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Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

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Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#371

Post by lazide »

smallerfish wrote: post #353
lazide wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t have to do boilerplate, generally. And with all the stacking LLMs against each other, that just sounds like more work than just… writing the damn tests.

> I don’t have to do boilerplate, generally. I meant this more in the sense of there is nothing new under the sun, and that LLMs have been trained on essentially everything that's available online "under the sun". Sure, there are new SaaS ideas every so often, but the software to produce the idea is rarely that novel (in that you can squint and figure out roughly how it works without thinking too hard), and is in tha…

hahaha, oh boy. that is roughly as useful or accurate as saying that all machines are just combinations of other machines, and hence there is nothing unique about any machine.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#372

Post by pranavj »

Studies like this remind me of early concerns about calculators making students "worse at math." The reality is that tools change what skills matter, not whether people think.

We're heading toward AI-first systems whether we like it or not. The interesting question isn't "does AI reduce brain connectivity for essay writing" - it's how we redesign education, work, and products around the assumption that everyone has access to powerful AI. The people who figure out how to leverage AI for higher-order thinking will massively outperform those still doing everything manually.

Cognitive debt is real if you're using AI to avoid thinking. But it's cognitive leverage if you're using AI to think faster and about bigger problems.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#373

Post by xlbuttplug2 »

blutoot wrote: post #246

There’s only one solution to this problem at this point. Make AI significantly less affordable and accessible. Raise the prices of Pro / Plus / max / ultra tiers, introduce time limits, especially for minors (like screen time) when the LLM can detect age better. This will be a win-win solution: (a) people will be forced to go back to “old ways” of doing whatever it is that AI was doing it for them, (b) we won’t need…

Or simply embrace ignorance. Why hold on to things you don't use? Accept AI as an extension to your brain, and let the now dormant parts atrophy.

Yes, you will be vulnerable should you lose access to AI at some point, but the same goes for a limb. You will adapt.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#374

Post by pranavj »

vidarh wrote: post #167
mcv wrote: post #98

This seems to confirm my feeling when using AI too much. It's easy to get started, but I can feel my brain engaging less with the problem than I'm used to. It can form a barrier to real understanding, and keeps me out of my flow. I recently worked on something very complex I don't think I would have been able to tackle as quickly without AI; a hierarchical graph layout algorithm based on the Sugiyama framework, using…

My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems. Writing code has just typically been how I've needed to solve those problems. That has increasingly shifted to "just" reviewing code and focusing on the architecture and domain models. I get to spend more time on my actual job.

Exactly this. The shift from "writing code" to "reviewing code and focusing on architecture" is the natural evolution. Every abstraction layer in computing history freed us to think at higher levels - assembler to C, C to Python, and now Python to "describe what you want."

The people framing this as "cognitive debt" are measuring the wrong thing. You're not losing the ability to think - you're shifting what you think about. That's not a bug, it's the whole point.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#375

Post by pixl97 »

ahoka wrote: post #307
discreteevent wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Brains are adaptive. They are, but you go on to assume that they will adapt in a good way. Bodies are adaptive too. That didn't work out well for a lot of people when their environment changed to be sedentary.

Yes, that's like saying I'm not weak, just my muscles are adapted to the couch.

Weak is relative. All humans are weak compared to an elephant and strong compared to a mouse. If strength stops being a competitive advantage in humans then weakness isn't a signal that determines outcomes.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#376

Post by [deleted] »

pranavj wrote: post #372

Studies like this remind me of early concerns about calculators making students "worse at math." The reality is that tools change what skills matter, not whether people think. We're heading toward AI-first systems whether we like it or not. The interesting question isn't "does AI reduce brain connectivity for essay writing" - it's how we redesign education, work, and products around the assumption that everyone has a…

[deleted]

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#377

Post by coldtea »

vidarh wrote: post #167
mcv wrote: post #98

This seems to confirm my feeling when using AI too much. It's easy to get started, but I can feel my brain engaging less with the problem than I'm used to. It can form a barrier to real understanding, and keeps me out of my flow. I recently worked on something very complex I don't think I would have been able to tackle as quickly without AI; a hierarchical graph layout algorithm based on the Sugiyama framework, using…

My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems. Writing code has just typically been how I've needed to solve those problems. That has increasingly shifted to "just" reviewing code and focusing on the architecture and domain models. I get to spend more time on my actual job.

