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GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

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Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#51

Post by qwytw »

tpmx wrote: post #24
cerol wrote: post #16

Am I the only one who thinks this is a really bad idea? By offloading your cognitive tasks to an AI, even though you now look smarter, you're becoming dumber in the long run, because you're never really challeging and exercising your intelect. This book[1] goes into a lot of detail about how rote memorization and recall is essential to critical thinking (you have a limited working memory, and the way by which you're…

Counterpoint/related: LLMs penalize those who spent most of their education memorizing things/doing rote learning and encourage actual thinking.

> encourage actual thinking

You mean when there is an X chance that the answer it provided is BS but in a subtle non immediately obvious way and you have to spend some amount of time 'actually thinking' before you figure it out?

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#52

Post by qwytw »

elitan wrote: post #5
Dzugaru wrote: post #3

I've just watched the Microsoft 365 copilot presentation. They never mentioned hallucinations, and talked about errors maybe once? This thing will definitely make stupid errors and will make up things when summarizing, doing presentations etc. - unless it achieves near human level intelligence of course - but in this case everyone'll lose their job. I'm really curious what'll eventually happen? How are we going to li…

> I'm really curious what'll eventually happen? Maybe it will produce fewer errors than humans and also improve over time.

Is there any indication based on current data that it might?

I mean currently it's just regurgitating what actually humans wrote down at some point. It's capably of synthesizing this information to some degree but it is almost completely incapable of criticizing it on its own.

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#53

Post by qwytw »

macrolime wrote: post #22

"Over the next year or two, I expect GPT-4 and its successors to become a copilot for the mind: a digital research assistant that will bring to bear the sum total of everything you’ve read, everything you’ve thought, and everything you’ve forgotten every time you touch a keyboard. " I'm not sure everybody is comfortable with handing over all that to Microsoft or other tech giants. Would you be comfortable letting fac…

> why let Microsoft get all your emails, browsing history and everything else you have on your computer

I think you'll also have to to give Microsoft access to what you have in your head for this to work...

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#54

Post by [deleted] »

cerol wrote: post #16

Am I the only one who thinks this is a really bad idea? By offloading your cognitive tasks to an AI, even though you now look smarter, you're becoming dumber in the long run, because you're never really challeging and exercising your intelect. This book[1] goes into a lot of detail about how rote memorization and recall is essential to critical thinking (you have a limited working memory, and the way by which you're…

[deleted]

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#55

Post by corbulo »

melvinmelih wrote: post #7

Productivity junkies need to remind themselves that their goals aren't necessarily useful or practical goals. The mind is working exactly how it should: there is no practical need to remember everything you've read or seen (it has been like this ever since Google Search existed and since 2008 even more so with the ability to google the entire world from your pocket). The mind does a great job at filtering all the noi…

The mind is also highly plastic. Its like clay, the more its worked the more dynamic it can be. If it is never worked then it will be very hard to bring the heat back in to make it dynamic again.

People who rely on ChatGPT or any LLM will be outsourcing their mind in a detrimental way. A calculator allows you to build up to bigger ideas. An LLM in the usecase being described is a replacement for critical thought, not an enhancer of it so the user can think bigger. Laborious tasks can frequently be useful if theyre the right ones.

To fully use an LLM as a copilot (sending texts, writing letters, important emails, generate business ideas) is to outsource your own mind. The territory still left for machine to conquer is our own consciousness that is a product of simultaneous multi-sensory input. We can feel a table, see a plane, smell the air, hear music, experience time. These build into understanding the consequences of our actions in a more complex way than an LLM can understand. An LLM is still simply a 1-1.5D being.

