Comment by theodric
7 months ago
My guess, based on what's been found about somewhat better cognitive outcomes in aging in people who make an effort to remain fit and stimulated[1], is that we could see slightly worse cognitive outcomes in people that spent their lives steering an LLM to do the "cognitive cardio" rather than putting in the miles themselves.
On the other hand, maybe abacuses and written language won't be the downfall of humanity, destroying our ability to hold numbers and memorize long passages of narrative, after all. Who's to know? The future is hard to see.
[1] I mean there's a hell of a lot of research on the topic, but here's a meta-study of 46 reviews https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...
> On the other hand, maybe abacuses and written language won't be the downfall of humanity, destroying our ability to hold numbers and memorize long passages of narrative, after all
The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though. We rely on calculators because they eclipse us in _any_ calculation, we rely on books because they store the stories permanently, but if I use chatGPT to write all my easy SQL I will still have to write the hard SQL by hand because it cannot do that properly (and if I rely on chatGPT to much I will not be able to do that either because of attrition in my brain).
We'll definitely need people who can do the hard stuff still!
If we're lucky, the tendency toward random hallucinations will force an upswing in functional skepticism and and lots of mental effort spent verifying outputs! If not, then we're probably cooked.
Maybe a ray of light, even coming from a serious skeptic of generative AI: I've been impressed at what someone with little ability to write code or inclination to learn can accomplish with something like Cursor to crank out little tools and widgets to improve their daily life, similar to how we still need skilled machinists even while 3D printing has enabled greater democratization of object production. LLMs: a 3D printer for software. It may not be great, but if it works, whatever.
> The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though.
Yeah, you'd think that a profession that talks about stuff like "NP-Hard" and "unit tests" would be more sensitive to the distinction between (A) the work of providing a result versus (B) the amount of work necessary to verify it.
Yeah, they realize (B) is almost always much, much lower than (A), which is why ChatGPT is stupidly useful even if it gets 15% of the stuff wrong.
1 reply →
> The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though
Not sure about books. Between self-help, religion, and New Age, I'd guess quite a lot of books not marked as fiction are making false claims.
Thats not what I meant tho, the point about books is that they store information reliably. If I write something down, within most reasonable settings it will still be the same text when I read it back. That means if I write something down instead of remembering it, the writing will outperform me in storing this information. Same with the calculator, the calculator will always perform at least as good as me at arithmetics. There is no calculation on which the calculator can randomly fail, leading me to do it by hand, so I don't need to retain the skill of doing it by hand. The same can not be said about LLMs and that is the issue.
1 reply →