>My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems

Solve enough problems relying on AI writing the code as a black box, and over time your grasp of coding will worsen, and you wont be undestanding what the AI should be doing or what it is doing wrong - not even at the architectural level, except in broad strokes.

One ends like the clueless manager type who hasn't touched a computer in 30 years. At which point there will be little reason for the actual job owners to retain their services.

Computer programming on the whole relying on the canned experience of the AI data set, producing more AI churn as ratio of the available training code over time, and plateuing both itself and AI, with the dubious future of reaching Singularity its only hope out of this.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#378

Post by chasd00 »

fatherwavelet wrote: post #206
TheColorYellow wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a technical forum, isn't pretentious name dropping kind of what we do? Seriously though, I appreciated it because my curiosity got the better of me and I went down a quick rabbit hole in Sugiyama, comparative graph algorithms, and learning about the node positioning as a particular dimension of graph theory. Sure nothing ground breaking, but it added a shallow amount to my broad knowledge base of theory that…

I think many are not doing anything like this so to the person who is not interested in learning anything, technical details like this sound like pretentious name dropping because that is how they relate to the world. Everything to them is a social media post for likes. I have explored all kinds of graph layouts in various network science context via LLMs and guess what? I don't know anything much about graph theory…

for many people here knowing various algorithms, data structures, and how to code really well and really fast are the only things that differentiates them from everyone else and largely define their identity. Now all of that value, status, and exclusivity is significantly threatened.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#379

Post by sothatsit »

orenp wrote: post #176
sothatsit wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we all just need to avoid the trap of using AI to circumvent understanding. I think that’s where most problems with AI lie. If I understand a problem and AI is just helping me write or refactor code, that’s all good. If I don’t understand a problem and I’m using AI to help me investigate the codebase or help me debug, that’s okay too. But if I ever just let the AI do its thing without understanding what it’s…

I'd say the new problem is knowing when understanding is important and where it's okay to delegate. It's similar to other abstractions in this way, but on a larger scale due to LLM having so many potential applications. And of course, due to the non-determinism.

My argument is that understanding is always important, even if you delegate. But perhaps you mean sometimes a lower degree of understanding may be okay, which may be true, but I’d be cautious on that front. AI coding is a very leaky abstraction.

We already see the damage of a lack of understanding when we have to work with old codebases. These behemoths can become very difficult to work in over time as the people who wrote it leave, and new people don’t have the same understanding to make good effective changes. This slows down progress tremendously.

Fundamentally, code changes you make without understanding them immediately become legacy code. You really don’t want too much of that to pile up.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#380

Post by pton_xd »

pranavj wrote: post #372

Studies like this remind me of early concerns about calculators making students "worse at math." The reality is that tools change what skills matter, not whether people think. We're heading toward AI-first systems whether we like it or not. The interesting question isn't "does AI reduce brain connectivity for essay writing" - it's how we redesign education, work, and products around the assumption that everyone has a…

> Studies like this remind me of early concerns about calculators making students "worse at math." The reality is that tools change what skills matter, not whether people think.

Over-reliance on calculators does make you worse at math. I (shamefully) skated through Calculus 3 by just typing everything into my TI-89. Now as an adult I have no recollection of anything I did in that class. I don't even remember how to use the TI-89, so it was basically a complete waste of my time. But I still remember the more basic calculus concepts from all the equations I solved by hand in Calc 1 and 2.

I'm not saying "calculators bad" but misusing them in the learning process is a risk.

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