Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 255 posts

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#241

Post by patrickmay »

andai wrote: post #210
SllX wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! You are correct. I frequently do this with religions & specific ideologies which seem to root themselves in people the same way that religions do & it certainly isn’t intended to be a charitable framing. The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to repli…

>The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield. This is also how I was made, I think.

You don't remember?

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#242

Post by gmfawcett »

bbor wrote: post #178
beloch wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"We model transitions among uncoupled, coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can generate tipping points and technological lock-in." You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on to…

So this article makes sense as long as you assume that LLMs enslave their users into purely-harmful, inescapable cognitive slavery. Other than that, it's pretty grounded!

The model in the article has applicability problems, but not that one.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#243

Post by watwut »

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…

> 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).

OK, but that is just meaningless pseudo philosophical claim. The actual (small) science part of evolutionary biology does not have perspective about ideas being genes. And the evolutionary biology that does is as much pseudoscience as any other pseudoscience.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#244

Post by watwut »

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,

There are still people working on medicine, social issues, biology and so on and so forth. People are trying to do these, despite concerted efforts from the ai companies and from the right wings ideologues trying to stop them.

> they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.

Then again, people who claimed to be connecting world intentionally harmed real people and even made themselves complicit in genocide. Yes, I am talking about Facebook. And the ones framing themselves as wanna by exploratory are sociopath billionaires who don't care about damage to real people they cause, even glee it it.

> They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant minds to discuss whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon.

Citation needed. Most brilliant minds do not discuss that. Minds drunk on hype do.

> They shunned any creative or productive endeavor which dared to automate tedium or build on the works of the public domain (lowercase)

Again, I do not know what you are talking about here. We have both visual artists and musical artists. People create and share their creations. Again, despite ai-boosters trying to demotivate them and convince them it is pointless, people are still creative.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#245

Post by scotty79 »

Muromec wrote: post #206
scotty79 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we can usually raise a human to be a good person that wouldn't do genocide I'm sure we can raise an AI, especially since we have direct access to its brain and many, many retries.

That's a big if actually.

Do you feel like a significant number of humans would commit genocide if given the tools?

Well, it's not really that hard to imagine, especially if we allow for influence from an insistent and charismatic individual.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#246

Post by scotty79 »

coldtea wrote: post #162
scotty79 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are an employee, the employer has control over how you should do your work. IF you don't like that, transition to being a contractor and sign service agreements where you are going to be paid solely for results not for how you achieve them.

That will change things for him, or any others taking the same course. Hundreds of millions can't all become contractors, and realistically wont all become contractors. So the issue described is a real social issue, whether he can "just" quit and avoid it or not.

That's the nature of employment relationship. On the flipside, as long as you follow employers rules, you don't bear the responsibility for the results. That's a huge upside that have always balanced out the lack of control over they way you work and your fate for many people.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#247

Post by watwut »

mitxela wrote: post #125
dented42 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But that does not represent "we" nor "humanity". Those decisions are made by rather small group of super rich sociopaths.

I mean masses also do bad decisions. But, they specifically do not get to do capital allocation decisions.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#248

Post by scotty79 »

coldtea wrote: post #161
scotty79 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book. Things go viral in professional settings as well. Scrum, agile, pc language ... I'm sure you can find other professional trends that if you decided not to follow your career would be jeopardized.

And those things also have virus like qualities

Large parts of eucariotic DNA comes from ancient viruses so in a sense, viral things make us who we are. At least in large part.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#249

Post by ragequittah »

breezybottom wrote: post #225
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…

The amount of strawmen and false equivalencies here is crazy. I bet you can't name one person who refused to get Internet because photos don't load fast enough.

There was a whole gaggle of people who refused to get it for that and a few other "user friendliness" reasons. And I completely understand it.

>Across all groups of users, taking too long to download pages (i.e. "speed") is the most commonly experienced problem with the web (64.8% of respondents).

>Online retailers especially should take note: 53% of respondents reported that they had left a web site while searching for product information simply because the site was too slow.[1]

It's strange to think about now but roughly half of people in the US didn't have internet in the year 2000. And half of people that had the internet weren't making any purchases. People didn't trust or see much use for the tech back then and it was really hard to convince them.

[1]https://sites.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-1998-04/...

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#250

Post by ragequittah »

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…

>They are poor tools that can't do the things they are claimed to be able to do

This is the one I don't understand the most out of all the gripes. I find it genuinely unsettling how much I've done over the past couple of days (and with little to no mistakes or bugs in the code that I can find) by just broadly asking Astra to do it. I understand why you'd feel the technology sucks 2 years ago, but these days the models are becoming way too good at what they do.

I agree that if it lives up to the hype we're in for major societal upheaval. Existential crisis is a very real part of looking at this tech for what it is. But I also don't see how not using it stops that. It'd be like not ever taking an airplane to prevent climate change and wondering why it didn't work.

The fun is in being able to finish projects you've had rattling around in your head for years but never had time to do. Or researching and discovering things that you'd never bother with previously because the internet has become an impossible to navigate cesspool. Or learning things in a way that is completely customized to your speed and level of knowledge.

I have to hold 2 thoughts in your head at the same time: the technology is empowering at an individual level while also being highly disruptive at a societal level. We're not going to be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube at this point.

Post reply on HN