Isn't it obvious that you use your brain less to generate an essay with AI vs writing it manually?
I think what you'd want to measure is someone completing a task manually and someone completing n times the tasks with a copilot.
MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
271–280 of 589 posts
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#272Earlier 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…
Wishful, self-serving, and beside the point. The primary argument here is not about the capability of the ai. I think the same effect has been around forever in the form of every boss/manager/ceo/rando-divorcee-or-child-with-money using employees to do their thinking as a current information-handling worker or student using an ai to do their thinking.
>Wishful, self-serving, and beside the point. The primary argument here is not about the capability of the ai.
"Alternatively they're just learning/building intuition for something else."
Reading comprehension is hard.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#273Earlier 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…
That would be true if several conditions were fulfilled, starting with LLMs being actually to do their tasks properly, which they still very much struggle with which basically defeats the premise of moving up an abstraction layer if you have to constantly check and correct the lower layer.
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Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#274Earlier 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…
"LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic."
So are humans and yet people pay other people to write code for them.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#275Earlier 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…
> my only job is to identify places where the current spec and the intended functionality differ and create a new spec to mitigate. and to be able to do this efficiently or even "correctly", you'd need to have had mountains of experience evaluating an implementation, and be able to imagine the consequences of that implementation against the desired outcome. Doing this requires experience that would get eroded by the…
Would that experience get eroded though? LLMs let me perform experiments (including architecture/system level) quickly, and build stress test/benchmark/etc harnesses quickly to evaluate those experiments, so in the time you can build human intuition with one experiment I've done 10. I build less intuition from each experiment, but I'm building broader intuition, and if I choose a bad experiment it's a small cost, but choosing a bad experiment and performing it manually is brutal.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#276Earlier 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'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…
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills or misunderstanding you. Shouldn't it matter that they are using 70mb of RAM more or less totally wastefully? Maybe not a deal breaker for Brave, sure, but waste is waste.
I understand the world is about compromises, but all the gains of essentially every computer program ever could be summed up by accumulation of small optimizations. Likewise, the accumulation of small wastes kills legacy projects more than anything else.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#277Earlier 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…
This reads to me as extremely defensive.
It's not but ok. Just responding to another version of "This generation is screwed" that has been happening literally since Socrates.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#278Earlier 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.
Yeah NGL if you can't get a model that is top 1% in Competitive Coding and Gold level medal IMO tier to do anything useful thats just an indictment on your skill level with them.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#279This is standard response to any new technology. Socrates call books the death of knowledge, in the 19th century there was a moral panic about girls reading novels etc etc.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#280Earlier 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'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…
>> 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.
I do. This sort of attitude is how we have machines more powerful than ever yet everything still seems to run like shit.