over, and it can be very difficult to tell if you don't review and distill the contents of your discourse with LLMs. Especially true if you're only using one. I do think there's a solution to this—kind of—which dramatically reduces…
One of my "let's try out this vibecoding thing" toy projects was a custom programming language. At the time, I felt like it was my design, which I iterated on through collaborative conversations with Claude. Then I saw someone's Show HN post for their own vibecoded programming language project, and many of the feature bullet points were the same. Maybe it was partly coincidence (all modern PLs have a fair bit of over…
Thats the thing about a normalization system, it is going to normalize outputs because its not built to output uniqueness, its to winnow uniqueness to a baseline. That is good in some instances, assuming that baseline is correct, but it also closes the aperture of human expression.
Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
#60Say someone uses AI, treating it as if it was a developer (probably not recommended today due to the risk of errors), and working and speaking with it as if they were some kind of product manager or senior engineer who only makes architectural decisions etc. I wonder what kind of difference would it really make? Sure the person might not be as good anymore as a developer, but how is this different from being a usual…
Why and how do you think it applies to broader domains?
Children learning in schools should not become product managers. If they are, what exactly is the "product" that they are "managing"? Reducing everything to and looking everything from a corporate viewpoint is bizarre.