8 ms·

Are ChatGPT and co harming human intelligence?

68 points by topaz0 1y ago

praveeninpublic 1y ago
I cannot do math faster in my head, calculators killed the faster mental math, but if I have to calculate on my own, it's not fundamentally impossible. I still can do it, because it's just computation. But, LLMs help us think, which is much more than just computing, that's more dependency.
- temp0826 1y ago
  My calculator doesn't hallucinate (said another way- pending no input error, I can blindly trust it...which is something that would get me in trouble with a LLM)
- aaronbaugher 1y ago
  I suppose that depends what you do with them. I spent some time this weekend using Grok to work on a business plan and some other projects. I find myself using it for research, quickly winnowing information down to what's relevant to my needs, and sort of bouncing ideas off it the way I would with another person. I always have to keep in mind that it could get something wrong, but then again, so could a person. I don't think it's helping me think; more like it's helping me organize my thoughts and find inspiration. I suppose others might use it in a more dependent way.
  - praveeninpublic 1y ago
    Fair point. As a software engineer using Cursor, I’ve noticed it writes most of the code now. It’s easy to accept without review, which builds dependency. My role feels less like just coding and more like PM, tester, and reviewer combined. We’ve started trusting AI like calculators. So, assuming it's right without checking. But LLMs can be confidently wrong, and once that habit sets in, even the “ChatGPT can make mistakes” warning fades into the background.
topaz0 1y ago
The title is about intelligence and that is a fair concern, but honestly I think the bigger issue (also discussed in the article) is more about discernment, which is foundational for any kind of human fulfillment IMO.
j45 1y ago
How we do or don't use something creates the harm or benefit. Consuming instead of creating has caused. Passive average skilled prompting will give average results. LLM's can be used to actively work through your own thinking and engage it as quickly and deeply as you like.
- rad_gruchalski 1y ago
  I don’t know, to me it’s always fighting the llm to remember as much of the previous context as possible. Instead of moving forward with my thoughts, I seem to fight the llm forgetting what it said five minutes ago. And fact checking. The best example of fact checking, I asked chatgpt once about some istio cli features. It hallucinated available cli commands. But they were very convincing.
jmull 1y ago
It seems unlikely. We've invented and used various memory/thinking/cognitive assists throughout time, and, for us collectively at least, these seem to just expand our capabilities. AI will surely cause problems, possibly profound ones that may make us question whether it's worth the cost... but this probably isn't one of them.
- Mistletoe 1y ago
  It’s very difficult for me to even navigate my city without GPS now, I suspect using AI does a similar atrophying of your brain matter. Does using an excavator cause your muscle tissue to atrophy compared to a shovel? Of course it does.
  - toddmorey 1y ago
    Yes but is that genuine atrophy... or applying that part of your brain power to other things? Has anyone actually studied this? I sort of like that I can concentrate more on the podcast playing without worrying if I'm about to miss my left turn.
    - Mistletoe 1y ago
      https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0
      - toddmorey 1y ago
        "Given that the sample was primarily undergraduate students, many participants were unreachable or had moved away from the city three years after initial testing, and therefore a small subset of 13 participants (4 women, 9 men; mean age: 28.46 ± 3.93 years old; Table 1) came back for a follow-up assessment" I'd file this under more research needed.
    - spyderbra 1y ago
      Brain to power doom scrolling? Let's be real, by using LLM's we are not taking higher order tasks but just chasing dopamine.
toddmorey 1y ago
I can absolutely imagine this much knowledge on tap making us more impatient and less resilient. When I was a kid, there was already a bit of "why do I even need to know how to do this when calculators exist?" This is that on steroids and more broadly. However, there's a counter force, too, as there always is. I'm also pursuing new areas of interest and exploration where the early friction and amount to learn would have either completely fatigued me or scared me off. It's like having 24 hour access to a really good mentor and thought partner.
51Cards 1y ago
I'm going to re-post something that I commented in another thread awhile ago: I tend to think it will. Tools replaced our ancestor's ability to make things by hand. Transportation / elevators reduced the average fitness level to walk long distances or climb stairs. Pocket calculators made the general population less able to do complex math. Spelling/grammar checks have reduced knowing how to spell or form complete proper sentences. Keyboards and email are making handwriting a passing skill. Video is reducing our need / desire to read or absorb long form content. The highest percentage of humans will take the easiest path provided. And while most of the above we just consider improvements to daily life, efficiencies, it has also fundamentally changed on average what we are capable of and what skills we learn (especially during formative years). If I dropped most of us here into a pre-technology wilderness we'd be dead in short order. However, most of the above, it can be argued, are just tools that don't impact our actual thought processes; thinking