Comment by santiagobasulto
7 months ago
Wasn't THE SAME said when Google came out? That we were not remembering things anymore and we were relying on Google? And also with cellphones before that (even the big dummy brickphones), that we were not remembering phone numbers anymore.
And this is exactly what this study showed too.
"Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support: the Brain‑only group exhibited the strongest, widest‑ranging networks, Search Engine group showed intermediate engagement, and LLM assistance elicited the weakest overall coupling."
Yes, that was true though, wasn't it? If this is also true, what does that imply?
Their results support this. The study has three groups: LLM users, Search Engine users and Brain only.
In terms of connections made, Brain Only beats Search User, Search User beats LLM User.
So, yes. If those measured connections mean something, it's the same but worse.
Plato was already worried that the written word caused people to forget things (although his main complaint was that words cant answer like a person can in a dialogue).
Yes but your cell phone contacts don't have a chance to call a completely different number out of thin air once in a while.
At least for now, while Apple and Google haven't put "AI" in the contacts list. Can't guarantee tomorrow.
That would actually be an amazing feature. Like in those movie meet-cutes where the person you were supposed to meet doesn't show up, and instead you make a connection with a random person.
Those services are available already, but the random person at the other end is "AI" generated :)
Google was like a faster library. ChatGPT just does most of the work for you.
It's the doing the work for you which is the trouble.
Suppose you want to know how some git command works. If you have to read the manual to find out, you end up reading about four other features you didn't know existed before you get to the thing you set out to look for to begin with, and then you have those things in your brain when you need them later.
If you can just type it into a search box and it spits back a command to paste into the terminal, it's "faster" -- this time -- but then you never actually learn how it works, so what happens when you get to a question the search box can't answer?
I don't remember phone numbers.
I remember where I can get information on the internet, not the information itself. I rely on google for many things, but find myself increasingly using AI instead since the signal/noise ratio on google is getting worse.
A comment on another similar thread pointed out it goes as far back as Socrates saying that writing things down means your not exercising your brain, so you're right, this is the same old argument we've heard for years before.
The question is, were they wrong? I'm not sure I could continue doing my job much as SWE if I lost access to search engines, and I certainly don't remember phone numbers anymore, and as for Socrates, we found that the ability to forget about something (while still maintaining some record of it) was actually a benefit of writing, not a flaw. I think in all these cases we found that to some extent they were right, but either the benefits outweighed the cost of reliance, or that the cost was the benefit.
I'm sure each one had its worst case scenario where we'd all turn into brainless slugs offloading all our critical thinking to the computer or the phone or a piece of paper, and that obviously didn't happen, so it might not here either, but there's a good chance we will lose something as a result of this, and its whether the benefits still outweigh the costs