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MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

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Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#231

Post by elAhmo »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #204
CuriouslyC wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're just moving up the abstraction ladder, like we did with compilers. I don't care about the individual lines of code, I care about architecture, code structure, rigorous automated e2e tests, contracts with comprehensive validation, etc. Rather than waste a bunch of time pouring over agent PRs I just make them jump over extremely high static/analytic hurdles that guarantee functionality, then my only job is to ide…

> We're just moving up the abstraction ladder, like we did with compilers. We're not because you have to still check every outputted code. You didn't have to check every compilation step of a compiler. It was testable actual code, not non-deterministic output from English language input

I would bet a significant amount of money that many LLM users don’t check the output. And as tools improve, this will only increase.

The number of users actually checking the output of a compiler is nonexistent. You just trust it.

LLMs are moving that direction, whether we like it or not

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#232

Post by squigz »

benterix wrote: post #173
goalieca wrote: post #164

Anecdote here, but when I was in grad school, I was talking to a PhD student i respected a lot. Whenever he read a paper, he would try to write the code out and get it working. I would take a couple of months but he could whip it up in a few days. He explained to me that it was just practice and the more you practice the better you become. He not only coded things quickly, he started analyzing papers quicker too and…

We are literally witnessing the skills split right in front of our eyes: (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it and implement them in code at any level, and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly lose that capability. For now the difference between these two populations is not that pronounced yet but give it a couple of years.

The loss of expertise does not mean the loss of a need for expertise. We'll still need experts. We'll also still need people who are... not experts. To that point...

> For now the difference between these two populations is not that pronounced yet but give it a couple of years.

There are lots and lots of programmers and other IT people who make a living that I wouldn't say fall into your first bucket.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#233

Post by KoolKat23 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #110
tomrod wrote: post #20

A few things to note. 1. This is arxiv - before publication or peer review. Grain of salt.[0] 2. 18 participants per cohort 3. 54 participants total Given the low N and the likelihood that this is drawn from 18-22 year olds attending MIT, one should expect an uphill battle for replication and for generalizability. Further, they are brain scanning during the experiment, which is an uncomfortable/out-of-the-norm experi…

The other thing to note is "AI" is being used in place of LLMs. AI is a lot of things, I would be surprised to find out that generating images, video and audio would lead to cognitive decline. What I think LLMs might lead to is intellectual laziness, why memorize or remember something if the LLM can remember it type of thing.

I'd say the framing is wrong. Do we call delivery drivers lazy because they take the highway rather than the backroads? Or because they drive the goods there rather than walk? They're missing out on all that traffic intersection experience.

Perhaps the issue of cognitive decline comes from sitting there vegetating rather applying themselves during all that additional spare time.

Although my experience has been perhaps different using LLM's, my mind still tires at work. I'm still having to think on the bigger questions, it's just less time spent on the grunt work.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#234

Post by card_zero »

elAhmo wrote: post #221
blibble wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can count the amount of times in my 20 year career that I've had to look at compiler generated assembly on one finger and I've never looked at the machine code produced by an assembler (other than when I wrote my own as a toy project) is the same true of LLM usage? absolutely not and it never will be, because it's not an abstraction

It is an abstraction. Just because you end up looking at what the prompt looks like “under the hood” in whichever language it produced the output, doesn’t mean every user does. Similar as with assembly, you might have not taken a look at it, but there are people that do and could argue the same thing as you. The lines will be very blurry in the near future.

I can fart in the general direction of the code and that's a kind of abstraction too. It distills my intent down to a simple raspberry noise which could then be interpreted by sufficiently intelligent software.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#235

Post by aprilthird2021 »

prewett wrote: post #229
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t see how this isn’t a _better_ era for people who want to develop a deep understanding of something. Same way a phone in your pocket gives you the world's compiled information available in a moment. But that's generally led to loneliness, isolation, social upheaval, polarization, and huge spread of wrong information. If you can handle the negatives is a big if. Even the smartest of our professional class are…

You conflated two things. Availability to the world's information did not produce loneliness, etc., that was availability of social networks designed for engagement^Waddiction on that same device that did. You don't need to install FB et all on your phone.