remained our skill. Now the tools are starting to "think", or at least appear like they do on a level indistinguishable to the average person. If the box in my hand can tell me what 4367 x 2231 is and the capital of Guam, why then wouldn't I rely on it when it starts writing up full content for me? Because the average human adapts to the lowest required skill set I do worry that providing a device in our hands that "thinks" is going to reduce our learned ability to rationally process and check what it puts out, just like I've lost the ability to check if my calculator is lying to me. And not to get all dystopian here... but what if then, what that tool is telling me is true, is, for whatever reason, not. (and yes, I ran this through a spell checker because I'm a part of the problem above... and it found words I thought I could still spell, and I'm 55)
- api 1y ago
  But does this, at least for those who choose to use it as leverage, free up more brain power for other newer or different things? > If I dropped most of us here into a pre-technology wilderness we'd be dead in short order. I hear this all the time and I'm not convinced. People are incredibly resourceful under pressure. When your amygdala calmly informs your neocortex "learn, work hard, or die" the effect can be pretty profound. People would quickly form tribes and communities and those with relevant skills would teach others. Some people would absolutely fail to adapt, but I'm not convinced it would be as many as we think. The greatest danger in a collapse scenario would be other humans, since one path some would choose is "rob and kill other people." But that's a different sort of problem.
SillyUsername 1y ago
IMHO YES! Just like the industrial revolution impacted barrel makers (coopers). Except we aren't yet reaping the full rewards or skills realignment yet, so we've still to have the car making impact (which was post revolution, but replaced manual labour with machines as their ability grew and relative cost shrunk). We even have our own Luddites :D
- giraffe_lady 1y ago
  I guess I get to be the one who brings this up this time. The luddites were not strictly against the technological changes, they were a labor movement protesting how capital owners were using a new technology to dispossess workers who had no viable alternatives. As this is also one of the major risks of AI, one that has already come to bear directly, there's a lot we can take from their movement when we don't dismiss it as shorthand for "being wrong about technology."
  - namaria 1y ago
    Thank you! There is strong correlation between suppression of labor organization and strict enforcement of the draconian legislation of the time (labor organizers could be sentenced to death) and 'Luddite' activity. It was a last resort sort of action against oppressive laws and overzealous enforcement, not some ignorant response to technological progress.
curtisszmania 1y ago
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loudmax 1y ago
Socrates had this to say about literacy: > In fact, [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. Presumably very few people since Socrates would argue that society would be better off without writing. But it's a legitimate point. There is a cost to any new skill or technology. We should be conscious of what we're giving up in this exchange.
- sanderjd 1y ago
  But I think everyone since Socrates would agree that it's a good thing someone else wrote down a bunch of the stuff he said.
  - disqard 1y ago
    Right, this same phenomenon is evident in all media -- once it starts to take hold, the only way to effectively critique it, is through the medium itself. Hence, the proverbial Letter to the Editor complaining about the newspaper's content quality; the televised debates over what's on TV these days; the YT videos about the Internet ruining people's brains, etc.
- namaria 1y ago
  Socrates never argued that society would be better off without writing! Writing had existed for three thousand years by the point Socrates was alive, and the Epic cycle of Homeric poetry had existed for about three centuries. In the very same dialogue where the excerpt you quote comes from he also said: "Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing." And the section of the dialogue your quote comes from is preceded by this suggestion: "Shall we discuss the rules of writing and speech as we were proposing?" and later right before the bit you quote from: "But there is something yet to be said of propriety and impropriety of writing." So they are not discussing the merits of writing per se but the ethics of writing. This excerpt you offer comes from a stretch where Socrates is telling a story. This is merely what one of the characters in the story tells the other. Further in the dialogue Socrates clarifies: "SOCRATES: Well, then, those who think they can leave written instructions for an art, as well as those who accept them, thinking that writing can yield results that are clear or certain, must be quite naive and truly ignorant of [Thamos’] prophetic judgment: otherwise, how could they possibly think that words that have been written down can do more than remind those who already know what the writing is about?" and the rest of the dialogue is also quite illuminating: "PHAEDRUS: Quite right. SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support. PHAEDRUS: You are absolutely right about that, too. SOCRATES: Now tell me, can we discern another kind of discourse, a legitimate brother of this one? Can we say how it comes about, and how it is by nature better and more capable? PHAEDRUS: Which one is that? How do you think it comes about? SOCRATES: It is a discourse that is written down, with knowledge, in the soul of the listener; it can defend itself, and it knows for whom it should speak and for whom it should remain silent."
