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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

#461

Post by skissane »

benterix wrote: post #173
goalieca wrote: post #164

Anecdote 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…

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.

The way I’ve been coding recently: I often ask the AI to write the function for me, because lazy. And then I don’t like the code it wrote, so I rewrite it. But still it is less mental effort to rewrite “mostly correct but slightly ugly code” than write the whole thing from scratch

Also I even though I have Copilot extension in VSCode I rarely use it… because I find it interrupts my flow with constant useless or incorrect or unwanted suggestions. Instead, when I want AI help, I type out my request by hand into a Gemini gem which contains a prompt describing my preferred coding style - but even with extra guidance as to how I want it to write code, I still often don’t like what it does and end up rewriting it

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

#462

Post by salawat »

hosh wrote: post #356
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.

There is a form of delegation that develops the people involved, so that people can continue to contribute and grow. Each individual can contribute what is unique to them, and grow more capable as they do so. Both people, and the community of those people remain alive, lively, and continue to grow. Some people call this paradigm “regenerative”; only living systems regenerate. There is another form of delegation where…

LLM's and AI in general is just a hack to reimplement slavery with an artificial being that is denied consideration as a being. Technical chattel, if you will, and if you've been paying attention in tech circles a lot of mental energy is being funneled into keeping the egghead's attention firmly in the "we don't want something that is" direction. Investors want robots that won't/can't say no.

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

#463

Post by jplusequalt »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #275
chii wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my only job is to identify places where the current spec and the intended functionality differ and create a new spec to mitigate. and to be able to do this efficiently or even "correctly", you'd need to have had mountains of experience evaluating an implementation, and be able to imagine the consequences of that implementation against the desired outcome. Doing this requires experience that would get eroded by the…

Would that experience get eroded though? LLMs let me perform experiments (including architecture/system level) quickly, and build stress test/benchmark/etc harnesses quickly to evaluate those experiments, so in the time you can build human intuition with one experiment I've done 10. I build less intuition from each experiment, but I'm building broader intuition, and if I choose a bad experiment it's a small cost, but…

>Would that experience get eroded though?

Yes. If you stop doing something, you get worse at it. There is literally no exception to this that I'm aware of. In the future where everyone is dependent on ever larger amounts of code, the possibility that nobody will be equipped to write/debug that code should scare you.

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

#464

Post by jplusequalt »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #348
benterix wrote: post #173

Earlier 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.

(3) people who never had that capability. Remember we aren’t all above average. You shouldn’t worry. Now that we have widespread literacy, nobody needs to and few even could recite Norse Sagas or the Illiad from memory. Basically nobody has useful skills for nomadic survival. We’re about to move on to more interesting problems, and our collective abilities and motivation will still be stratified as it always has been…

>We’re about to move on to more interesting problems, and our collective abilities and motivation will still be stratified as it always has been and must be

Who is "we"? There are more people out there in the world doing hard physical labor, or data entry, than there are software engineers.

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

#465

Post by nerdsniper »

benterix wrote: post #339
vidarh wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of programmers don't know assembly, so can in fact not work without all the abstractions they rely on. Do you therefore argue programming languages aren't abstractions?

> The vast majority of programmers don't know assembly, so can in fact not work without all the abstractions they rely on. The problem with this analogy is obvious when you imagine an assembler generating machine code that doesn't work half of the time and a human trying to correct that.

I mean, it’s more like 0.1% of the time but I’ve definitely had to do this in embedded programming on ARM Cortex M0-M3. Sometimes things just didn't compile the way I expected. My favorite was when I smashed the stack and I overflowed ADC readings into the PC and SP, leading to the MCU jumping completely randomly all over the codebase. Other times it was more subtle things, like optimizing away some operation that I needed to not be optimized away.

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

#466

Post by jplusequalt »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #277
asveikau wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads to me as extremely defensive.

It's not but ok. Just responding to another version of "This generation is screwed" that has been happening literally since Socrates.

There has been a growing amount of evidence for years that modern technology is not without it's side effects (mental health issues due to social media use, destruction of attention spans among the youth due to cell phone use, erosion of societal discourse and straight up political manipulation, and now we're seeing impacts to cognitive ability from LLMs).

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

#467

Post by ncruces »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #243
blibble wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can count the amount of times in my 20 year career that I've had to look at compiler generated assembly on one finger and I've never looked at the machine code produced by an assembler (other than when I wrote my own as a toy project) is the same true of LLM usage? absolutely not and it never will be, because it's not an abstraction

It's still early stages, that is why. It is not yet good enough or there is not yet sufficient trust. Also there are still resources allocated to checking the code. I saw a post yesterday showing Brave browser's new tab using 70mb of RAM in the background. I'm very sure there's code there that can be optimized, but who gives a shit. It's splitting hairs and our computers are powerful enough now that it doesn't matter…

> It's still early stages, that is why.

Were we advised to check compiler output every single time "in the early days"?

No, that's not the difference.

A compiler from whatever high/low level language is expected to translate a formal specification of an algorithm faithfully. If it fails to do so, the compiler is buggy, period.

A LLM is expected to understand fuzzy language and spit out something that makes sense.

It's a fundamentally different task, and I trust a human more with this. Certainly, humans are judged by their capability to do this, apply common sense, ask for necessary clarification, also question what they're being asked to do.

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

#468

Post by pfisherman »

Big caveat here is how people are using the LLMs. Here they were using them for things like information recall and ideation. LLMs as producer and human as editor / curator. They did not test another (my preferred) mode of LLM use - human as producer and LLM as editor / curator.

In this mode of use, you write out all your core ideas as stream of consciousness, bullet points or whatever without constraints of structure or style. Like more content than will make it into the essay. And then have the LLM summarize and clean it up.

Would be curious to see how that would play out in a study like this. I suspect that the subjects would not be able to quote verbatim, but would be able to quote all the main ideas and feel a greater sense of ownership.

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

#470

Post by jplusequalt »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #233
giancarlostoro wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing to note is "AI" is being used in place of LLMs. AI is a lot of things, I would be surprised to find out that generating images, video and audio would lead to cognitive decline. What I think LLMs might lead to is intellectual laziness, why memorize or remember something if the LLM can remember it type of thing.

I'd say the framing is wrong. Do we call delivery drivers lazy because they take the highway rather than the backroads? Or because they drive the goods there rather than walk? They're missing out on all that traffic intersection experience. Perhaps the issue of cognitive decline comes from sitting there vegetating rather applying themselves during all that additional spare time. Although my experience has been perhap…

>Perhaps the issue of cognitive decline comes from sitting there vegetating rather applying themselves during all that additional spare time.

The push for these tools is to increase productivity. What spare time is there to be had if now you're expected to produce 2-3X the amount of code in the same time frame?

Also, I don't know if you've gotten outside of the software/tech bubble, but most people already spend 90% of their free time glued to a screen. I'd wager the majority of critical thinking people experience on a day to day basis is at work. Now that we may be automating that away, I bet you'll see many people cease to think deeply at all!

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