Again, most people have FB on their phone. The vast majority of people will not be like snowflake HN anecdotes who claim to only get the positives and not the negatives of technology

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#236

Post by tuesdaynight »

codyb wrote: post #188
vonneumannstan wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think the "just tweak the prompts bro" people are missing out on learning. Alternatively they're just learning/building intuition for something else. The level of abstraction is moving upwards. I don't know why people don't seem to grok that the level of the current models is the floor, not the ceiling. Despite the naysayers like Gary Marcus, there is in fact no sign of scaling or progress slowing down at all on A…

Really? No signs of slowing down? A year or two ago when LLMs popped on the scene my coworkers would say "Look at how great this is, I can generate test cases". Now my coworkers are saying "I can still generate test cases! And if I'm _really pacificcccc_, I can get it to generate small functions too!". It seems to have slowed down considerably, but maybe that's just me.

Sorry for the bluntness, but you sound like you have a lot of opinions about LLM performance for someone who says that doesn't use them. It's okay if you are against them, but if have used them 3 years ago, you have no idea if there were improvements or not.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#237

Post by joenot443 »

blibble wrote: post #202
CuriouslyC wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're just moving up the abstraction ladder, like we did with compilers. I don't care about the individual lines of code, I care about architecture, code structure, rigorous automated e2e tests, contracts with comprehensive validation, etc. Rather than waste a bunch of time pouring over agent PRs I just make them jump over extremely high static/analytic hurdles that guarantee functionality, then my only job is to ide…

I can count the amount of times in my 20 year career that I've had to look at compiler generated assembly on one finger and I've never looked at the machine code produced by an assembler (other than when I wrote my own as a toy project) is the same true of LLM usage? absolutely not and it never will be, because it's not an abstraction

"SwiftUI red circle with a white outline 100px"

``` Circle() .fill(Color.red) .overlay( Circle().stroke(Color.white, lineWidth: 4) ).frame(width: 100, height: 100) ```

Is the mapping 1:1 and completely lossless? Of course not, I'd say the former is most definitely a sort of abstraction of the latter, and one would be being disingenuous to pretend it's not.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#238

Post by zingababba »

goalieca wrote: post #164

Anecdote here, but when I was in grad school, I was talking to a PhD student i respected a lot. Whenever he read a paper, he would try to write the code out and get it working. I would take a couple of months but he could whip it up in a few days. He explained to me that it was just practice and the more you practice the better you become. He not only coded things quickly, he started analyzing papers quicker too and…

I just decided to take a break from LLMs for coding assistance a couple days ago. Feels really good. It's funny how fast I am when I just understand the code myself instead of not understanding it and proooompting.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#239

Post by chaps »

benterix wrote: post #218
chaps wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it and implement them in code at any level, and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly loose that capability. ...is it really only going to be these two? No middle ground, gradient, or possibly even a trichotomous variation of your split? > loose that capability You mean "lose". ;)

Well, in real life you always have a gradient (or, more usually, a normal distribution) - actually it would be interesting to understand what the actual distribution is and how it changes with time.

It would! I'd be very interested in seeing the shape and outliers. Like, are there some folk who actually see improvements? Or who don't see any brain reprogramming at all? Do different methods of interacting with these systems have the same reprogramming effect? etc etc

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#240

Post by crinkly »

goalieca wrote: post #164

Anecdote here, but when I was in grad school, I was talking to a PhD student i respected a lot. Whenever he read a paper, he would try to write the code out and get it working. I would take a couple of months but he could whip it up in a few days. He explained to me that it was just practice and the more you practice the better you become. He not only coded things quickly, he started analyzing papers quicker too and…

Good to hear. I will add that not everyone who writes a paper expects anyone to read a paper with that level of diligence and it can lead to some interesting outcomes for the paper authors over time.

Keep up the good work is all I can say!

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