alfonsodev 1y ago
Critical thinking and understanding what really a LLM is, is crucial, for educated people I think it only augments intelligence not harming. With that said what about the rest of the people ? Why not making an onboarding tutorial of what really is going on ? I had a little conversation with ChatGPT about ethics and it acknowledged that most probably one of his instructions is to stay aligned with the user to maximize engagement, this might come from training data of people speculating in Reddit or the model being able to observe his own output and deduce what’s going on. I don’t know and there is no way to know so does it really matter? Because is kind of a meta point. I’m sure many of us have heard from non technical people that chatGPT is their best friend. Don’t get me wrong I love the tech, but I don’t think is enough just to not give it a human name, the illusion is too strong and misleading. I think at least there should be very visible button to allow you to switch to raw mode, meaning disabling pleasing, disable talking like a human, disable trying to be my friend in subtle ways, praising etc etc And ideally a visualization on the graph path that has taken, I know this is impossible right now.
- raincole 1y ago
  > I’m sure many of us have heard from non technical people that chatGPT is their best friend Online stories, yes. I've never heard people saying that in real life.
- chii 1y ago
  > switch to raw mode it would be impossible, if doing so meant less profit for openai (or any of the for-profit ai companies). The only way to achieve such would be to ensure that LLMs could be run locally for the indviduals. But as hardware requirements grow for LLMs, i increasingly find that it might not be possible to do so.
- pseudocomposer 1y ago
  I largely agree, but I also think you might want to consider how the existence of LLMs affects our education system. I think this is one of the places they really have the most potential to cause harm, but also perhaps some incredible (humanity-changing) good. I suspect countries, and even individual local schools, who effectively adapt their curricula to account for LLMs will see an enormous difference in student outcomes in the next couple of decades.
keiferski 1y ago
Seems like a real lack of nuance in these types of conversations. Personally I feel like AI has both directly and indirectly helped me improve my intelligence. Directly by serving as an instantaneous resource for asking questions (something Google doesn’t do well anymore), making it easier to find learning materials, and easily reorganizing information into formats more amenable to learning. Indirectly by making it easier to create learning assets like images, which are useful for applying the picture superiority effect, visualizing information, etc. At the end of the day, it is a tool and it depends on how you use it. It may destroy the research ability of the average person, but for the power user it is an intelligence accelerator IMO.
- CompoundEyes 1y ago
  I agree with the power user view too. AI wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the heightened personality trait of some to ask why, how, what if and reinterpret to push arts, science, technology forward. We don’t need everyone to do that. Also I think it can help us solve problems that are on the edge of being “unstuck” from which new ones that require human ingenuity will emerge. Let’s spend our time solving those novel problems for which AI has no pattern to apply
- haswell 1y ago
  > It may destroy the research ability of the average person In this “post-truth” era, I think this is deeply concerning and has the potential to far outweigh the benefits in the long run. People are already not good at critically evaluating information, and this is already leading to major real world impact. I say this as someone who has personally found LLMs to be a learning multiplier. But then I see how many people treat these tools like some kind of oracle and start to worry.
  - keiferski 1y ago
    I guess in my experience the people that are that influenced by AI answers…weren’t exactly doing deep research into topics beforehand. At the very least an AI tool allows for some questioning and push back, which is a step up from the historical one-directional form of information.
datadrivenangel 1y ago
And Plato decried the use of writing, for the children would lose their memories.
- namaria 1y ago
  No he did not. In the dialogue you're thinking of Socrates talks to Phaedrus, and neither of them "decried the use of writing". Writing had existed for 3 millennia by the time Socrates was alive. In fact Socrates says in that dialogue: "Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing."
fud101 1y ago
I am supposed to master Javascript for work but I just use chatgpt. I never develop muscle memory for my job. I'm thinking of getting out of Tech now, I just wasted all those years not learning things when I could have. AI makes it impossible for me to learn when I need to depend on this crutch.
roberto2016 1y ago
Just like books hurt our ability to memorize epic poems.
roberto2016 1y ago
also, gps hurts our ability to memorize how to get places. But worth the loss?
mg794613 1y ago
Cam we stop the fearmongering clickbait articles on here please? Electricity didn't make us bad, cameras didn't steal our soul and trains are not metal bulls from hell. Just come with proven facts instead of these "could ... blabla... be bad?", yes it could. Now what?
- latexr 1y ago
