Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 253 posts

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#81

Post by ragequittah »

dspillett wrote: post #27
Suhinnall27 wrote: post #14

LLMs are both a blessing and a curse, they magnificent tools for those who know how to employ them , but a crutch for those who rely on them.

And like a cult to those of us preferring not to engage, for whatever reason, with everyone and their dog telling us that we should (and sometimes getting quite offended, like our refusal to play that game is a personal attack on them for choosing to).

I just find it such a fascinating technology. It's finally fun to be a nerd again! For me it's the same feeling as when I was on the internet in the early '90s and was trying to tell people how useful it would be. I don't hold a grudge against anybody who held out until the iPhone came around or whatever it was that got them to finally realize the usefulness, but I still question why it was so hard to convince so many people when the benefits were just plainly obvious.

If you want to avoid the technology go nuts. I just hope you're doing so knowing how important it will be to the future. It's also almost satire how outdated the assumptions of many people who don't engage are. "It mostly lies to you anyway" or "It can't even count the number of letters in a word" are such silly things to say about the technology these days. As is the typical "but it uses so much water!" as the person orders a hamburger.

My gripes mostly come with people who don't engage with it and then spout memes/misinformation (ironic) about AI as if they're experts. Usually akin to "That internet stuff is garbage, pictures take 2 minutes to load!" after everyone and their dog already has broadband.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#82

Post by robotresearcher »

goatlover wrote: post #65
Murfalo wrote: post #19

I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from). There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cult…

Wasn't aware that memes were an accepted part of evolutionary biology. They're not inherited like genes through reproduction that are subject to natural selection via biological fitness. Or any other evolutionary mechanism.

The word was invented by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist. He described ideas as reproducing with variation under selection pressure, which is the definition of the evolutionary mechanism.

There is a more recent use of ‘meme’ to refer to what we used to call an ‘internet image macro’. So the meme of the idea ‘meme’ has itself evolved to have a more specific variant of the general idea.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#83

Post by 27183 »

SoStupid wrote: post #29

The wording alone is just so Idiocracy . What our descendants will think when they look back on this time period. They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living, they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others. They wondered whether or not a word calculator was the antichrist. They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant min…

> whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon

Shockingly little linear algebra is required to manufacture the weapons that will probably bring about Armageddon. We've had them for damn near a century. It would be hilarious if these latest games with linear algebra were the impetus to make us actually use them at scale.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#84

Post by sbiru93 »

Unlike some other comments, I don't think there will be a dystopian future where humans will become cognitively switched off and everything will be delegated to machines. (More likely: extinction of the human race?)

Anyway, I work as a programmer, and at work I see a lot of people massively overusing LLMs to generate user stories or basically write functional specifications.

This honestly hurts a bit, because I can see the quality level of my environment going down, but in the end I'm often the one fixing the problems that come from it.

I just think this is a transition phase, and in the medium-term future there will only be room for people who, AI-assisted ofc, know how to apply logic in the best possible way.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#85

Post by cyclopeanutopia »

iforgotmypasswo wrote: post #40

I feel the premise of this research is wrong, or at least the synopsis phrasing. Smart people like learning. Now we just learn more interesting things. Weekend me before LLMs: Maybe I’ll chip away at that dependency injection library I’ve been working on. If I spend most of the day I could improve the user facing test framework. Weekend me after LLMs: Let’s continue work to get Claude Code running in WebXR on a Quest…

One can't think only about the smartest people, but the whole population.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#86

Post by simonklitj »

jjk166 wrote: post #64

"If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." -Socrates

I don’t suppose he was entirely wrong. I would probably be able to recall a lot more (verbatim) if it all had to be stored in me noggin. I think the trade off worthwhile, however.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#87

Post by teamonkey »

27183 wrote: post #79
jimbooonooo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

offloading thinking is a little/lottle bit different than writing to preserve your thoughts versus memorization. it's more analogous to skipping the writing, plugging your ears, and closing your eyes, while you wait for the answer to be presented before you.

This offloading was present even with pre-LLM googling. Sufficiently powerful search allows you to forget enough of the story to rely on imprecise recall. This is a form of thought atrophy. I think this is probably what Socrates meant. He wasn't wrong, it's just that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. Even the "calculators make you forget how to do math" people seem antiquarian to me. But I totally get it when peopl…

Also telling your expert employees/servants to do something for you.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#88

Post by tosapple »

jimbooonooo wrote: post #72
jjk166 wrote: post #64

"If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." -Socrates

offloading thinking is a little/lottle bit different than writing to preserve your thoughts versus memorization. it's more analogous to skipping the writing, plugging your ears, and closing your eyes, while you wait for the answer to be presented before you.

yeah, the centralization and concentration of knowledge and ability through reliance in this manner enables the teacher to escrow all your states pencils at any given moment for whatever reason.

once embedded i can see whole classes of industry dos'd.

logistics, dos'd. it, dos'd. military planning, dos'd. medical, dos'd.

pay us this fee so you can update your nvidia drivers.

it's the unholy marriage of the surveillance and petrol states pushing this.

edit: what happened with vmware?

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#89

Post by qarl »

goatlover wrote: post #69
pixl97 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, do you consider humans a virus like entity that's taken over a planet and is trying to spread to another?

Not anymore than ants or any other species that's spread across the planet. A virus is something co-opts the replication machinery of a host to make more copies. That's not what humans do. Since this idea may have come from the first Matrix movie, it's ironic that the character who espoused the idea, Agent Smith, became an actual virus in the 2nd and third movies.

> Agent Smith became an actual virus in the 2nd and third movies.

OOO. I never put that together before. Very nice. Very hypocritical of him.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#90

Post by whattheheckheck »

jjk166 wrote: post #64

"If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." -Socrates

And you know he was right
Post reply on HN