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AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

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Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#41

Post by gallerdude »

palmotea wrote: post #25
zozbot234 wrote: post #12

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of…

Oh no, not that tired thing again. I suppose your point is: people once were critical of the technology of writing, so all criticism of the technology-at-hand is illegitimate. You don't actually make a point, so one has to assume. Some points: 1. Technological inventions are not repetitions of the same phenomenon. Each invention is its own unique event, you cannot generalize the experience with previous inventions to…

1. You can't understand the nuances, but there is a general pattern: new inventions may make us slightly less proficient at specifics, yet more powerful overall

2. Imagine a hunter gatherer is time travelled to 2026. You have lunch go to a cafe with him, and he learns that food is cheap, delicious, and abundant. He sees your house, and thinks it's amazing compared to his cave. He thinks that 2026 must be absolute paradise. You explain to him, well kinda, but also not really. Is the hunter gatherer right?

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#42

Post by _verandaguy »

palmotea wrote: post #25
zozbot234 wrote: post #12

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of…

Oh no, not that tired thing again. I suppose your point is: people once were critical of the technology of writing, so all criticism of the technology-at-hand is illegitimate. You don't actually make a point, so one has to assume. Some points: 1. Technological inventions are not repetitions of the same phenomenon. Each invention is its own unique event, you cannot generalize the experience with previous inventions to…

While I agree with your rebuke of the GP, Socrates was materially wrong about writing (or at least, about the ability to persist information beyond any single human lifetime).

Cumulatively, knowledge work (including, in particular, curating knowledge) is exceptionally energy intensive from an evolutionary standpoint. It does pay dividends, clearly, but to get compounding effects from it, being able to efficiently pass down big corpora of facts, ideas, processes, etc., is an absolute necessity.

Writing systems are the fundamental way through which we can do this. They worked for us for millennia, and we eventually built upon them to develop encodings used today to store information remarkably densely.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#43

Post by pixl97 »

partyficial wrote: post #35
palmotea wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, not that tired thing again. I suppose your point is: people once were critical of the technology of writing, so all criticism of the technology-at-hand is illegitimate. You don't actually make a point, so one has to assume. Some points: 1. Technological inventions are not repetitions of the same phenomenon. Each invention is its own unique event, you cannot generalize the experience with previous inventions to…

he(zozbot234) could also be agreeing with OP, not disagreeing. I don't remember phone numbers anymore. If I were to lose my phone, or the cloud, I'm SOL re-adding everyone.

I mean, it's most likely because you have an absolute shit load of numbers/contacts in your phone. In the old days people just had rolodexes filled with numbers and if that disappeared they were just as screwed.

I remember a few numbers of my most direct contacts and depend on backups for everything else.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#44

Post by rrr_oh_man »

partyficial wrote: post #35
palmotea wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, not that tired thing again. I suppose your point is: people once were critical of the technology of writing, so all criticism of the technology-at-hand is illegitimate. You don't actually make a point, so one has to assume. Some points: 1. Technological inventions are not repetitions of the same phenomenon. Each invention is its own unique event, you cannot generalize the experience with previous inventions to…

he(zozbot234) could also be agreeing with OP, not disagreeing. I don't remember phone numbers anymore. If I were to lose my phone, or the cloud, I'm SOL re-adding everyone.

> he(zozbot234) could also be agreeing with OP, not disagreeing.

This is how I for one understood this.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#45

Post by MillionOClock »

Say someone uses AI, treating it as if it was a developer (probably not recommended today due to the risk of errors), and working and speaking with it as if they were some kind of product manager or senior engineer who only makes architectural decisions etc. I wonder what kind of difference would it really make? Sure the person might not be as good anymore as a developer, but how is this different from being a usual product manager or whatever the day AI truly is good enough for a developer role? I'm not saying I know what the answer to this question is, but this is something I genuinely wonder, and I think the same kind of questioning can apply to broader domains.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#46

Post by tbrownaw »

palmotea wrote: post #25
zozbot234 wrote: post #12

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of…

Oh no, not that tired thing again. I suppose your point is: people once were critical of the technology of writing, so all criticism of the technology-at-hand is illegitimate. You don't actually make a point, so one has to assume. Some points: 1. Technological inventions are not repetitions of the same phenomenon. Each invention is its own unique event, you cannot generalize the experience with previous inventions to…

Writings are fixed once written, and don't update themselves as the world changes.

Writings are subject to known biases such as publication bias, and so relying on them reduces the range of what you can consider.

Therefore, writing is bad for the same reasons that this post thinks that AI is bad.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#48

Post by hdndjsbbs »

zozbot234 wrote: post #12

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of…

The irony of quoting this particular story without providing any of the necessary context for readers. Truly an aid to reminiscence and not memory.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#49

Post by comboy »

jbethune wrote: post #19

This was a bit word-salad-y but I share the same basic concern. I think more I worry about the tendency toward greater and greater cognitive off-loading to LLMs. My sister told me a story the other day about how she caught her plumber using chatgpt on his phone to fix an issue with her bathroom. I just think it's good for humans to know how to do stuff.

I mean, yes but LLMs have been making me more cognitively active. I've learned how to do more stuff that I would have without them and it's a decent multiplier not some rounding error.

Obviously you can have a plumber that knows his stuff and the one that doesn't. The good one can check some details and will recognize bs. If you already have the bad one it's probably if better if he uses LLM rather than when doesnt.

Re: AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

#50

Post by daveguy »

danielbln wrote: post #39
jessetemp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plumber obviously. Not everyone needs to know how to be a plumber, but a plumber should know how to be a plumber

Im a software engineer and know how to be a software engineer, yet I find LLMs quite helpful. Why should a plumber be any different.

Because if a plumber moves fast and breaks things, I've got shit all over the place.
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