Calculators either? [1]. To be fair, we can find articles in favor and against the same tool.
[1] https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S136...
MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
401–410 of 589 posts
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#402Anecdote 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 is in a way like doing math. I can read a math book all day and even appreciate the ideas in the book, but I'd practically learn little if I don't actually attempt to work out examples for the definitions, the theorems, and some exercises in the book.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 generall…
I don't follow; you can read the code that your LLM produces as well.
It's way easier to drill down in this way than the bytecode/assembly vs. high-level language divide.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#404Anecdote 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 is in a way like doing math. I can read a math book all day and even appreciate the ideas in the book, but I'd practically learn little if I don't actually attempt to work out examples for the definitions, the theorems, and some exercises in the book.
I fall into this trap more than I’d care to admit.
I love learning by reading, to the point that I’ll read the available documentation for something before I decide to use it. This consumes a lot of time, and there’s a tradeoff.
Eventually if I do use the thing, I’m well suited to learning it quickly because I know where to go when I get stuck.
But by the same token I read a lot of documentation I never again need to use. Sometimes it’s useful for learning about how others have done things.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#405Earlier 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…
> LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic
I believe that if you can tweak the temperature input (OpenAI recently turned it off in their API, I noticed), an input of 0 should hypothetically result in the same output, given the same input.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#406aren’t those with higher intellect at greater risk of depression?
I’m going to use 2x the amount of AI that I was planning to use today.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
That's a bit pedantic: lots of python programs will work the same way in major OSs. If they don't, someone will likely try to debug the specific error and fix it. But LLMs frequently hallucinate in non deterministic ways. Also, it seems like there's little chance for knowledge transfer. If I work with dictionaries in python all the timrle, eventually I'm better prepared to go under the hood and understand their imple…
> That's a bit pedantic
It's a pedantic reply to a pedantic point :)
> If I'm prompting a LLM, what's the bridge from prompt engineering to software engineering?
A sibling also made this point, but I don't follow. You can still read the code.
If you don't know the syntax, you can ask the LLM to explain it to you. LLMs are great for knowledge transfer, if you're actually trying to learn something - and they are strongest in domains where you have an oracle to test your understanding, like code.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#408Earlier 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.
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…
> We're just moving up the abstraction ladder, like we did with compilers.
Got any studies about reasoning decline from using compilers to go with your claim?
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#409Anecdote 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 differe…
It's not the same with LLMs. What the study finds out is actually much more serious. When you use a phone or a calculator, you don't lose cognitive faculties. But when you delegate the thinking process to an LLM, your Brain gets phisically changed, witch leads to a cognitive damage. It's a completely different league.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
GCC can use randomized branch prediction.