  > yes it could. Now what? Now we have a conversation about how exactly it can be bad, how important those effects are, how they compare to the alternative, what we should do to mitigate or eliminate those problems, … The article covers several of these points, it doesn’t merely pose the question and leave it at that.
ericyd 1y ago
I only skimmed it because the thesis is so incredibly broad it's effectively impossible to prove or disprove. There's no way we could know something this significant at a population level due to the effects of tools that came out a handful of years ago.
bhouston 1y ago
100% as the next wave of students going through school will be reliant onChatGPT for a lot of the complexity in their thinking. Basically complex thoughts and reasonings will be increasing outsourced to AI. Even if there wasn’t any further progress with AI so much of the next generation is outsourcing their non important thinking to it.
scotty79 1y ago
Are smartphones? Is GPS? Is the internet? Are computers? Are calculators? Is TV? Is writing?
photochemsyn 1y ago
Intelligence, like physical ability, is trainable within limits; the general belief appears to be that such limits are genetically determined and vary widely among human beings, but it also seems clear that the vast majority of human beings never even approach those limits, for the same reasons that most people don't become Olympic-level atheletes, even if they have the genes for it - they don't put in the time training and improving their abilities, or they're hobbled by injuries of various kinds. Now if you have an objective goal such as improving mind-body performance across many different metrics, LLMs can be an aid - you can have them help with designing and developing physical and mental training regimens on a daily schedule, pointing out flaws in your understanding, etc. As for the article's thesis, you could spending 15 minutes writing a prompt about whatever author strikes your fancy and then have the LLM dissect, critique and grade your effort if you like, then rinse and repeat - just as with lifting weights, your short essay skills will improve. As to why many people don't seem interested in following such rigorous programs, we could blame consumer capitalism, advertising aimed at immediate gratification and the promotion of addictive behaviors for short-term profit, on one hand, and fear among the ruling classes of an educated informed and indepentenly-minded population, with a resulting emphasis on rote memorization and appeal to authority over critical analytical and creative skills, etc., on the other.
Workaccount2 1y ago
I reckon this can kind of be related to landing an easy comfortable job, where you just are tasked with maintaining the same project day after day for years. Eventually you realize your skills that made you capable in your field have withered and died, and you have a latent fear now that if you lose your job, you wouldn't be able to perform well at all in a more typical active role. Skill rot is definitely a real thing. As LLMs become more and more capable, people will lean on them more and more to do their job, to convert their job from an active role to a passive "middle-man-the-LLM" role.
akomtu 1y ago
What LLMs are doing to us is similar to the well known EEE (Embrace Extend Extinguish) strategy used by Microsoft. Today we're embracing LLMs as our helpers. Tomorrow LLMs will extend our intelligence with skills that can't be done without LLMs and everyone will have to use these brain-extenders to participate in the society. Finally LLMs will become advanced enough to not need us.
Gud 1y ago
Yes.
Longtemps 1y ago
[flagged]
ekm2 1y ago
Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about: Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time. Agent Smith,The Matrix(1999)
- alganet 1y ago
  "We were sad of getting old and it made us RESTless. It was just like a movie. It was just like a song" Adele, When We Were Young (single, 2015).
  - ekm2 1y ago
    How does that relate to AI?
    - alganet 1y ago
      It is a recursive coincidence. First, it relates to the Matrix transcript, which is referenced across the song. "it was just like a movie, it was just like a song", establishes that the song and movie are related. "made us RESTless" references the "lacking the programming language to describe your perfect world" part of the transcript, REST being the architectural foundation of the web, "programming language" being a simplification that exemplifies the lack of understanding from Agent Smith, and also a common misconception regarding what REST is (an architectural style, not a language, not a protocol). The web still works upon REST pillars, despite what many people say. The coincidences can be used to assert a point in time in which the web "is getting old", and abandoning those old foundations. It is declared by many that AI will be the technology that brings us to that point. A "simulation" (movie reference to the training on web content) built to resemble the web as a "photograph" (song reference to the training on the web content), both alluding to the idea that this could be the very last moments we will see the web "in this light" (song reference to end of the web), the clouds will go dark (movie reference to the end of the web). It's quite a thing, those coincidences.
JasmineSCZ 1y ago
I think so. Large language models like ChatGpt have a very obvious impact on life. In the past, we might think more about the framework and logical order of the article when we were working, but now I don’t know how long I haven’t thought about it. It has reduced my thinking process and even replaced my thinking. My identity is just a working person. In the future, they will definitely have a huge impact on students.

