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AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

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Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#61

Post by pixl97 »

jessetemp wrote: post #26
dfee wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which part of being a plumber? Was the house installed with something non-typical? Would you rather have them take an additional 30 minutes looking up their technical manual?

Without further knowledge of what was going on it's hard to say why they used ChatGPT.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#62

Post by butlike »

zozbot234 wrote: post #12

At 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…

It's just a story. Doesn't mean it's wise.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#63

Post by hibikir »

palmotea wrote: post #25
zozbot234 wrote: post #12

At 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…

That's quite the uncharitable view. Let's try a better one.

Changes on what humans need to remember what to do have, for as far as we have written records, changed the skills humans hone over time. They change our fitness function. Some of those changes are bad for a while, and then get better. Others are just far better at all times. Others might get rejected. Either way, it takes a long time before we know what the technology does to us: See how cheap printing is directly linked to wars of religion.

So it's not that AI could not be bad in the short run, or even in the long run: It appears to be the kind of technology where one cannot evaluate without significant adoption, and at that poing, we are in this rollercoaster for a while whether we want it or not. See social media, or just political innovation, like liberal democracy or communism. We can make guesses, but many guesses made early on look ridiculous in hindsight, like someone complaining about humans relying on writing.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#64

Post by quirkot »

tbrownaw wrote: post #46
palmotea wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

Writings are fixed once written, and don't update themselves as the world changes. Writings are subject to known biases such as publication bias, and so relying on them reduces the range of what you can consider. Therefore, writing is bad for the same reasons that this post thinks that AI is bad.

[dead]

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#65

Post by layer8 »

chunky1994 wrote: post #8

Does 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.

Most users probably don’t ask themselves the question and simply are unwittingly affected by how the model happens to be wired.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#66

Post by fl4regun »

amluto wrote: post #11
chunky1994 wrote: post #8

Does 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.

Why do you expect web search tool calls to continue to be useful in the presence of modern AI slop farms, AI-assisted SEO, and search engines largely turning themselves into AI-based question-answering engines? (At present, Gemini's question-answering capability (which Google kind of makes its users use) seems extremely error-prone -- much worse than competing LLMs when asked the same question.)

I agree with you, this is a huge concern, and we are still in an age where most content on the internet isn't ai generated yet. What about 10 years from now? We have many instances of people writing posts on reddit or uploading videos and blogs using AI generated text. What happens when that is a significant percentage of content?

I recently saw a video discussing a researcher who published a fake scientific article about a fictitious disease, with bogus author names, even a warning IN the article itself that stated "This is not a real disease, this article is not real" (paraphrasing) but still AI ended up picking up this article and serving information from it as if it was a real disease.

It even got cited in papers (which were later redacted of course), but the fact those papers got published in the first place is a serious issue.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#68

Post by layer8 »

user3939382 wrote: post #36
zozbot234 wrote: post #12

At 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…

This is actually a great criticism. Post Enlightenment we’ve come to worship the written word as a source of truth. It’s not. Thoughts, wisdom, understanding, exist primarily (and by necessity primarily) as a continuous structure in our minds. By writing, we distill and collapse this rich continuous structure into a discrete 2D slice. It’s portable which has many benefits but we tend to forget that this written word…

On the other hand, books allow us to access a much broader selection of ideas than would otherwise be feasible.

I’m not sure where LLMs lie on that spectrum. They allow faster access, but it also feels more limited.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#69

Post by AlecSchueler »

gallerdude wrote: post #41
palmotea wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

1. You can't understand the nuances, but there is a general pattern: new inventions may make us slightly less proficient at specifics, yet more powerful overall 2. Imagine a hunter gatherer is time travelled to 2026. You have lunch go to a cafe with him, and he learns that food is cheap, delicious, and abundant. He sees your house, and thinks it's amazing compared to his cave. He thinks that 2026 must be absolute par…

Alternatively he sees that you live in your house alone and feel lonely all the time. Maybe you have a small family and a few friends but it's nothing compared to the tribal life he knows.

He sees you spend your day working but rarely get to go outside or do anything active. Even when you're not working you sit behind a desk staring at a screen.

He wonders why you bother will all the technology when it made your life worse. Is he right?

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#70

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

One thing that's always been true with human communication that is becoming increasingly obvious to me through my interactions with LLMs is the art of asking a good question.

The framing of questions massively affects the results you get from discussion with humans, and I'd argue it's even more pronounced with LLMs.

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