This study does not seem to address whether AI use causes true cognitive decline, or simply shifts the role of cognition from "doing the task" to "managing the task"?
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
#382Earlier 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!
perhaps my favourite of his short stories. there's also the more satirical "the feeling of power", which touches on the same theme https://ia800806.us.archive.org/20/items/TheFeelingOfPower/T...
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#383This MIT study does not seem to address whether AI use causes true cognitive decline, or simply shifts the role of cognition from "doing the task" to "managing the task"?
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#384Anecdote 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…
Interesting, thanks. Do you mean he would write the code out by hand on pen and paper? That has often struck me as a very good way of understanding things (granted, I don't code for my job). Similar thing in the historian's profession (which I also don't do for my job but have some knowledge of). Historians who spend all day immersed in physical archives tend, over time, to be great at synthesizing ideas and building…
Assuming this observation applies generally, give one point to the embodiment crowd.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#385Earlier 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…
> An abstraction is a deterministic, pure function
That must be why we talk about leaky abstractions so much.
They're neither pure functions, nor are they always deterministic. We as a profession have been spoilt by mostly deterministic code (and even then, we had a chunk of probabilistic algorithms, depending on where you worked).
Heck, I've worked with compilers that used simulated annealing for optimization, 2 decades ago.
Yes, it's a sea change for CRUD/SaaS land. But there are plenty of folks outside of that who actually took the "engineering" part of software engineering seriously, and understand just fine how to deal with probabilistic processes and risk management.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#386A few things to note. 1. This is arxiv - before publication or peer review. Grain of salt.[0] 2. 18 participants per cohort 3. 54 participants total Given the low N and the likelihood that this is drawn from 18-22 year olds attending MIT, one should expect an uphill battle for replication and for generalizability. Further, they are brain scanning during the experiment, which is an uncomfortable/out-of-the-norm experi…
>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…
The experimental setup is hopelessly flawed. It assumes that people’s tasks will remain unchanged in the presence of an LLM.
If the computer writes the essay, then the human that’s responsible for producing good essays is going to pick up new (probably broader) skills really fast.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rather given the reproducibility crisis, how much salt does peer review nock off that grain? How often does peer review catch fraud or just bad science?
I would also add, how often are peer reviews the same group of buddy-bro back-scratchers that know if they help that person with a positive peer review that person will return the favor. How many peer reviewers actually reproduce the results? How many peer reviewers would approve a paper if their credentials were on the line? Ironically, I am waiting for AI to start automating the process of teasing apart obvious pen…
who says it's "1%"? i'd reckon it's closer to 50% than 1%; that could mean 27%, it could mean 40%. I always have this at the back of my mind when i say something, and someone rejects it by citing a paper (or two). I doubt they even read the paper they're telling me to read as proof i am wrong, to start with. And then the "what are the chances this is repro?" itches a bit.
This also ignores the fact that you can find a paper to support nearly everything if one is willing to link people "correlative" studies.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#388A few things to note. 1. This is arxiv - before publication or peer review. Grain of salt.[0] 2. 18 participants per cohort 3. 54 participants total Given the low N and the likelihood that this is drawn from 18-22 year olds attending MIT, one should expect an uphill battle for replication and for generalizability. Further, they are brain scanning during the experiment, which is an uncomfortable/out-of-the-norm experi…
>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…
Most studies don't replicate. Unless a study is exceptionally large and rigorous, your expectation should be that it won't replicate.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#389Earlier 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.
However, the undefined behaviours are specified and known about (or at least some people know about them). With LLMs, there's no way to know ahead of time that a particular prompt will lead to hallucinations.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#390Earlier 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.
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.
Perhaps more importantly, those boosters may never have had the ability to really model a problem in the first place, and didn't miss it, because muddling through worked well enough for them. Many such cases.