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GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

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Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#21

Post by f0e4c2f7 »

cerol wrote: post #16

Am I the only one who thinks this is a really bad idea? By offloading your cognitive tasks to an AI, even though you now look smarter, you're becoming dumber in the long run, because you're never really challeging and exercising your intelect. This book[1] goes into a lot of detail about how rote memorization and recall is essential to critical thinking (you have a limited working memory, and the way by which you're…

You can still seek challenge, it just has to be more ambitious and further out at the edges now.

A challenge closer to leading a team of researchers rather than plugging along alone at a problem.

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#22

Post by macrolime »

"Over the next year or two, I expect GPT-4 and its successors to become a copilot for the mind: a digital research assistant that will bring to bear the sum total of everything you’ve read, everything you’ve thought, and everything you’ve forgotten every time you touch a keyboard. "

I'm not sure everybody is comfortable with handing over all that to Microsoft or other tech giants. Would you be comfortable letting facebook have video cameras in all the rooms of your house? If not, then why let Microsoft get all your emails, browsing history and everything else you have on your computer.

Letting some AI, that is controlled by some megacorp, know and control everything about your life, isn't necessarily the best idea.

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#23

Post by jmull »

> It will bring back the ideas, quotes, and memories you need, when you need them most, with no organizing, tagging, or linking required. It will work as a personalized extension of your intelligence available 24/7 at the touch of a button.

How can people come to this conclusion after using chatgpt?

(1) Its responses are often good but they are routinely wrong as well.

(2) Search engines already do these things, without the same loss of fidelity.

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#24

Post by tpmx »

cerol wrote: post #16

Am I the only one who thinks this is a really bad idea? By offloading your cognitive tasks to an AI, even though you now look smarter, you're becoming dumber in the long run, because you're never really challeging and exercising your intelect. This book[1] goes into a lot of detail about how rote memorization and recall is essential to critical thinking (you have a limited working memory, and the way by which you're…

Counterpoint/related: LLMs penalize those who spent most of their education memorizing things/doing rote learning and encourage actual thinking.

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#25

Post by [deleted] »

cerol wrote: post #16

Am I the only one who thinks this is a really bad idea? By offloading your cognitive tasks to an AI, even though you now look smarter, you're becoming dumber in the long run, because you're never really challeging and exercising your intelect. This book[1] goes into a lot of detail about how rote memorization and recall is essential to critical thinking (you have a limited working memory, and the way by which you're…

[deleted]

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#26

Post by meitham »

cerol wrote: post #16

Am I the only one who thinks this is a really bad idea? By offloading your cognitive tasks to an AI, even though you now look smarter, you're becoming dumber in the long run, because you're never really challeging and exercising your intelect. This book[1] goes into a lot of detail about how rote memorization and recall is essential to critical thinking (you have a limited working memory, and the way by which you're…

I agree with you. In a more extreme example, I wish I never offload my address book to my phone, I can hardly remember a single phone number in my head now!

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#27

Post by danwee »

For me this would work only on a "work" setting. Like, if I'm being paid to perform some tasks, then I want to be able to use tech like "a copilot for my mind". But outside it, I would rather prefer not. If you come to my party using such copilot and start to quote nice books always in the right time, and tell really good jokes and all, well, what can I say, you won't surprise me at all. I actually wouldn't like you in my party.

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#29

Post by lysecret »

I am extremely bullish on this. I use ChatGPT every day. I am learning at a rate that I haven‘t in years and I love it, the pure fact I can ask follow up question or ask it to shorten things. This is the core problem of learning: I already know this I am bored, I can‘t understand this now. For the first: Hey ChatGPT sum this up for me, for the second hey ChatGPT give me more examples, set this in relation to this. I am soo excited for the future.

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#30

Post by lordnacho »

cerol wrote: post #16

Am I the only one who thinks this is a really bad idea? By offloading your cognitive tasks to an AI, even though you now look smarter, you're becoming dumber in the long run, because you're never really challeging and exercising your intelect. This book[1] goes into a lot of detail about how rote memorization and recall is essential to critical thinking (you have a limited working memory, and the way by which you're…

If you think of cognitive tasks as a hierarchy it makes more sense. It's a big task to think through and plan an essay, but it's a little cognitive task to check your grammar and citations. If you can get an LLM to do the little things, you can practice the higher level stuff.

I guess the question is whether you are actually learning the higher level stuff by getting help with the lower level stuff. I think on some level you would, like how having a calculator when you're doing higher level math helps you think about the problem rather than the details.

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