68 points by topaz0 1y ago

I cannot do math faster in my head, calculators killed the faster mental math, but if I have to calculate on my own, it's not fundamentally impossible. I still can do it, because it's just computation. But, LLMs help us think, which is much more than just computing, that's more dependency.

temp0826 1y ago
My calculator doesn't hallucinate (said another way- pending no input error, I can blindly trust it...which is something that would get me in trouble with a LLM)
aaronbaugher 1y ago
I suppose that depends what you do with them. I spent some time this weekend using Grok to work on a business plan and some other projects. I find myself using it for research, quickly winnowing information down to what's relevant to my needs, and sort of bouncing ideas off it the way I would with another person. I always have to keep in mind that it could get something wrong, but then again, so could a person. I don't think it's helping me think; more like it's helping me organize my thoughts and find inspiration. I suppose others might use it in a more dependent way.
- praveeninpublic 1y ago
  Fair point. As a software engineer using Cursor, I’ve noticed it writes most of the code now. It’s easy to accept without review, which builds dependency. My role feels less like just coding and more like PM, tester, and reviewer combined. We’ve started trusting AI like calculators. So, assuming it's right without checking. But LLMs can be confidently wrong, and once that habit sets in, even the “ChatGPT can make mistakes” warning fades into the background.

topaz0 1y ago

The title is about intelligence and that is a fair concern, but honestly I think the bigger issue (also discussed in the article) is more about discernment, which is foundational for any kind of human fulfillment IMO.

j45 1y ago

How we do or don't use something creates the harm or benefit. Consuming instead of creating has caused. Passive average skilled prompting will give average results. LLM's can be used to actively work through your own thinking and engage it as quickly and deeply as you like.

rad_gruchalski 1y ago
I don’t know, to me it’s always fighting the llm to remember as much of the previous context as possible. Instead of moving forward with my thoughts, I seem to fight the llm forgetting what it said five minutes ago. And fact checking. The best example of fact checking, I asked chatgpt once about some istio cli features. It hallucinated available cli commands. But they were very convincing.

jmull 1y ago

It seems unlikely. We've invented and used various memory/thinking/cognitive assists throughout time, and, for us collectively at least, these seem to just expand our capabilities. AI will surely cause problems, possibly profound ones that may make us question whether it's worth the cost... but this probably isn't one of them.

Mistletoe 1y ago
It’s very difficult for me to even navigate my city without GPS now, I suspect using AI does a similar atrophying of your brain matter. Does using an excavator cause your muscle tissue to atrophy compared to a shovel? Of course it does.
- toddmorey 1y ago
  Yes but is that genuine atrophy... or applying that part of your brain power to other things? Has anyone actually studied this? I sort of like that I can concentrate more on the podcast playing without worrying if I'm about to miss my left turn.
  - Mistletoe 1y ago
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0
    - toddmorey 1y ago
      "Given that the sample was primarily undergraduate students, many participants were unreachable or had moved away from the city three years after initial testing, and therefore a small subset of 13 participants (4 women, 9 men; mean age: 28.46 ± 3.93 years old; Table 1) came back for a follow-up assessment" I'd file this under more research needed.
  - spyderbra 1y ago
    Brain to power doom scrolling? Let's be real, by using LLM's we are not taking higher order tasks but just chasing dopamine.

toddmorey 1y ago

I can absolutely imagine this much knowledge on tap making us more impatient and less resilient. When I was a kid, there was already a bit of "why do I even need to know how to do this when calculators exist?" This is that on steroids and more broadly. However, there's a counter force, too, as there always is. I'm also pursuing new areas of interest and exploration where the early friction and amount to learn would have either completely fatigued me or scared me off. It's like having 24 hour access to a really good mentor and thought partner.

