MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by defgeneric » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 4:12 PM UTC

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.

A lot of the boosterism seems to come from those who never had the ability in the first place, and never really will, but can now hack a demo together a little faster than before. But I'm mostly concerned about those going through school who don't even realize they're undermining themselves by reaching for AI so quickly.

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

#362

Post by sarchertech » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #262

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

I like to think of it as a duck-typed abstraction. I have formal specs which guarantee certain things about my software, and the agent has to satisfy those (including performance, etc). Given that, the code the agent generates is essentially fungible in the manner of machine code.

Only if you can write specs precisely enough. For those of us who remember the way software used to be built, we learned that this is basically impossible and that English is a terrible language to even attempt it in.

If you do make your specs precise enough, such that 2 different dev shops will produce functionally equivalent software, your specs are equivalent to code.

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

#363

Post by ashton314 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 4:14 PM UTC

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.

Undefined behavior does not violate correctness. Undefined behavior is just wiggle room for compiler engineers to not have to worry so much about certain edge cases.

"Correctness" must always be considered with respect to something else. If we take e.g. the C specification, then yes, there are plenty of compilers that are in almost all ways people will encounter correct according to that spec, UB and all. Yes, there are bugs but they are bugs and they can be fixed. The LLVM project has a very neat tool called Alive2 [1] that can verify optimization passes for correctness.

I think there's a very big gap between the kind of reliability we can expect from a deterministic, verified compiler and the approximating behavior of a probabilistic LLM.

[1]: https://github.com/AliveToolkit/alive2

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

#364

Post by WD-42 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 4:14 PM UTC

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 could learn assembly, most of it in a day. They don’t need to, because the abstractions that generate it are deterministic.

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

#365

Post by Terr_ » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

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!

The first sentence made me expect Asimov's "The Feeling of Power", which--avoiding spoilers--regards the (over-)use of calculators by a society.

However, since I brought up calculators, I'd like to pre-emphasize something: They aren't analogous to today's LLMs. Most people don't offload their "what and why" executive decision-making to a calculator, calculators are orders of magnitude more trustworthy, and they don't emit plausible lies to cover their errors... Though that last does sound like another short-story premise.

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

#366

Post by sieabahlpark » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

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.

[dead]

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

#367

Post by planetmcd » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

ath3nd wrote: post #43

quotemstr wrote: post #11

"Studies" like this bite at the ankles of every change in information technology. Victorians thought women reading too many magazines would rot their minds. Given that AI is literally just words on a monitor just like the rest of the internet, I have a strong prior it's not "reprogram[ming]" anyone's mind, at least not in some manner that, e.g. heavy Reddit use might.

If it wasn't for studies like this, you'd still think arsenic is a great way to produce a vibrant green color to paint your house in the color of nature! Because of studies like this we know the burning of fossil fuels is a dead-end for us and our climate, and due to that have developed alternative methods of generating energy. And the study actually proved that LLM usage reprograms your brain and makes you a dumbass…

1. Wait, in a category where the general failure rate is traditionally 75%, using a bleeding edge technology adds 20% more risk, what a shock. 2. This is an interesting study, but perhaps limited. Draws conclusions from a set of 16 developers on very large projects, many of whom did not have previous experience with the editor used in the study or LLMs in general. The study did conclude it added time in these cases. There is a reason for the large sense of value, this would be the thing of note to uncover based on these results. Study notes 79% continued to use the AI tools. Speed is not the only value to be gained, but it was the only value measured. (Study notes this.) 3. Author didn't read or used AI to poorly summarize the poorly thought out study it is based on. Also, it seems you didn't read the study.

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

#368

Post by PhantomHour » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #281

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…

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. 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.

One of the other replies alludes to it, but I want to say it explicitly:

The key difference is that you can generally drill down to assembly, there is infinitely precise control to be had.

It'd be a giant pain in the ass, and not particularly fast, but if you want to invoke some assembly code in your Java, you can just do that. You want to see the JIT compiler's assembly? You can just do that. JIT Compiler acting up? Disable it entirely if you wish for more predictable & understandable execution of the code.

And while people used to higher level languages don't know the finer details of assembly or even C's memory management, they can incrementally learn. Assembly programming is hard, but it is still programming and the foundations you learn from other programming do help you there.

Yet AI is corrosive to those foundations.

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

#369

Post by thisisit » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

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…

This seems like the age old discussion of how does new technology changes our lives and makes us "lazy" or "lack of learning".

Before the advent of smartphones people needed to remember phone numbers of their loved ones and maybe do some small calculations on the fly. Now people sometimes don't even remember their own numbers and have it saved on their phones.

Now some might want to debate how smartphones are different from LLMs and it is not the same. But we have to remember for better or worse LLM adoption has been fast and it has become consumer technology. That is the area being discussed in the article. People using it to write essays. And those who might be using the label of "prompt bros" might be missing the full picture. There are people, however small, being helped by LLMs as there were people helped by smartphones.

This is by no means a defense for using LLMs for learning tasks. If you write code by yourself, you learn coding. If you write your essays yourself, you learn how to make a solid points.

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

#370

Post by SamPatt » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #313

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…

> It's still early stages, that is why. I have been hearing (reading?) this for a solid two years now, and LLMs were not invented two years ago: they are ostensibly the same tech as they were back in 2017, with larger training pools and some optimizations along the way. How many more hundreds of billions of dollars is reasonable to throw at a technology that has never once exceeded the lofty heights of "fine"? At thi…

The difference between using Cursor when it launched and using Cursor today is dramatically different.

It was basically a novelty before. "Wow, AI can sort of write code!"

Now I find it very capable.