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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

#501

Post by ModernMech »

salawat wrote: post #462
hosh wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's interesting about this proposition, is that by the time you create a machine that's as capable in the way they want to replace humans, we'll have to start talking about robot personhood, because by then they will be indistinguishable from us.

I don't think you can get the kinds of robots they want without also inventing the artificial equivalent of soul. So their whole moral sidestep to reimplement slavery won't even work. Enslaving sapient beings is evil whether they are made of meat or metal.

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

#502

Post by yesbut »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #493
theptip wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I don't follow; you can read the code that your LLM produces as well. You can. You can also read the code a compiler produces perfectly well. In fact https://godbolt.org/ is a web site dedicated to programmers do just that. But ... how many programmers do you know who look at the assembler their compiler produces? In fact how many programmers do you know who understand the assembler? Now lets extrapolate a bit. I'v…

salary aside, the vibe coders are exposing themselves to increased cognitive decline which should be a strong enough incentive to avoid AI to begin with. maybe they already had a cognitive impairment before reading this MIT study and can't understand the risk.

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

#503

Post by ModernMech »

kbelder wrote: post #480
oceanplexian wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think 'chaotic' is a better descriptor than 'probabilistic'. It certainly follows deterministic rules, unless randomness is deliberately injected. But the interaction of the rules and the context the operate in is so convoluted that you can't trace an exact causal relationship between the input and output.

It's chaotic in general. The randomness makes it chaotic and nondeterministic. Chaotic systems aren't that bad to work with as long as they are deterministic. Chaotic + nondeterministic is like building on quicksand.

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

#504

Post by ModernMech »

charcircuit wrote: post #397
WD-42 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are these non deterministic compilers I keep hearing about, honestly curious.

For example looping over the files in a directory can happen in a different order depending on the order the files were created in. If you are linking a bunch of objects the order typically matters. If the compiler is implemented correctly the resulting binary should functionally be the same but the binary itself may not be exactly the same. Or even when implemented correctly you will see cases where different object…

That's not nondeterminism though, you've changed the input (the order of the files). Nondeterminism would be if the binary changes despite the files being in the same order. If the binary is the same holding fixed the order of the files, then the output is deterministic.

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

#505

Post by fragmede »

marcofloriano wrote: post #409
thisisit wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> When you use a phone or a calculator, you don't lose cognitive faculties.

Of course you do. I used to be able to multiply two two-digit numbers in my head. Now, my brain freezes and I reach for a calculator.

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

#506

Post by soraminazuki »

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.

You're in denial. (1) The other party keeps learning, (2) the article cites evidence showing that heavy AI use causes cognitive decline.

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

#507

Post by grim_io »

grugagag wrote: post #122
grim_io wrote: post #63

I have never used LLM's to write essays, so I can't comment on that. What I can comment on is how valuable and energizing it is for me to cooperatively code with LLM's using agents. I find it sad to hear when someone finds this experience disappointing, and I wonder what could go wrong to make it so.

I don’t thik someone finds this experience dissapointing but harmful for cognition, probably in the long run as the cognition ‘muscle’ athrophies in some regions as I see it. Remains to be seen how it pans out. However, how much would you be willing to pay for LLMs before you decide it’s not worth it? It is unexpensive at this stage but this won’t last.

Unless they get Thanos snapped out of existence, I would probably just switch to inferior local models.

Going back to pre-LLM is not an option for me. Not because I can't, but because I don't want to.

How are you people using AI? I still have to think a lot. The biggest change is that I don't run around in circles trying to fix annoying bugs.

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

#508

Post by vidarh »

strix_varius wrote: post #442
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?

This is a tautology. At some level, nobody can work at a lower level of abstraction. A programmer who knows assembly probably could not physically build the machine it runs on. A programmer who could do that probably could not smelt the metals required to make that machine. etc. However, the specific discussion here is about delegating the work of writing to an LLM, vs abstracting the work of writing via deterministi…

This is meaningless. An LLM is also deterministic if configured to be so, and any library, framework, module can be non-deterministic if built to be. It's not a distinguishing factor.

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

#509

Post by soraminazuki »

charcircuit wrote: post #487
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Become smarter at what exactly? People reliant on AI aren't going to use AI on just one thing, they're going to use it for everything. Besides, as others have pointed out to you, the study shows evidence that AI reliance causes cognitive decline. It affects your general intelligence, not limited to a single area of expertise.

> Students who repeatedly relied on ChatGPT showed weakened neural connectivity, impaired memory recall, and diminished sense of ownership over their own writing

So we're going to have more bosses, perhaps not in title, who think they're becoming more knowledgeable about a broad range of topics, but are actually in cognitive decline and out of touch with reality on the ground. Great.

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

#510

Post by soraminazuki »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #189
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.

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…

That's untrue, as many others have pointed out. Furthermore, compilers don't cause the kind of cognitive decline that's shown in the study.
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