Another Atlantic article that appears to hit.
The TLDR is if you seek higher cognition and use AI as a tool alongside that practice you’ll be fine. If you lean on AI to avoid cognition then you’ll backslide into the primordial goo as a person.
It’ll just be more of the same people who have chosen to offload all of their critical thinking skills to someone else. They will be bigots and miserable.
Conservatives have done it with Fox News and religious people with their church leaders for a long time.
People with no critical thinking skills. Also, people who believe everything if you can show them the AI confirming it.
The people who spend 23 hours a day running agents and outputting 300 slop emails an hour aren’t seeking cognition, they’re seeking quick rewards; “working” with “AI” isn’t a cognitive task so much as it’s a gambling task. Just keep asking Claude to try again on that PR and eventually you get that dopamine hit from it making a not-totally-shitty solution and you never had to actually engage your higher brain function, you just did lots of low level churn of “prompting”.
I think the article had a couple of good examples of how to use an AI.
Ask for hints, not answers: People who ask AI to directly answer their questions suffer severe declines in motivation and ability. But people who ask AI for background thinking or clarifications do not.
Start with a blank page: Before you go to the bot, start with a blank piece of paper and write up your own analysis and conclusions. Then ask AI to challenge your thinking, not produce it.
Ask for thinkers, not thinking: My favorite trick when using Claude is to never ask it to think through a problem for me. I ask it to summarize the thinkers who have already addressed a given problem. If I’m trying to understand child development, I ask it to imagine a debate between Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson. What would these two great psychologists say to each other about the problem I’m wrestling with? Then I ask it what books by these thinkers I should read if I want to understand their work. I get much better results from AI when I treat it as a brilliant librarian rather than as an oracle.
I understand that this is anecdotal, but the schoolteachers I know all tell similar stories.
Most kids can’t read up to their grade level and can’t focus for more than 60 seconds. They’re unable to tell you the answer to a question when it’s literally written on the board in front of them, and a common question they ask is: “If AI can do this for me, why do I have to learn it at all?”
Which tells me that the AI age will produce lazy people who are unable to think for themselves or solve simple problems. Then again, maybe BCI’s will become common and they literally won’t have to actually think for themselves.
It’s gonna be so great getting old with them running the world.
It’s gonna be so great getting old with them running the world.
Based on the current situation, why do you think they will run anything? From the currently available data, the oldest fucks (then, we) will run the show until they (we) fall over dead (and sometimes beyond, looking at Moscow Mitch).
That’s probably a fair point. We’ll see how it all plays out. I’m assuming the worst for due to the lack of any concern on the part if the tech community and the lack of any meaningful guardrails or regulation.
I was pretty good at maths in school, and throughout my adult life there have been times when doing mental math has been helpful.
I must’ve saved quite a few minutes, perhaps even an hour total.
But it has never been that important, that using the calculator I always have in my pocket would’ve somehow changed anything in the moment.
In all, it actually doesn’t feel like that helpful of a skill, though your milage will vary depending on your job.
In saying that, LLM’s aren’t going anywhere, and the panic around peoples stupification is probably a mask for ignorance or indifference which would exist regardless.
I hope I’m wrong and the worry turns out to be unfounded, but absent any meaningful regulation for the evident effects of LLMs on people’s cognitive abilities and mental health, I don’t have much of a reason to assume there won’t be disastrous effects in the future.
The key skills you learn from math is not arithmetic. If you’re rationale for math not being helpful is that you don’t find yourself doing arithmetic, you’re not focusing on the main takeaway from math. The key skill is problem solving and logical processing.
Precisely.
The problem is the emerging inability to think.
Sure, but that isn’t the point I’m making.
Consider that my analogy was referring specifically to arithmetic, while we have calculators in our pockets.
Consider a different analogy if you want, spell checkers.
If they came out now, I’m sure you’d have people arguing that people will never learn how to spell.
I predict less of an imagination/less productive with no patience.
The less patience and higher anxiety is already happening in higher numbers among new hires. It’s astonishing.
I’ve got a coworker who still attends something one could call programming school. They use AI extensively. I am not sure if I could trust him to complete a project in a way that would leave it maintainable. Of that he could maintain it.
I started backsliding into a primordial goo person almost 15 years ago tyvm
whatever kind of person it is that uses LLM datasets and digital assisstant spyware apps, i don’t think primordial nor goo are accurate desciptions of them
Before it was cool!
Tf does “seeking higher cognition” mean. If you use AI you are an idiot. Handing your thinking over to a corporation for profit is insane behaviour, even if it did something useful. Which it doesn’t.
It means “the kind of person who enjoys learning things”, and your lack of curiosity (even in attempting to parse it) suggests you’re part of the latter group
Personally I’ve found the way to use it is to get it to do the work of processing documents I could never be bothered to process myself, and to transform large volumes of information into an indexed and cross referenced dynamic index. It does both of these things well, because that’s what language models are good at.
The end result is that I am more informed. The downside is that I spend less time going off into the weeds, which does mean picking up less esoteric information.
It’s also more mentally exhausting to have to be constantly second guessing your sources of information.
But I’ve found well prompted LLMs to be a force multiplier if used in the background to do the things you previously just didn’t bother doing at all.
I use it to manage my task list. I have Codex hooked up to Obsidian and it manages the tedious stuff that would be onerous to do by hand. Organization is by far my greatest weakness. I would be so much worse at my job if I had to spend my mental energy doing menial shit.
The smaller and more procedural the task, the better AI is at it.
How do you feel about all your personal notes being sent to OpenAI?
What personal notes? That Sathyaraj has managed to turn about 3 weeks of work into three months? That I have to remember to hound the platform team to review a change request? Or that I requested a production change so I have to remember to go to the approval board today to get it approved?
OpenAI can have all that.
It’s hilarious how badly you’ve misread this situation.
I’m in the camp of people who see pseudo intellectual bullshit bandied about all day on the internet and have since it all began.
“Seeking higher cognition” is meaningless word fluff and anyone who feels the need to advertise and ensure others are aware of their intelligence rank, which is of course ABOVE THEM.
seeking higher cognition is the type of phrase that makes my amigdyla fire and engage my primal prey response because this shit is either a cult or a scam and we’re the marks.
AI doesn’t mean anything, AI is a lot of things to a lot of people but really it’s software. Software that a lot of people have bet very very heavily on, but that doesn’t seem to really be finding a market to the scale warranted by the insane resources that have been allocated and are being used every day. The math there doesn’t work, huge amounts of land, power, water, high end computers, 247365, and you sell the world’s new MS paint.
Anyway fuck you
Ok, well if you read the article you’re so mad about you wouldn’t be so mad 🤷
I’m not mad at the article really, it’s just dumb. I’m mostly mad at the dumbass I responded to
Sure buddy. Nobody can see the comments you left on this public forum
Well I’m mad at AI, that hardly makes me mad at the article. Ok though. Bye
There’s plenty of busy work that requires some level of “thinking” but it doesn’t add anything to whoever is doing it for the 50th time. You’re the one sounding like an idiot for ignoring this.
There is yes, AI doesn’t seem to be a solution to that.
What part of that phrase was confusing?
I mean, feel free to look up each word if you have to, there are only three of them…
the*
