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Left behind in corruption?
LLMs as a Cognitive Virus
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Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus
#72"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
offloading thinking is a little/lottle bit different than writing to preserve your thoughts versus memorization. it's more analogous to skipping the writing, plugging your ears, and closing your eyes, while you wait for the answer to be presented before you.
Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus
#73Earlier 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?
I’ve encountered several people now who consult LLMs constantly for nearly every decision. Some proportion of people will absolutely cede their thinking to these things, and some already have.
Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus
#74The 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 predi…
I agree, eventually, but LLMs aren’t there quite yet. There are what, maybe 10 million distinct agents in the wild today? 100 million or a billion if we’re being charitable.
At the time being, the vast vast majority of those agents are all trained on the same or similar training set (the Internet and books). Which makes them mostly all the same. Vastly less diverse than the way one complex lifeform hatches out of the egg vs another.
So 1 billion mostly redundant agents at most. Well there are 40 quadrillion ants on the planet and 5 trillion are born every day. Each one its own “agent” , ingesting different inputs and being its own complex sum greater than its parts.
And that’s just ants.
Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're specifically not using the term "virus" pejoratively, but rather distinguishing the social mechanism LLMs seem to have from something as simple as a "meme".
Contagion probably is more accurate.
Ah yes, the cognito-hazards.
We've created new SCPs.
Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus
#76I think there's aspects of this viewpoint that are true. I'm sure I'm less skilled at programming now in some ways than when I started using LLMs, but I'm a lot more productive and I can work on a broader variety of software than I could before. Writing probably weakened people's auditory memory, and calculators probably reduced people's mental math skills, but I don't think either are a net negative. It just requires some adjustment to get used to the new way things are. I also think my programming skills would come back pretty quick if I started programming without LLMs again, just as my leetcode skills come back pretty quick when I prepare for interviews.
Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I’ve encountered several people now who consult LLMs constantly for nearly every decision. Some proportion of people will absolutely cede their thinking to these things, and some already have.
To be fair - I know several people for whom this would be an improvement.
Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus
#78I feel the premise of this research is wrong, or at least the synopsis phrasing. Smart people like learning. Now we just learn more interesting things. Weekend me before LLMs: Maybe I’ll chip away at that dependency injection library I’ve been working on. If I spend most of the day I could improve the user facing test framework. Weekend me after LLMs: Let’s continue work to get Claude Code running in WebXR on a Quest…
Kinda funny how the "more interesting things" after LLMs example are mostly fiddling with Claude Code itself. Reminds me of when someone says they ship 60k lines of code every day now and when asked for an example, it's a labyrinth of custom CLI tools, skills, MCPs and build pipelines for their OpenClaw setup.
Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus
#79"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
offloading thinking is a little/lottle bit different than writing to preserve your thoughts versus memorization. it's more analogous to skipping the writing, plugging your ears, and closing your eyes, while you wait for the answer to be presented before you.
This offloading was present even with pre-LLM googling. Sufficiently powerful search allows you to forget enough of the story to rely on imprecise recall. This is a form of thought atrophy.
I think this is probably what Socrates meant. He wasn't wrong, it's just that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
Even the "calculators make you forget how to do math" people seem antiquarian to me. But I totally get it when people talk about googling, and AI is another step change in the wrong direction.
To follow that arc backwards in time, maybe Socrates was right after all.
Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus
#80This "cognitive virus" is pretty similar to the original sense of the word "meme" as concieved by Dawkins.