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

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

publichealthpolicyjournal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 589 posts

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

#321

Post by pengaru »

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.

> and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly lose that capability.

What I'm seeing is most of this group never really had the capability in the first place. These are the formerly unproductive slackers who now churn out GenAI slop with their name on it at an alarming rate.

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

#322

Post by threatofrain »

const_cast wrote: post #297
Paradigma11 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic." So are humans and yet people pay other people to write code for them.

Yes but we don't call humans abstractions. A software engineer isn't an abstraction over code.

No, but depending on your governance structure, we have software engineers abstract over domains. And then we draw boxes and arrows around the works of your colleagues without looking inside the box.

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

#323

Post by delfinom »

threatofrain wrote: post #317
e3bc54b2 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So it's a noisy abstraction. Programmers deal with that all the time. Whenever you bring in an outside library or dependency there's an implicit contract that you don't have to look underneath the abstraction. But it's noisy so sometimes you do. Colleagues are the same thing. You may abstract business domains and say that something is the job of your colleague, but sometimes that abstraction breaks. Still good enough…

Noisy is an understatement, it's buggy, it's error filled, it's time consuming and inefficient. It's exact opposite of automation but great for job security.

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

#324

Post by InfamousRece »

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.

> slowly, slowly lose that capability.

Well, not so slowly it seems.

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

#325

Post by notTooFarGone »

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…

If you had google maps and you knew the directions it gives are 80% gonna be correct, would you still need navigation skills?

You could also tweak it by going like "Lead me to the US" -> "Lead me to the state of New York" -> "Lead me to New York City" -> "Lead me to Manhattan" -> "Lead me to the museum of new arts" and it would give you 86% accurate directions, would you still need to be able to navigate?

How about when you go over roads that are very frequently used you push to 92% accuracy, would you still need to be able to navigate?

Yes of course because in 1/10 trips you'd get fucking lost.

My point is: unless you get to that 99% mark, you still need the underlying skill and the abstraction is only a helper and always has to be checked by someone who has that underlying skill.

I don't see LLMs as that 99% solution in the next years to come.

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

#326

Post by vidarh »

robenkleene wrote: post #301
stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One argument for abstraction being different from delegation, is when a programmer uses an abstraction, I'd expect the programmer to be able to work without the abstraction, if necessary, and also be able to build their own abstractions. I wouldn't have that expectation with delegation.

The vast majority of programmers don't know assembly, so can in fact not work without all the abstractions they rely on.

Do you therefore argue programming languages aren't abstractions?

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

#327

Post by el_benhameen »

Planktonne wrote: post #299
el_benhameen wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about people who use the machines to augment their learning process? I find that being able to ask questions, particularly “dumb” questions that I don’t want to bother someone else with and niche questions that might not be answered well in the corpus, helps me better understand new concepts. If you just take the answers and move on, then sure, you’re going to have a bad time. But if you critically interrogate t…

There's a difference between learning and the perception/appearance of learning; teachers need to manage this in classrooms, but how do you manage it on your own?

I don’t think this is a critique of llms so much as a general observation that actual deep learning is difficult.

I’ve read plenty of books (thanks, Dickens) where I looked at every word on every page but can recall very little of what they meant. You can look at the results from an llm and say “huh cool, I know that now) and do nothing to assimilate that knowledge, or you can think deeply about it and try to fit it in with everything else you know about the subject. The advantage here is that you can ask follow-up questions if something doesn’t click.

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

#328

Post by robenkleene »

Jensson wrote: post #314
robenkleene wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One argument for abstraction being different from delegation, is when a programmer uses an abstraction, I'd expect the programmer to be able to work without the abstraction, if necessary, and also be able to build their own abstractions. I wouldn't have that expectation with delegation.

> I wouldn't have that expectation with delegation. Managers tend to hire sub managers to manage their people. You can see this with LLM as well, people see "Oh this prompting is a lot of work, lets make the LLM prompt the LLM".

Note, I'm not saying there are never situations where you'd delegate something that you can do yourself (the whole concept of apprenticeship is based on doing just that). Just that it's not an expectation, e.g., you don't expect a CEO to be able to do the CTO's job.

I guess I'm not 100% sure I agree with my original point though, should a programmer working on JavaScript for a website's frontend be able to implement a browser engine. Probably not, but the original point I was trying to make is I would expect a programmer working on a browser engine to be able to re-implement any abstractions that they're using in their day-to-day work if necessary.

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

#329

Post by robenkleene »

vidarh wrote: post #326
robenkleene wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One argument for abstraction being different from delegation, is when a programmer uses an abstraction, I'd expect the programmer to be able to work without the abstraction, if necessary, and also be able to build their own abstractions. I wouldn't have that expectation with delegation.

The vast majority of programmers don't know assembly, so can in fact not work without all the abstractions they rely on. Do you therefore argue programming languages aren't abstractions?

Fair point, I elaborated what I mean here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45116976

To address your specific point in the same way: When we're talking about programmers using abstractions, we're usually not talking about the programming language their using, we're talking about the UI framework, networking libraries, etc... they're using. Those are the APIs their calling with their code, and those are all abstractions that are all implemented at (roughly) the same level of abstraction as the programmer's day-to-day work. I'd expect a programmer to be able to re-implement those if necessary.

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

#330

Post by Jensson »

tuesdaynight wrote: post #236
codyb wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can see what people built with LLM 3 years ago and what they build with LLM today and compare the two.

That is a very natural and efficient way to do it, and also more reliable than using your own experience since you are just a single data point with feelings.

You don't have to drive a car to see where cars were 20 years ago, see where cars are today, and say: "it doesn't look like cars will start flying anytime soon".

Post reply on HN