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AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

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Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#111

Post by amluto »

fl4regun wrote: post #66
amluto wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Isn’t a lot of pretraining done by chopping sources up into short-context-window-sized pieces and then shoving them into the SGD process? The AI-in-training could be entirely incapable of correlating the beginning with the end of the article in its development of its supposed knowledge base.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#112

Post by 0xBA5ED »

dcre wrote: post #89

I've never seen an argument like this that, if true, wouldn't also apply to the cognitive offloading we do by relying on culture, by working with others, or working with the artifacts built by others.

Cognitive offloading via culture has many forms and many of them are not sustainable at all.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#113

Post by DiscourseFan »

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…

As to 2., the whole of this narrative in the Phaedrus is ironic, considering it depends on the written word for its transmission, this dialouge being fully reported by Plato, filled with literary allusion, dramatic setting. Cf. "Plato's Pharmacy," by Derrida, and the work of his student, Bernard Stiegler.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#114

Post by mayankd »

The cognitive effects are going to be so divergent. While the avid learners will learn knowledge and skills on the fly exponentially faster, the populace offloading thinking to the AI models will see unprecedented cognitive decline. This is similar to the effect that the internet had on knowledge retention but this time on critical thinking

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#115

Post by Forgeties79 »

svnt wrote: post #85

It is a quirky article but the author, instead of engaging with information sources to understand what important thoughts people have had about these topics, feels the best thing to do is introduce new terms that other terms already exist for. This is basically just inductive bias plus the AI homogenization idea producing a distribution shift. This is what happens in thought-isolation. It isn’t better than educating…

>This is a benefit if you can use your newfound capacity and free time for something better, which I think most people ultimately will.

I think for a lot of of us the problem is that this is not a given. It’s often promised and rarely occurs, especially in the modern era. Increased productivity usually just means increased demands in the workplace.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#116

Post by lexandstuff »

drusepth wrote: post #108

This is absolutely something to potentially be worried about, but one thing I never see highlighted in critiques of AI-assisted cognition is that some elements of physiology may not actually be biologically necessary if they can be fully supplanted by some replacement (in this case, new tools). I can't traverse as much land on foot as my ancestors did (my muscles are weaker, my endurance is less, etc), but I can trav…

> I can't traverse as much land on foot as my ancestors did, but I can travel further by car/plane/etc

Which is partially how we found ourselves in the midst of an obesity epidemic.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#117

Post by DangitBobby »

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…

We would literally not have access to this criticism without the written word. It would have long been lost to time. And so it is with enumerate other thoughts that happily have been recorded.

Before written word, the uneducated had to just take the words of the (apparently) wise as an authority on all matters, and the only access to their knowledge was through conversation with them. That's gatekeeping and siloing in one go.

And authorities' thoughts themselves often form 2D slices of knowledge once they stop continually updating themselves in the know on SotA. Even if they do keep themselves updated, each conversation you've had with (what a layperson can recollect of it) is a thin 2D slice of that knowledge.

I can think of practically no ways that written expertise is not better.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#118

Post by programjames »

bonesss wrote: post #107
_verandaguy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#119

Post by bigfishrunning »

Lerc wrote: post #103
jbethune wrote: post #19

This 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.

Would you prefer to have: The plumber who turned up leave without fixing the problem, The plumber fixing something that he didn't know how to do by looking up the answer. The plumber attempting to fix something that they didn't know how to do. While it's great to have the plumber who knows how to do everything, they are rare and in high demand, so cost way more than you can afford.

I would prefer to have a plumber with some kind of reference that doesn't just make shit up 10% of the time -- plumbing mistakes are insanely costly (i once owned a house that was destroyed by a plumbing mistake that was made by a previous owner)

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#120

Post by davidkhess »

enraged_camel wrote: post #73
daveguy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if a plumber moves fast and breaks things, I've got shit all over the place.

That, and also the plumber loses their license. So perhaps the solution is professional licensing for software engineers.

I think that's coming regardless. AI just might be the perfect storm to bring the timeline in considerably.
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