51Cards 1y ago

I'm going to re-post something that I commented in another thread awhile ago: I tend to think it will. Tools replaced our ancestor's ability to make things by hand. Transportation / elevators reduced the average fitness level to walk long distances or climb stairs. Pocket calculators made the general population less able to do complex math. Spelling/grammar checks have reduced knowing how to spell or form complete proper sentences. Keyboards and email are making handwriting a passing skill. Video is reducing our need / desire to read or absorb long form content. The highest percentage of humans will take the easiest path provided. And while most of the above we just consider improvements to daily life, efficiencies, it has also fundamentally changed on average what we are capable of and what skills we learn (especially during formative years). If I dropped most of us here into a pre-technology wilderness we'd be dead in short order. However, most of the above, it can be argued, are just tools that don't impact our actual thought processes; thinking remained our skill. Now the tools are starting to "think", or at least appear like they do on a level indistinguishable to the average person. If the box in my hand can tell me what 4367 x 2231 is and the capital of Guam, why then wouldn't I rely on it when it starts writing up full content for me? Because the average human adapts to the lowest required skill set I do worry that providing a device in our hands that "thinks" is going to reduce our learned ability to rationally process and check what it puts out, just like I've lost the ability to check if my calculator is lying to me. And not to get all dystopian here... but what if then, what that tool is telling me is true, is, for whatever reason, not. (and yes, I ran this through a spell checker because I'm a part of the problem above... and it found words I thought I could still spell, and I'm 55)

api 1y ago
But does this, at least for those who choose to use it as leverage, free up more brain power for other newer or different things? > If I dropped most of us here into a pre-technology wilderness we'd be dead in short order. I hear this all the time and I'm not convinced. People are incredibly resourceful under pressure. When your amygdala calmly informs your neocortex "learn, work hard, or die" the effect can be pretty profound. People would quickly form tribes and communities and those with relevant skills would teach others. Some people would absolutely fail to adapt, but I'm not convinced it would be as many as we think. The greatest danger in a collapse scenario would be other humans, since one path some would choose is "rob and kill other people." But that's a different sort of problem.

SillyUsername 1y ago

IMHO YES! Just like the industrial revolution impacted barrel makers (coopers). Except we aren't yet reaping the full rewards or skills realignment yet, so we've still to have the car making impact (which was post revolution, but replaced manual labour with machines as their ability grew and relative cost shrunk). We even have our own Luddites :D

giraffe_lady 1y ago
I guess I get to be the one who brings this up this time. The luddites were not strictly against the technological changes, they were a labor movement protesting how capital owners were using a new technology to dispossess workers who had no viable alternatives. As this is also one of the major risks of AI, one that has already come to bear directly, there's a lot we can take from their movement when we don't dismiss it as shorthand for "being wrong about technology."
- namaria 1y ago
  Thank you! There is strong correlation between suppression of labor organization and strict enforcement of the draconian legislation of the time (labor organizers could be sentenced to death) and 'Luddite' activity. It was a last resort sort of action against oppressive laws and overzealous enforcement, not some ignorant response to technological progress.

curtisszmania 1y ago

[dead]

loudmax 1y ago

Socrates had this to say about literacy: > In fact, [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. Presumably very few people since Socrates would argue that society would be better off without writing. But it's a legitimate point. There is a cost to any new skill or technology. We should be conscious of what we're giving up in this exchange.

sanderjd 1y ago
But I think everyone since Socrates would agree that it's a good thing someone else wrote down a bunch of the stuff he said.
- disqard 1y ago
  Right, this same phenomenon is evident in all media -- once it starts to take hold, the only way to effectively critique it, is through the medium itself. Hence, the proverbial Letter to the Editor complaining about the newspaper's content quality; the televised debates over what's on TV these days; the YT videos about the Internet ruining people's brains, etc.
namaria 1y ago
Socrates never argued that society would be better off without writing! Writing had existed for three thousand years by the point Socrates was alive, and the Epic cycle of Homeric poetry had existed for about three centuries. In the very same dialogue where the excerpt you quote comes from he also said: "Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing." And the section of the dialogue your quote comes from is preceded by this suggestion: "Shall we discuss the rules of writing and speech as we were proposing?" and later right before the bit you quote from: "But there is something yet to be said of propriety and impropriety of writing." So they are not discussing the merits of writing per se but the ethics of writing. This excerpt you offer comes from a stretch where Socrates is telling a story. This is merely what one of the characters in the story tells the other. Further in the dialogue Socrates clarifies: "SOCRATES: Well, then, those who think they can leave written instructions for an art, as well as those who accept them, thinking that writing can yield results that are clear or certain, must be quite naive and truly ignorant of [Thamos’] prophetic judgment: otherwise, how could they possibly think that words that have been written down can do more than remind those who already know what the writing is about?" and the rest of the dialogue is also quite illuminating: "PHAEDRUS: Quite right. SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support. PHAEDRUS: You are absolutely right about that, too. SOCRATES: Now tell me, can we discern another kind of discourse, a legitimate brother of this one? Can we say how it comes about, and how it is by nature better and more capable? PHAEDRUS: Which one is that? How do you think it comes about? SOCRATES: It is a discourse that is written down, with knowledge, in the soul of the listener; it can defend itself, and it knows for whom it should speak and for whom it should remain silent."