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#56

Post by pstorm »

jaqalopes wrote: post #13

All week I've seen basically two dominant takes about how AI is going to impact creative work in the future (three if you count "generative AI is a fad with no value," which I do not): (1) It's going to take people's jobs (rip); or (2) It's going to help people do their jobs better. I'm a writer and have been thinking a lot about use case (2)—since I'm not emotionally ready for my job to be taken by AI, I'm trying to…

I just search Obsidian plugins and there are 3 that might work for you:

- https://github.com/louis030195/obsidian-ava

- https://github.com/brianpetro/obsidian-smart-connections

- https://github.com/bramses/chatgpt-md

I haven't looked into any of them in depth, but searching through a large corpus of text and using that to interact with GPT3 or GPT4 has some pretty good solutions already.

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#57

Post by avastmick »

wccrawford wrote: post #32
jaqalopes wrote: post #13

All week I've seen basically two dominant takes about how AI is going to impact creative work in the future (three if you count "generative AI is a fad with no value," which I do not): (1) It's going to take people's jobs (rip); or (2) It's going to help people do their jobs better. I'm a writer and have been thinking a lot about use case (2)—since I'm not emotionally ready for my job to be taken by AI, I'm trying to…

It's going to do both, and it's the same thing. If AI makes people 10% more efficient, companies will hire 10% fewer people to get the same job done. It has both helped people do their jobs and stolen jobs.

Honest question: is there an example in history of when a new technology led to the loss of jobs and didn’t just lead to a shift and further growth? I’ve tried to think of one, but I’m stumped.

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#58

Post by henriquemaia »

pleasantpeasant wrote: post #41
marginalia_nu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plato was largely right though, when looking at the individual alone. It is still a problem, thinking you understand something because you could look it up. It permits hypothetical access to facts but not the synthesis of knowledge from those facts. Anyone reading this could look up the latin terms "manus" and "facere", but unless they do, they probably won't spontaneously understand the etymology of "manufacture" as…

Plato was an elitist. He didn't want or believe that the lower-class Athenians should have access to education. He very much believed in an Oligarchy where the State would be ruled by a select few.

Such a big statement about someone who we know so little about.

But regardless of that, judging from the available works alone that is simply not true. Cases in point: Meno, the slave boy moment; the whole education project from the Republic.

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#59

Post by dmarchand90 »

dmitrybrant wrote: post #40
cerol wrote: post #16

Am I the only one who thinks this is a really bad idea? By offloading your cognitive tasks to an AI, even though you now look smarter, you're becoming dumber in the long run, because you're never really challeging and exercising your intelect. This book[1] goes into a lot of detail about how rote memorization and recall is essential to critical thinking (you have a limited working memory, and the way by which you're…

I haven't formed a definite opinion on this, and I think I largely agree, but what about a counterargument like this one: Virtually no one does long division manually anymore, or really any basic arithmetic greater than two digits, because we invented pocket calculators and smartphones that do this for us. And are we any worse mathematicians or engineers because of this? If anything, this has freed us to perform more…

Socrate didn't want to write anything down because he thought it would make you stupid too.

Though maybe he might be right as well...

Re: GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

#60

Post by skydhash »

rendleflag wrote: post #42
cerol wrote: post #16

Am I the only one who thinks this is a really bad idea? By offloading your cognitive tasks to an AI, even though you now look smarter, you're becoming dumber in the long run, because you're never really challeging and exercising your intelect. This book[1] goes into a lot of detail about how rote memorization and recall is essential to critical thinking (you have a limited working memory, and the way by which you're…

I recently asked an AI for help writing a python program with a mutex to prevent outdated information from being accessed. It presented me with a solution that I didn't fully understand, so I asked it to explain that part of the code. And then I asked it to explain part of the explanation. It just kept answering, never getting tired or irritated with me asking for clarification, and generating information that couldn…

> information that couldn't exist in a book or a blog post

I think that exists somewhere. Maybe not something that is specific to situation, but there is enough information out there that can lead you easily to the solution.

That’s why I prefer research instead of this AI assisted workflow. Instead of giving me the specific knowledge I need, it lets me know what I didn’t know and give me much more information to reason about.

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