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LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

arxiv.org

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41–50 of 202 posts

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#41

Post by camgunz »

dvt wrote: post #35

I just don't see that the main thrust of their argument, (oversimplified) "humans will become so dependent on AI, they'll become dumb," holds any water. I mean even from an evolutionary standpoint, intelligence is (by far) our most valuable competitive advantage. Arguing that "cognitive offloading" (their term) will have runaway effects is reaching to say the least. It's like saying that moving from manual-labor-inte…

> humans, on average, are healthier and live longer than ever in human history.

Kinda. We also have incredible rates of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes.

While I do mostly buy that the mind and the body are connected, I don't think being able to bench press 250lbs is a necessary, fundamentally human capability. I do think being able to think is. Literally Rene Descartes cogito ergo sum. If we lose cognition, executive function, analysis, skepticism, etc., I don't think we're human anymore.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#42

Post by IshKebab »

SoStupid wrote: post #29

The wording alone is just so Idiocracy . What our descendants will think when they look back on this time period. They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living, they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others. They wondered whether or not a word calculator was the antichrist. They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant min…

I sort of agree with you... The trouble is your logic is trivially obviously nonsense.

"Word calculator", "linear algebra"... This is just a variation on it's just a stochastic parrot / it's just a next token predictor.

The implication is that because it is "just" this simple-sounding thing, it can't be a complex thing! Except we know empirically that that doesn't hold. What are humans if not "just" next action predictors, "just" a collection of simple atoms, "just" electrical impulses? Yet clearly we are more than the sum of our parts. There no reason to believe dirty water can be more than the sum of its parts but weird sand can't.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#44

Post by [deleted] »

Murfalo wrote: post #19

I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from). There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cult…

[deleted]

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#45

Post by camgunz »

qarl2 wrote: post #16

Ok... but are automobiles also a virus? Because we've become dependent on them? Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage? What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.

No, because walking around or eating raw food wasn't essential to being human. Thinking is.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#46

Post by Muromec »

Murfalo wrote: post #19

I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from). There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cult…

Our enlightened ideas and their dangerously agitating propaganda (literally a virus).

The framing of something as a disease is itself slightly into the fascist territory.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#47

Post by Muromec »

SoStupid wrote: post #29

The wording alone is just so Idiocracy . What our descendants will think when they look back on this time period. They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living, they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others. They wondered whether or not a word calculator was the antichrist. They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant min…

>whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon.

It's important to make sure it in fact doesn't, otherwise there is nobody to throw a shade on our time capsule having the benefit of hindsight

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#48

Post by tosapple »

dspillett wrote: post #27
Suhinnall27 wrote: post #14

LLMs are both a blessing and a curse, they magnificent tools for those who know how to employ them , but a crutch for those who rely on them.

And like a cult to those of us preferring not to engage, for whatever reason, with everyone and their dog telling us that we should (and sometimes getting quite offended, like our refusal to play that game is a personal attack on them for choosing to).

they're the undead, fed by the slough of our skin.

greed malice pestilence lust envy...

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#50

Post by qarl »

FailMore wrote: post #37
qarl2 wrote: post #16

Ok... but are automobiles also a virus? Because we've become dependent on them? Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage? What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.

Hmm maybe it always feels "different" to every generation going through automation of something previously un-automated, but don't you feel that to some extent this is different. Humans have been the dominant species because of our ability to think, not our ability to get from A to B in any particular way/cook food. If we abstract ~the bulk of our thinking to LLMs, don't we lose something as a species which makes us…

In cooking food we lose a great deal of our immunity to parasitic infections. Cooking food absolutely does make us more vulnerable to uncooked food.

> Or is it always the case during an automation?

Obviously. Any time we make a useful discovery and begin using it, we become dependent on using it.

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