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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

#331

Post by Nevermark »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #284
tuesdaynight wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"It can't do 9.9-9.11 or count the number of r's in strawberry!" lol

Since models are given tokens, not letters, to process, the famous issues with counting letters is not indicative of incompetence. They are just sub-sensory for the model.

None of us can reliably count the e’s as someone talks to us, either.

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

#332

Post by glitchc »

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…

> LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic. Probabilistic is NOT deterministic.

Although I'm on the side of getting my hands dirty, I'm not sure if the difference is that different. A modern compiler embeds a considerable degree of probabilistic behaviour.

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

#333

Post by colincooke »

Shank wrote: post #266
colincooke wrote: post #261

It is worth noting that this study was tbh pretty poorly performed from a psychology/neuroscience perspective and the neuro community was kind of roasting their results as uninterpretable. Their trial design and interpretation of results is not properly done (i.e. they are making unfair comparison of LLM users to non-LLM users), so they can't really make the kind of claims they are making. This would not stand up to…

> It is worth noting that this study was tbh pretty poorly performed from a psychology/neuroscience perspective and the neuro community was kind of roasting their results as uninterpretable. Do you have links or citations to people saying these claims?

It was a bluesky thread I've since lost (lame I know). This article summarizes the issues well: https://residualinsights.com/all-hype-no-bite-your-brain-on-...

Comes down to: - Self selection bias - Trial design - Dubious intepretations of neural connectivity

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

#334

Post by KoolKat23 »

rafterydj wrote: post #276
KoolKat23 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes it can be construed as wasteful. But it's exactly that, a compromise. Could the programmer spend their time better elsewhere generating better value, not doing so is also wasteful.

Supply and demand will decide what compromise is acceptable and what that compromise looks like.

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

#335

Post by Mtinie »

rafterydj wrote: post #276
KoolKat23 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It could matter but what isn't clear to me is if 70MB is wasteful in this specific context. Maybe? Maybe not?

Flagging something as potentially problematic is useful but without additional information related to the tradeoffs being made this may be an optimized way to do whatever Brave is doing which requires the 70MB of RAM. Perhaps the non-optimal way it was previously doing it required 250MB of RAM and this is a significant improvement.

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

#336

Post by benterix »

hoppp wrote: post #315
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.

Delegation of intelligence? So one party gets more stupid for the other to be smart?

Except that (1) the other party doesn't become smart, (2) the one who delegates doesn't become stupid, it just loses the opportunity to become smarter when compared to a human who'd actually do the work.

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

#337

Post by davidrupp »

glitchc wrote: post #332
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…

> LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic. Probabilistic is NOT deterministic. Although I'm on the side of getting my hands dirty, I'm not sure if the difference is that different . A modern compiler embeds a considerable degree of probabilistic behaviour.

> A modern compiler embeds a considerable degree of probabilistic behaviour.

Can you give some examples?

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

#338

Post by invalidptr »

Jensson wrote: post #307
theptip wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just beware the “real programmers hand-write assembly” fallacy. It was said that compilers would produce a generation of programmers unable to understand the workings of their programs. In some sense, this is true! But, almost nobody thinks it really matters for the actual project of building things. If you stop thinking, then of course you will learn less. If instead you think about the next level of abstraction up,…

> Just beware the “real programmers hand-write assembly” fallacy All previous programming abstractions kept correctness, a python program produce no less reliable results than a C program running the same algorithm, it just took more time. LLM doesn't keep correctness, I can write a correct prompt and get incorrect results. Then you are no longer programming, you are a manager over a senior programmer suffering from…

>All previous programming abstractions kept correctness

That's not strictly speaking true, since most (all?) high level languages have undefined behaviors, and their behavior varies between compilers/architectures in unexpected ways. We did lose a level of fidelity. It's still smaller than the loss of fidelity from LLMs but it is there.

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

#339

Post by benterix »

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?

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

The problem with this analogy is obvious when you imagine an assembler generating machine code that doesn't work half of the time and a human trying to correct that.

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

#340

Post by segmondy »

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 3, people who are about to use AI to build a mental model quickly and understand the concept deeper
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