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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

#481

Post by thegrim33 »

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.

So .. people in the past were supposedly wrong about the next generation being "screwed", and therefore we all know that makes it completely impossible for any new generation at any point in history to ever be in any way worse or more screwed than previous generations. Because some people in the past were supposedly incorrect with similar assertions.

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

#482

Post by maltalex »

oceanplexian wrote: post #475
e3bc54b2 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. This couldn't be any more wrong. LLMs are 100% deterministic. You just don't observe that feature because you're renting it from some cloud service. Run it on your own hardware with a consistent seed, and it will return the same answer to the same prompt every time.

That’s like arguing that random number generators are not random if you give them a fixed seed. You’re splitting hairs.

LLMs, as used in practice in 99.9% of cases, are probabilistic.

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

#483

Post by maltalex »

vidarh wrote: post #326
robenkleene wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One argument for abstraction being different from delegation, is when a programmer uses an abstraction, I'd expect the programmer to be able to work without the abstraction, if necessary, and also be able to build their own abstractions. I wouldn't have that expectation with delegation.

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?

> Do you therefore argue programming languages aren't abstractions?

Yes, and no. They’re abstractions in the sense of hiding the implementation details of the underlying assembly. Similarly, assembly hides the implementation details of the cpu, memory, and other hw components.

However, except with programming languages you don’t need to know the details of the underlying layers except for very rare cases. The abstraction that programming languages provide is simple, deterministic, and well documented. So, in 99.999% of cases, you can reason based on the guarantees of the language, regardless of how those guarantees are provided. With LLMs, the relation between input and output is much more loose. The output is non-deterministic, and tiny changes to the input can create enormous changes in the output seemingly without reason. It’s much shakier ground to build on.

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

#484

Post by jplusequalt »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #479
jplusequalt wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

The amount of weightlifting a strength athlete needs to do to stay near their peak (but outside medal range) is ~15% of a full training workload. People can play instruments once a month and still be exceptional once the pathways are set down. Are you getting slightly worse at direct code jockeying? Sure, but not a lot, and you're getting superpowers in exchange.

Both of these examples have much more to do with muscle memory than critical thinking.

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

#485

Post by jplusequalt »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #479
jplusequalt wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

The amount of weightlifting a strength athlete needs to do to stay near their peak (but outside medal range) is ~15% of a full training workload. People can play instruments once a month and still be exceptional once the pathways are set down. Are you getting slightly worse at direct code jockeying? Sure, but not a lot, and you're getting superpowers in exchange.

>and you're getting superpowers in exchange

The superpower you speak of is to become a product manager, and lose out on the fun of problem solving. If that's the future of tech, I want nothing to do with it.

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

#486

Post by lazystar »

benterix wrote: post #336
hoppp wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delegation of intelligence? So one party gets more stupid for the other to be smart?

Except that (1) the other party doesn't become smart, (2) the one who delegates doesn't become stupid, it just loses the opportunity to become smarter when compared to a human who'd actually do the work.

well, then it comes down to which skillset is more marketable - the delegator, or the codong language expert.

customers dont care about the syntactic sugar/advanced reflection in the codebase of the product that theyre buying. if the end product of the delegator and the expert is the same, employers will go with the faster one every time.

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

#487

Post by charcircuit »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #458
charcircuit wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you are in a comment chain discussing how there is a subset of people where the study is not true.

Rather a subset of people who would like to believe the results don't apply to them. Frankly, I'm sure there will be much more studies in this direction. Now this is a university, an independent organization. But, given the amount of money involved, some of future studies will come from the camp vitally interested in people believing that by outsourcing their work to coding agents they are becoming smarter instead of…

Outsourcing work doesn't make you smarter. It makes you more productive. It gives you extra time that you can dedicate towards becoming smarter at something else.

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

#488

Post by beepbooptheory »

daveguy wrote: post #342
fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your thought's I'd say, but it's more of a two way street than what I think of as abstraction.

Okay, language was the original vehicle for abstraction if everyone wants to get pedantic about it. And yes, abstraction of thought. Only in computerland (programming, mathematics and physics) do you even have the opportunity to have leak-free functional abstractions. That is not the norm. LLM-like leaky abstractions are the norm.

This is clearly not true. For example, the Pythagorean theorem is an old, completely leak free, abstraction with no computer required.

Sorry for being pedantic, I was just curious what you mean at all. Language as abstraction of thought implies that thought is always somehow more "general" than language, right? But if that was the case, how could I read a novel that brings me to tears? Is not my thought in this case more the "lossy abstraction" of the language than the other way around?

Or, what is the abstraction of the "STOP" on the stop sign at the intersection?

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

#489

Post by rstuart4133 »

beeflet wrote: post #431
charcircuit wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you are in a comment chain discussing how there is a subset of people where the study is not true.

There is? You haven't proven anything

Haven't you been paying attention? He probably heard it from an AI. That's the only proof needed. Why he put in any more effort? /s

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

#490

Post by ModernMech »

lazystar wrote: post #486
benterix wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that (1) the other party doesn't become smart, (2) the one who delegates doesn't become stupid, it just loses the opportunity to become smarter when compared to a human who'd actually do the work.

well, then it comes down to which skillset is more marketable - the delegator, or the codong language expert. customers dont care about the syntactic sugar/advanced reflection in the codebase of the product that theyre buying. if the end product of the delegator and the expert is the same, employers will go with the faster one every time.

That's how you end up in the Idiocracy world, where things still happen, but they are driven by ads rather than actual need, no one really understands how anything works, somehow society plods along due to momentum, but it's all shit from top to bottom and nothing is getting better. "Brawndo: it's got what plants crave!" is the end result of being lead around by marketers.
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