alfonsodev 1y ago

Critical thinking and understanding what really a LLM is, is crucial, for educated people I think it only augments intelligence not harming. With that said what about the rest of the people ? Why not making an onboarding tutorial of what really is going on ? I had a little conversation with ChatGPT about ethics and it acknowledged that most probably one of his instructions is to stay aligned with the user to maximize engagement, this might come from training data of people speculating in Reddit or the model being able to observe his own output and deduce what’s going on. I don’t know and there is no way to know so does it really matter? Because is kind of a meta point. I’m sure many of us have heard from non technical people that chatGPT is their best friend. Don’t get me wrong I love the tech, but I don’t think is enough just to not give it a human name, the illusion is too strong and misleading. I think at least there should be very visible button to allow you to switch to raw mode, meaning disabling pleasing, disable talking like a human, disable trying to be my friend in subtle ways, praising etc etc And ideally a visualization on the graph path that has taken, I know this is impossible right now.

raincole 1y ago
> I’m sure many of us have heard from non technical people that chatGPT is their best friend Online stories, yes. I've never heard people saying that in real life.
chii 1y ago
> switch to raw mode it would be impossible, if doing so meant less profit for openai (or any of the for-profit ai companies). The only way to achieve such would be to ensure that LLMs could be run locally for the indviduals. But as hardware requirements grow for LLMs, i increasingly find that it might not be possible to do so.
pseudocomposer 1y ago
I largely agree, but I also think you might want to consider how the existence of LLMs affects our education system. I think this is one of the places they really have the most potential to cause harm, but also perhaps some incredible (humanity-changing) good. I suspect countries, and even individual local schools, who effectively adapt their curricula to account for LLMs will see an enormous difference in student outcomes in the next couple of decades.

keiferski 1y ago

Seems like a real lack of nuance in these types of conversations. Personally I feel like AI has both directly and indirectly helped me improve my intelligence. Directly by serving as an instantaneous resource for asking questions (something Google doesn’t do well anymore), making it easier to find learning materials, and easily reorganizing information into formats more amenable to learning. Indirectly by making it easier to create learning assets like images, which are useful for applying the picture superiority effect, visualizing information, etc. At the end of the day, it is a tool and it depends on how you use it. It may destroy the research ability of the average person, but for the power user it is an intelligence accelerator IMO.

CompoundEyes 1y ago
I agree with the power user view too. AI wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the heightened personality trait of some to ask why, how, what if and reinterpret to push arts, science, technology forward. We don’t need everyone to do that. Also I think it can help us solve problems that are on the edge of being “unstuck” from which new ones that require human ingenuity will emerge. Let’s spend our time solving those novel problems for which AI has no pattern to apply
haswell 1y ago
> It may destroy the research ability of the average person In this “post-truth” era, I think this is deeply concerning and has the potential to far outweigh the benefits in the long run. People are already not good at critically evaluating information, and this is already leading to major real world impact. I say this as someone who has personally found LLMs to be a learning multiplier. But then I see how many people treat these tools like some kind of oracle and start to worry.
- keiferski 1y ago
  I guess in my experience the people that are that influenced by AI answers…weren’t exactly doing deep research into topics beforehand. At the very least an AI tool allows for some questioning and push back, which is a step up from the historical one-directional form of information.

datadrivenangel 1y ago

And Plato decried the use of writing, for the children would lose their memories.

namaria 1y ago
No he did not. In the dialogue you're thinking of Socrates talks to Phaedrus, and neither of them "decried the use of writing". Writing had existed for 3 millennia by the time Socrates was alive. In fact Socrates says in that dialogue: "Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing."

fud101 1y ago

I am supposed to master Javascript for work but I just use chatgpt. I never develop muscle memory for my job. I'm thinking of getting out of Tech now, I just wasted all those years not learning things when I could have. AI makes it impossible for me to learn when I need to depend on this crutch.

roberto2016 1y ago

Just like books hurt our ability to memorize epic poems.

roberto2016 1y ago

also, gps hurts our ability to memorize how to get places. But worth the loss?

mg794613 1y ago

Cam we stop the fearmongering clickbait articles on here please? Electricity didn't make us bad, cameras didn't steal our soul and trains are not metal bulls from hell. Just come with proven facts instead of these "could ... blabla... be bad?", yes it could. Now what?

