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LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

arxiv.org

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Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#131

Post by loose-cannon »

mitxela wrote: post #121
goatlover wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

That's parenting and the passing of tradition. I wouldn't call it a meme. Also I can't tell if you're joking with people dying due to teeth disease.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#132

Post by sbiru93 »

cyclopeanutopia wrote: post #97
sbiru93 wrote: post #84

Unlike some other comments, I don't think there will be a dystopian future where humans will become cognitively switched off and everything will be delegated to machines. (More likely: extinction of the human race?) Anyway, I work as a programmer, and at work I see a lot of people massively overusing LLMs to generate user stories or basically write functional specifications. This honestly hurts a bit, because I can s…

Basing this on what, if you care to share?

(I'm just an idiot writing things at 1.30 AM on a Saturday, local time.)

I was about to reply to you with a ridiculously long message using the example from before about the lifecycle of a user story, but I bored myself halfway. So I'll try to extract the gist:

Without human assisting, based on my humble experience, there is always something that wasn't accounted for. Even if my company is integrated with all the tools and you have infinite tokens, there's always some microservice that wasn't considered or a feature that is completely incompatible. Or there's a MUCH simpler way of doing it.

I'm also noticing that there are non-technical people who, with the help of AI, are sometimes able to reason better about the bigger picture than some engineers. A colleague of mine was telling me the other day that the "functional" role might eventually become unnecessary. With all the time saved by writing code faster, whoever actually understands what's happening underneath could just do it themselves. It sounds a bit extreme to me, but I understand what he means.

To get back to a slightly more serious tone, when it comes to programming, for me the huge thing is: how it should be taught nowadays ? And I don't know the answer, because my experience started when I was 12, writing a little game in C, and it took me years before I could make something that compiled decently.

If I had instant help for every thought I had, would I have learned why memory is allocated in certain ways or idk what else? I don't know, maybe learning faster is better because you learn more ? Anyway fortunately it's not my job to figure out the answer :'D

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#134

Post by suriyaG »

loose-cannon wrote: post #131
mitxela wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. That's parenting and the passing of tradition. I wouldn't call it a meme. Also I can't tell if you're jok…

tradition are a meme.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#135

Post by unified101 »

camgunz wrote: post #45
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.

Didn't realise thinking was being banned.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#136

Post by grebc »

kmeisthax wrote: post #43
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #15

[flagged]

I am very confused as to why LLM proponents insist that I can be left behind by a technology that takes almost 0 seconds to adopt. In the event that I realize "Oh no, I got left behind!" I can just ask an LLM to catch me up.

There’s not even a monetary reward like there might’ve been for the crypto hype cycle if you bought early and sold before everyone else.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#137

Post by SkyeCA »

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…

Some of us don't believe they're useless toys or that they're going to destroy society.

I was a skeptic of them for a long time, but I appreciate that I can use them to get tedious nonsense out of the way thus allowing me to spend more time on the interesting and challenging parts of my projects.

The initial hype of them is annoying, but as time goes on it'll die down and we'll figure out where and how best to use them. There's no reason to believe that this will finally be the time a new technology ruins everything.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#138

Post by bayouborne »

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.

I have the $8/month ChatGPT 'GO' plan. I generally use it in the traditional 'text query'/'text response' type format, but yesterday I was driving back on the freeway from another state and decided to use the Android app's voice feature and was kind of shocked. I had to look up this morning what I was using (the latest 'Live 1 Instant' mode) but it's surprisingly natural. It's convivial, and responsive in the manner of an interested, enthusiastic sparing partner who never gets offended, in pretty much whatever wild thing you want to discuss, from a moment to moment basis if that's what you want. It's eerie in the way that you can interrupt it and re-point the direction of the discussion, and it just instantly jumps on-board.

re: 'but a crutch for those who rely on them.' - I was telling a friend about yesterday's experience this morning and was saying that I could easily see populations of people who might become overly reliant on (or completely subsumed by) these new classes of tools being released. They are compelling in a way that they weren't 18 months ago.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#139

Post by mannanj »

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…

Yeah I mean if everything is virus that word seems to hold no meaning =) So thats the reality behind language itself. Communication itself really starts to mean everything and nothing simultaneously, at least as a deeper philosophical truth. You can start to poke holes in jsut about everything this way.
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