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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

#351

Post by meheleventyone »

robenkleene wrote: post #328
Jensson wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's an interesting comparison in delegation where for example people that stop programming through delegation do lose their skills over time.

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

#352

Post by Insanity »

So, logically, I know this is the case. I can feel it happen to myself, when I use an LLM to generate any kind of work. Although I rarely use it for coding as my job is more at a higher level (designs etc), if I have the LLM write part of a trade-off analysis, I'll remember it less and be less engaged.

What's really bothering me though, is that I enjoy my job less when using an LLM. I feel less accomplished, I learn less, and I overall don't derive the same value out of my work.. But, on the flip side, by not adopting an LLM I'll be slower than my peers, which then also impacts my job negatively.

So it's like being stuck between a rock and a hard place - I don't enjoy the LLM usage but feel somewhat obligated to.

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

#353

Post by rf15 »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #348
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.

(3) people who never had that capability. Remember we aren’t all above average. You shouldn’t worry. Now that we have widespread literacy, nobody needs to and few even could recite Norse Sagas or the Illiad from memory. Basically nobody has useful skills for nomadic survival. We’re about to move on to more interesting problems, and our collective abilities and motivation will still be stratified as it always has been…

I don't think it's down to ability, I think it's down to the decision not to learn itself. And that scares me.

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

#354

Post by pnt12 »

invalidptr wrote: post #338
Jensson wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's a bit pedantic: lots of python programs will work the same way in major OSs. If they don't, someone will likely try to debug the specific error and fix it. But LLMs frequently hallucinate in non deterministic ways.

Also, it seems like there's little chance for knowledge transfer. If I work with dictionaries in python all the timrle, eventually I'm better prepared to go under the hood and understand their implementation. If I'm prompting a LLM, what's the bridge from prompt engineering to software engineering? Not such direct connection, surely!

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

#355

Post by charcircuit »

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?

It's not 0 sum. All parties can become more intelligent over time.

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

#356

Post by hosh »

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #247
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…

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.

There is a form of delegation that develops the people involved, so that people can continue to contribute and grow. Each individual can contribute what is unique to them, and grow more capable as they do so. Both people, and the community of those people remain alive, lively, and continue to grow. Some people call this paradigm “regenerative”; only living systems regenerate.

There is another form of delegation where the work needed to be done is imposed onto another, in order to exploit and extract value. We are trying to do this with LLMs now, but we also did this during the Industrial Revolution, and before that, humanity enslaved each other to get the labor to extract value out of the land. This value extraction leads to degeneration, something that happens when living systems dies.

While the Industrial Revolution afforded humanity a middle-class, and appeared to distribute the wealth that came about — resulting in better standards of living — it came along with numerous ills that as a society, we still have not really figured out.

I think that, collectively, we figure that the LLMs can do the things no one wants to do, and so _everyone_ can enjoy a better standard of living. I think doing it this way, though, leads to a life without purpose or meaning. I am not at all convinced that LLMs are going to give us back that time … not unless we figure out how to develop AIs that help grow humans instead of replacing them.

The following article is an example of what I mean by designing an AI that helps develop people instead of replacing them: https://hazelweakly.me/blog/stop-building-ai-tools-backwards...

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

#357

Post by ducttapecrown »

mooreds wrote: post #347
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.

I've posted this Asimov short story before, but this comment inspires me to post it again. http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio... "Somewhere there must be men and women with capacity for original thought." He wrote that in 1957. 1957!

It turns out incremental thought is much better than original thought. I guess.

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

#358

Post by charcircuit »

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.

So are compilers, but people still successfully use them. Compilers and LLMs can both be made deterministic but for performance reasons it's convenient to give up that guarantee.

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

#359

Post by ashton314 »

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.

Compilers use heuristics which may result in dramatically different results between compiler passes. Different timing effects during compilation may constrain certain optimization passes (e.g. "run algorithm x over the nodes and optimize for y seconds") but in the end the result should still not modify defined observable behavior, modulo runtime. I consider that to be dramatically different than the probabilistic behavior we get from an LLM.

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

#360

Post by sarchertech »

theptip wrote: post #300
blibble wrote: post #202

Earlier 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

> and it never will be The only thing I’m certain of is that you’re highly overconfident. I’m sure plenty of assembly gurus said the same of the first compilers. > because it's not an abstraction This just seems like a category error. A human is not an abstraction, yet they write code and produce value. An IDE is a tool not an abstraction, yet they make humans more productive. When I talk about moving up the levels o…

>“please ship a new product to meet customer X’s need”

The customer would just ask the AI directly to meet their needs. They wouldn’t purchase the product from you.

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