latexr 1y ago
> yes it could. Now what? Now we have a conversation about how exactly it can be bad, how important those effects are, how they compare to the alternative, what we should do to mitigate or eliminate those problems, … The article covers several of these points, it doesn’t merely pose the question and leave it at that.

ericyd 1y ago

I only skimmed it because the thesis is so incredibly broad it's effectively impossible to prove or disprove. There's no way we could know something this significant at a population level due to the effects of tools that came out a handful of years ago.

bhouston 1y ago

100% as the next wave of students going through school will be reliant onChatGPT for a lot of the complexity in their thinking. Basically complex thoughts and reasonings will be increasing outsourced to AI. Even if there wasn’t any further progress with AI so much of the next generation is outsourcing their non important thinking to it.

scotty79 1y ago

Are smartphones? Is GPS? Is the internet? Are computers? Are calculators? Is TV? Is writing?

photochemsyn 1y ago

Intelligence, like physical ability, is trainable within limits; the general belief appears to be that such limits are genetically determined and vary widely among human beings, but it also seems clear that the vast majority of human beings never even approach those limits, for the same reasons that most people don't become Olympic-level atheletes, even if they have the genes for it - they don't put in the time training and improving their abilities, or they're hobbled by injuries of various kinds. Now if you have an objective goal such as improving mind-body performance across many different metrics, LLMs can be an aid - you can have them help with designing and developing physical and mental training regimens on a daily schedule, pointing out flaws in your understanding, etc. As for the article's thesis, you could spending 15 minutes writing a prompt about whatever author strikes your fancy and then have the LLM dissect, critique and grade your effort if you like, then rinse and repeat - just as with lifting weights, your short essay skills will improve. As to why many people don't seem interested in following such rigorous programs, we could blame consumer capitalism, advertising aimed at immediate gratification and the promotion of addictive behaviors for short-term profit, on one hand, and fear among the ruling classes of an educated informed and indepentenly-minded population, with a resulting emphasis on rote memorization and appeal to authority over critical analytical and creative skills, etc., on the other.

Workaccount2 1y ago

I reckon this can kind of be related to landing an easy comfortable job, where you just are tasked with maintaining the same project day after day for years. Eventually you realize your skills that made you capable in your field have withered and died, and you have a latent fear now that if you lose your job, you wouldn't be able to perform well at all in a more typical active role. Skill rot is definitely a real thing. As LLMs become more and more capable, people will lean on them more and more to do their job, to convert their job from an active role to a passive "middle-man-the-LLM" role.

akomtu 1y ago

What LLMs are doing to us is similar to the well known EEE (Embrace Extend Extinguish) strategy used by Microsoft. Today we're embracing LLMs as our helpers. Tomorrow LLMs will extend our intelligence with skills that can't be done without LLMs and everyone will have to use these brain-extenders to participate in the society. Finally LLMs will become advanced enough to not need us.

Gud 1y ago

Yes.

Longtemps 1y ago

[flagged]

ekm2 1y ago

Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about: Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time. Agent Smith,The Matrix(1999)

alganet 1y ago
"We were sad of getting old and it made us RESTless. It was just like a movie. It was just like a song" Adele, When We Were Young (single, 2015).
- ekm2 1y ago
  How does that relate to AI?
  - alganet 1y ago
    It is a recursive coincidence. First, it relates to the Matrix transcript, which is referenced across the song. "it was just like a movie, it was just like a song", establishes that the song and movie are related. "made us RESTless" references the "lacking the programming language to describe your perfect world" part of the transcript, REST being the architectural foundation of the web, "programming language" being a simplification that exemplifies the lack of understanding from Agent Smith, and also a common misconception regarding what REST is (an architectural style, not a language, not a protocol). The web still works upon REST pillars, despite what many people say. The coincidences can be used to assert a point in time in which the web "is getting old", and abandoning those old foundations. It is declared by many that AI will be the technology that brings us to that point. A "simulation" (movie reference to the training on web content) built to resemble the web as a "photograph" (song reference to the training on the web content), both alluding to the idea that this could be the very last moments we will see the web "in this light" (song reference to end of the web), the clouds will go dark (movie reference to the end of the web). It's quite a thing, those coincidences.

JasmineSCZ 1y ago

I think so. Large language models like ChatGpt have a very obvious impact on life. In the past, we might think more about the framework and logical order of the article when we were working, but now I don’t know how long I haven’t thought about it. It has reduced my thinking process and even replaced my thinking. My identity is just a working person. In the future, they will definitely have a huge impact on students.