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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

#241

Post by joenot443 »

card_zero wrote: post #234
elAhmo wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sort of like when people argue about "what is art?", some folks find it clever to come up with the most bizarre of examples to point to, as if the entire concept rests on the existence of its members at the fringe.

Personally, I think if your farts are an abstraction that you can derive useful meaning from the mapping, who are we to tell you no?

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

#242

Post by chaps »

card_zero wrote: post #234
elAhmo wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could you please expand on this thought? I'm curious where this abstraction's inflection points are.

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

#243

Post by KoolKat23 »

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

It's still early stages, that is why.

It is not yet good enough or there is not yet sufficient trust. Also there are still resources allocated to checking the code.

I saw a post yesterday showing Brave browser's new tab using 70mb of RAM in the background. I'm very sure there's code there that can be optimized, but who gives a shit. It's splitting hairs and our computers are powerful enough now that it doesn't matter.

Immateriality has abstracted that particular few line codes away.

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

#244

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

> These days, I'm fairly senior and don't touch code much anymore but I find it really really instructive to get my hands dirty and struggle through new code and ideas. I think the "just tweak the prompts bro" people are missing out on learning.

If you just use prompts and don't actually read the output, and figure out why it worked, and why it works, you will never get better. But if you take the time to understand why it works, you will be better for it, and might not even bother asking next time.

I've said it before, but when I first started using Firefox w/ autocorrect in like 2005, I made it a point to learn to spell from it, so that over time I would make less typos. English is my second language, so its always been an uphill battle for me despite having a native American English accent. Autocorrect on Firefox helped me tremendously.

I can use LLMs to plunge into things I'm afraid of trying out due to impostor syndrome and get more done sooner and learn on the way there. I think the key thing is to use tools correctly.

AI is like the limitless drug to a degree, you have an insane fountain of knowledge at your fingertips, you just need to use it wisely and learn from it.

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

#245

Post by stackskipton »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #44
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…

>These 54 participants were between the ages of 18 to 39 years old (age M = 22.9, SD = 1.69) and all recruited from the following 5 universities in greater Boston area: MIT (14F, 5M), Wellesley (18F), Harvard (1N/A, 7M, 2 Non-Binary), Tufts (5M), and Northeastern (2M) (Figure 3). 35 participants reported pursuing undergraduate studies and 14 postgraduate studies. 6 participants either finished their studies with MSc…

I'd love to see much more diverse selection of schools. All of these schools are extremely selective so you are looking at extremely selective slice of the population.

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

#246

Post by ergonaught »

No idea whether this holds up, but the human body is all about conditioning and maximizing energy efficiency, so it should at least be unsurprising if true.

My vehicle has a number of self-driving capabilities. When I used them, my brain rapidly stopped attending to the functions I'd given over, to the extent that there was a "gap" before I noticed it was about to do the wrong thing. On resumption of performing that work myself, it was almost as if I had forgotten some elements of it for a moment while my brain sorted it out.

No real reason to think that outsourcing our thinking/writing/etc will cause our brains to respond any differently. Most of the "reasoned" arguments I see against that idea seem based on false equivalences.

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

#247

Post by stuartjohnson12 »

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #228
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…

As the other comment said, LLMs are not an abstraction. An abstraction is a deterministic, pure function, than when given A always returns B. This allows the consumer to rely on the abstraction. This reliance frees up the consumer from having to implement the A->B, thus allowing it to move up the ladder. LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic. Probabilistic is NOT deterministic. Which means the consumer is neve…

It's delegation then.

We can use different words if you like (and I'm not convinced that delegation isn't colloquially a form of abstraction) but you can't control the world by controlling the categories.

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

#248

Post by CuriouslyC »

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #228
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…

As the other comment said, LLMs are not an abstraction. An abstraction is a deterministic, pure function, than when given A always returns B. This allows the consumer to rely on the abstraction. This reliance frees up the consumer from having to implement the A->B, thus allowing it to move up the ladder. LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic. Probabilistic is NOT deterministic. Which means the consumer is neve…

Ok, let's call it a stochastic transformation over abstraction spaces. It's basically sampling from the set of deterministic transformations given the priors established by the prompt.

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

#249

Post by __loam »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #189
benterix wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Leakiest abstraction of all time.

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

#250

Post by Phemist »

card_zero wrote: post #234
elAhmo wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The final result of course depending on how many r's there are in the raspberry.
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