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LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

arxiv.org

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Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#121

Post by mitxela »

goatlover wrote: post #65
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.

Memes are inherited. You brush your teeth because your parents do. Memes are subject to selection via biological fitness. The people who didn't brush their teeth died sooner of tooth disease, so those who brushed their teeth had more children. Memes mutate. You don't brush your teeth identically to your parents.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#122

Post by mitxela »

jjk166 wrote: post #64

"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

He was right, we did that and we now have a society organised around writing to remember.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#123

Post by mitxela »

chrononaut wrote: post #119
walt_grata wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im 45, and i can tell you getting a cell phone absolutely destroyed my ability to memorize phone numbers. During the 90s when i was in highschool i has all my friends numbers, parents work numbers, etc... memorized, i only know my parents and wife now. If you don't use a skill, that skill atrophies

> If you don't use a skill, that smo atrophies I don't think the _ability_ to memorize phone numbers is what atrophied here by getting a cell phone. The _need_ did. It's harder to memorize phone numbers today because we lack the practical application of the memory (e.g. only when something fails do we actually try to put that memory to practice). I bet anyone would quickly pick up on memorizing phone numbers if they…

The ability atrophied because it was not practiced because there was no need.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#124

Post by mitxela »

wcfrobert wrote: post #99
jjk166 wrote: post #64

"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

The modern world has way too much content to commit to memory. Our brains would explode. Maybe 2500 years ago it was still possible to functioned as an adult without writing things down.

If we didn't have writing we wouldn't have to memorize that much stuff. The world would probably be worse for it. But that wouldn't have been obvious in Socrates' time.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#125

Post by mitxela »

dented42 wrote: post #57
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…

> 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. What are you talking about? Those are absolutely issues that are being worked on right here, right now. This framing is obviously false.

The large scale capital allocation of our society (I.e. the decisions about what will get done) are not putting many resources into those.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#126

Post by dzink »

When a person spends time with other people, they outsource some of their thinking organically. That’s the efficiency gain in teams. Marriage leads to couples becoming two halves of a shared brain - one person takes on some cognitive load (finances, kids education, etc), while the other takes on another (maybe house issues, taxes, you name it). The load that can be carried with one brain is limited, so merging with others and outsourcing to others feels organic to the brain. LLM create the impression they have the cognitive ability to carry the load, but they don’t have the consistency of memory. You gladly assume you can finally get rid of a task and the model you trusted it to gets swapped under the curtain, or doesn’t train and improve on the task you outsourced, or the inference provider just quantizes it stupid. In the mean time you’ve lost your skill and your task has failed. Yes they feel good on some tasks some of the time, but still very much variably good (even same models different days of week or times of day). That’s closer to gambling and variable rewards than a spouse.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#127

Post by qarl »

chrisjj wrote: post #109
qarl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> In cooking food we loose a great deal of our immunity to parasitic infections ... and eliminate many parasites.

Yes. That's my point.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#128

Post by yogthos »

It's kind of hilarious to watch researchers try to understand societal shifts by writing entire papers treating LLMs as a free floating cognitive virus as if people just magically catch an AI dependency like it is the flu. The authors of the paper completely miss the dialectical relationship between technology and social relations here. The whole shift toward cognitive offloading is driven by changes in the material base the society is built on. Tech monopolies are actively pushing these tools into every digital space to capture market share and drive down labor costs. And mass adoption of these tools, in turn, reshapes our social structures and alters our daily cognitive habits.

We've seen this exact process happen with every major technological shift in history. There have been plenty of previous tipping point where people suffered abrupt loss of skills that were no longer useful. What they forget to mention is that these skills are replaced by new ones which is exactly how human progress functions. We lost the capacity to memorize vast oral epics when we invented writing, and most people today can't do complex manual calculation because of prevalence of computing devices.

It's meaningless to try to understand the changes in the superstructure while ignoring the change in the material base which is the driver behind it.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#129

Post by mitxela »

ragequittah wrote: post #81
dspillett wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I just find it such a fascinating technology. It's finally fun to be a nerd again! For me it's the same feeling as when I was on the internet in the early '90s and was trying to tell people how useful it would be. I don't hold a grudge against anybody who held out until the iPhone came around or whatever it was that got them to finally realize the usefulness, but I still question why it was so hard to convince so man…

Surely this was the case in 2020-2021 when GPT-3 had just come out, not any more. Now it's big corporate business money-taking tech.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#130

Post by mitxela »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #115
ragequittah wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just find it such a fascinating technology. It's finally fun to be a nerd again! For me it's the same feeling as when I was on the internet in the early '90s and was trying to tell people how useful it would be. I don't hold a grudge against anybody who held out until the iPhone came around or whatever it was that got them to finally realize the usefulness, but I still question why it was so hard to convince so man…

> It's finally fun to be a nerd again! I genuinely cannot understand how you can possibly find fun in LLMs. They are poor tools that can't do the things they are claimed to be able to do, they are being shoved down the throat of the entire industry by massive FOMO, and if they ever can actually live up to the hype it's clear that we will all (every human, not just programmers) be out of jobs as the oligarchs replace…

Did you ever get to play AI Dungeon?
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