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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

#371

Post by defgeneric »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #62

Personally, I don't think you should ever allow the LLM to write for you or to modify / update anything you're writing. You can use it to get feedback when editing, to explore an idea-space, and to find any topical gaps. But write everything yourself! It's just too easy to give in and slowly let the LLM take over your brain. This article is focused on essay writing, but I swear I've experienced cognitive decline when…

This is exactly the problem, but there's still a sweet spot where you can get quickly up to speed on a technical areas adjacent to your specialty and not have small gaps in your own knowledge hold you back from the main task. I was quickly able to do some signal processing for underwater acoustics in C, for example, and don't really plan to become highly proficient in it. I was able to get something workable and move on to other tasks while still getting an idea of what was involved if I ever wanted to come back to it. In the past I would have just read a bunch of existing code.

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

#372

Post by tguedes »

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…

I think what you're trying to reference is APIs or libraries, most of which I wouldn't consider abstractions. I would hope most senior front-end developers are capable of developing a date library for their use case, but in almost all cases it's better to use the built in Date class, moment, etc. But that's not an abstraction.

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

#373

Post by CuriouslyC »

sarchertech wrote: post #362
CuriouslyC wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is doable, I have a multi-stage process that makes it pretty reliable. Stage 1 is ideation, this can be with a LLM or humans, w/e, you just need a log. Stage 2 is conversion of that ideation log to a simple spec format that LLMs can write easily called SRF, which is fenced inside a nice markdown document humans can read and understand. You can edit that SRF if desired, have a conversation with the agent about it to get them to massage it, or just have your agent feed it into a tool I wrote which takes a SRF and converts it to a CUE with full formal validation and lots of other nice features.

The value of this is that FOR FREE you can get comprehensive test defintions (unit+e2e), kube/terraform infra setup, documentation stubs, openai specs, etc. It's seriously magical.

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

#374

Post by defgeneric »

sudosteph wrote: post #88

Meanwhile my main use cases for AI outside of work: - Learning how to solder - Learning how to use a multimeter - Learning to build basic circuits on breadboxes - learning about solar panels, mppt, battery management system, and different variations of li-on batteries - learning about LoRa band / meshtastic / how to build my own antenna And every single one of these things I've learned I've also applied practically t…

The physicality of having to actually do things in the real world slows things down to the rate at which our brains actually learn. The "vibe coding" loop is too fast to learn anything, and ends up teaching your brain to avoid the friction of learning.

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

#375

Post by hatefulmoron »

Nevermark wrote: post #331
vonneumannstan wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It does say something that the models simultaneously:

a) "know" that they're not able to do it for the reason you've outlined (as in, you can ask about the limitations of LLMs for counting letters in words)

b) still blindly engage with the query and get the wrong answer, with no disclaimer or commentary.

If you asked me how many atoms there are in a chair, I wouldn't just give you a large natural number with no commentary.

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

#376

Post by arduanika »

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?

Yes, just like moving into management. So we'll get a generation of programmers who get to turn prematurely into the Pointy-Haired Boss.

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

#377

Post by WD-42 »

davidrupp wrote: post #337
glitchc wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I keep hearing this but it’s a head scratcher. They might be thinking of branch prediction, but that’s a function of the cpu, not the compiler.

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

#378

Post by genewitch »

tomrod wrote: post #58
i_am_proteus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These 54 participants were between the ages of 18 to 39 years old (age M = 22.9, SD = 1.69) and all recruited from the following 5 universities in greater Boston area: MIT (14F, 5M), Wellesley (18F), Harvard (1N/A, 7M, 2 Non-Binary), Tufts (5M), and Northeastern (2M) (Figure 3). 35 participants reported pursuing undergraduate studies and 14 postgraduate studies. 6 participants either finished their studies with MSc…

> I would describe the study size and composition as a limitation, and a reason to pursue a larger and more diverse study for confirmation, rather than a reason to expect an "uphill battle" for replication and so forth. Maybe. I believe we both agree it is a critical gap in the research as-is, but whether it is a neutral item or an albatross is an open question. Much of psychology and neuroscience research doesn't re…

do you feel this way about every study with N~=54? For instance the GLP-1 brain cancer one?

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

#379

Post by WD-42 »

charcircuit wrote: post #358
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. 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.

What are these non deterministic compilers I keep hearing about, honestly curious.

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

#380

Post by Planktonne »

el_benhameen wrote: post #327
Planktonne wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not a critique of LLMs, but it is a reason to be wary of the claim that it really helps you learn.

We have the idea of 'tutorial hell' for programming (particularly gamedev), where people go through the motions of learning without actually progressing.

Until you go apply the skills and check, it's hard to evaluate the effectiveness of a learning method.

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