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LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

arxiv.org

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Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#61

Post by pixl97 »

qarl2 wrote: post #36
pixl97 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ok... but are automobiles also a virus? Yes. >Because we've become dependent on them? Because we're burning the planet down with them. >Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage? Yes, because in places we do people enjoy higher qualities of life and happiness. Along with things like health improvement from doing more excersize. >What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cookin…

Don't straw man me. My question was not about processed food. My question was about cooking food. Is cooking food a virus? Should we facilitate reversibility in our food cooking?

Well, do you consider humans a virus like entity that's taken over a planet and is trying to spread to another?

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#62

Post by qarl »

tripleee wrote: post #53
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.

I'm not sure what the point you're making is. We're in the midst of figuring out what the tradeoffs are of LLM usage - all the things you list are already mostly known and found worth it. You trade a tiny amount of time and fuel to cook food in exchange for not getting sick. How is that relevant to anything?

> I'm not sure what the point you're making is.

I'm making the point that the viral sensationalism in this article can be equally applied to automobiles, computer, telephones, calculators, and toothbrushes.

If the article had merely been what you said "is AI worth the cost" then I would not have taken issue with it.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#63

Post by tripleee »

canjobear wrote: post #54
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.

> What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food. In evolutionary time, we lost the ability to digest raw meat because we offloaded so much of process of the digestion to the cultural technology of cooking. Do you like the looks of a future where that happens but for thinking?

Even if AI were superhuman at all thinking tasks, that doesn't mean we'd lose our abilities.

Chess and games can be a lot more demanding than a lot of people's work lives - and AI is already superhuman there.

The heaviest thing I need to lift in my daily life is a laptop and yet I've gotten significantly stronger over the last few years from strength training.

If AI took over all the boring but hard things I'm required to do it'd free up lots of time for me to spend thinking about things, and solve problems I find more interesting.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#64

Post by jjk166 »

"If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."

-Socrates

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#65

Post by goatlover »

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…

Wasn't aware that memes were an accepted part of evolutionary biology. They're not inherited like genes through reproduction that are subject to natural selection via biological fitness. Or any other evolutionary mechanism.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#66

Post by qarl »

pixl97 wrote: post #61
qarl2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't straw man me. My question was not about processed food. My question was about cooking food. Is cooking food a virus? Should we facilitate reversibility in our food cooking?

Well, do you consider humans a virus like entity that's taken over a planet and is trying to spread to another?

You continue to refuse to answer the question in my argument. I am not inclined to answer yours, nor do I see the point of it.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#67

Post by LoganDark »

camgunz wrote: post #41
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 cognit…

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

To me, this is kinda like saying we have incredible rates of autism. While technically true, the science is still fairly new, so we simply don't have very much historical data. In all likelihood there isn't a sudden epidemic of autism, only improvements to how it's diagnosed.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#68

Post by chrisjj »

qarl wrote: post #58
canjobear wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food. In evolutionary time, we lost the ability to digest raw meat because we offloaded so much of process of the digestion to the cultural technology of cooking. Do you like the looks of a future where that happens but for thinking?

Do you truly believe that AI will prevent people from thinking? It seems clear to me that people will continue to think, but in different ways. I hate to bring this analogy up again, but it seems impossible to escape: did losing the ability to do long division really impact humanity?

> Do you truly believe that AI will prevent people from thinking?

It is already relieving people of need for thinking. Today the need; tomorrow the ability.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#69

Post by goatlover »

pixl97 wrote: post #61
qarl2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't straw man me. My question was not about processed food. My question was about cooking food. Is cooking food a virus? Should we facilitate reversibility in our food cooking?

Well, do you consider humans a virus like entity that's taken over a planet and is trying to spread to another?

Not anymore than ants or any other species that's spread across the planet. A virus is something co-opts the replication machinery of a host to make more copies. That's not what humans do.

Since this idea may have come from the first Matrix movie, it's ironic that the character who espoused the idea, Agent Smith, became an actual virus in the 2nd and third movies.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#70

Post by satrerer »

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…

If any alien is picking up the text we are generating they must conclude that people in 2026 spend most of their time at the library reading philosophy and having these salons of enlightened reasoned debate if they are so worried about the atrophy of their thinking by LLMs. They don't send electronic communication at the salons or library and are really concerned when they get out with the loss of the culture and thinking they currently have. That is how they are explaining the hysteria they see in the text.

They certainly would never guess that the text is being generated by people who mostly spend their time sending and receiving text/video of unthinking, brain rotting, bullshit all day and night.

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