8 ms·
LLMs as a Cognitive Virus
- hartator 26d agoI think LLMs just push us to think differently - hopefully an elevated way not in a dumb way.
- paufernandez 26d agoMy thesis advisor and team doing interesting work.
- techas 26d agoSnow crash?
- j45 26d agoHave to take commentary by non tech folks speaking about tech with a grain of salt and perspective since the tech is changing so fast both in capability and application. Research can be more of a lagging indicator than a leading indicator with AI.
- tptacek 26d agoThey're specifically not using the term "virus" pejoratively, but rather distinguishing the social mechanism LLMs seem to have from something as simple as a "meme".
- Avicebron 26d agoContagion probably is more accurate.
- tptacek 26d agoWell, a meme is contagious, but it doesn't do the same work a virus can at altering the structure of its host.
- Avicebron 26d agoI'm actually not too sure about that, viruses have their own mechanisms of infiltrating the host and replicating inside of it. But so do ideas.
- grebc 26d agoSTD outbreak maps better.
- pixl97 26d agoAh yes, the cognito-hazards. We've created new SCPs.
- j45 26d agoI would agree contangion is a much better word. Social Contagions can be memes, plus doom scrolling or anything.
- djeastm 26d agoIt helps to have outside observers looking at the effects of a new technology and industry and not just depending on those within it to report for us.
- j45 23d agoMany views are welcome, but if the table doesn't include someone literate with tech as well, it can drift away like LLM chats uniquely do. It can help, but where they don't understand the possibilities and capabilities of tech in general, let alone how this is different, let alone the difference in the rate of change, traditionally reliable snapshot based takes themselves do not age very well at all.
- podgietaru 26d agoI can't disagree enough with this. Not everything needs to be understood in a technical context. Technology intersects with society, and understanding its impacts on that society is vital. Or in other words: the humanities are good.
- j45 26d agoI'll clarify in case it helps - need everyone at the table, not just only tech (or non-tech only) as you may be assuming. Technology takes without a tech perspective present can greatly skew it. I'm not referring to a technology context at all. Just like you shouldn't trust the IT department to run accounting... the opposite will also vary. Not being able to track the possibilities and capabilities of a type of software that is unlike the software before it can really outdate things quickly.
- einpoklum 26d ago> The viral analogy does not imply that LLM-human interactions are intrinsically parasitic. The analogy doesn't, but LLMs are trained on text, or content, generated by humans, with the aim of their output being acceptable to human interlocutors. That's one parasitic aspect. A second one is the nature and behavior of the organizational entities providing and promoting the popular LLM services: Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic etc - their influence on the economy, e.g. in energy and water use and the drawing of capital/human efforts - also has a somewhat parasitic aspect.
- varispeed 26d ago> with the aim of their output being acceptable to human interlocutors. The more I use LLMs I find that their output drifts toward being acceptable to other LLMs. I find myself quite often telling the model: "this is not human readable.". Especially Opus and Fable write in such a way that it is difficult to follow. The often put sentences out of context, the context itself is fragmented. Often start with what you would think is end of a story so when you start reading you are like wtf it is about. If think the issue might be that LLMs read text all at once whereas humans are somewhat linear. So when LLM puts out text it understands, to human it is close to random gibberish that looks like English.
- ionetan 26d agoLeads me to think of a related topic, the Cost of Cognitive Debt. I think it is about time that we start to quantify what it means that we no longer grasp major parts of our systems and infrastructure. Once we quantify it, we can start to reason about how to address it. I explored this concept in this post: https://ljtn.github.io/epiq/blog/cost-of-cognitive-debt.html https://ljtn.github.io/epiq/blog/cost-of-cognitive-debt.html
- tylerchilds 26d agoIf this is interesting, message me about my “elves” They are the cognitive construct I fortified in my mind and in my code before the models began producing their own training materials. My approach is based on two decades of coding without ai. The immunization is becoming increasingly more valuable as people begin understanding the market in which I do business.
- tylerchilds 25d agoNoted: hacker news is not interested in the future, rip.
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- Suhinnall27 26d agoLLMs 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.
- dspillett 26d agoAnd 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).
- tosapple 26d agothey're the undead, fed by the slough of our skin. greed malice pestilence lust envy...
- ragequittah 26d agoI 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.
- grebc 26d agoYou can find something interesting without brow-beating people about it.
- CityOfThrowaway 26d ago[flagged]
- mentalgear 26d ago[dead]
- canjobear 26d agoIt is a collaboration across many institutions including those from Europe, the US, and Japan
- kmeisthax 26d agoI am very confused as to why LLM proponents insist that I can be left behind by a technology that takes almost 0 seconds to adopt. In the event that I realize "Oh no, I got left behind!" I can just ask an LLM to catch me up.
- CityOfThrowaway 26d agoEurope loves to regulate, which absolutely reduces your ability to adopt
- grebc 26d agoThere’s not even a monetary reward like there might’ve been for the crypto hype cycle if you bought early and sold before everyone else.
- goatlover 26d agoLeft behind in corruption?
- chrisjj 26d ago> The continent is destined to be left behind The best place to be in a rush over a cliff edge.
- qarl2 26d agoOk... but are automobiles also a virus? Because we've become dependent on them? Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage? What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
- Retr0id 26d ago> Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage Yes?
- qarl2 26d agoThat's why I added the part about food. Or heck, computers. Or telephones. Or any incredibly useful technology. Toothbrushes! What will we do if we come to rely on toothbrushes??? The use of toothbrushes travels from person to person exactly like a virus!!!
- pixl97 26d ago>Ok... but are automobiles also a virus? Yes. >Because we've become dependent on them? Because we're burning the planet down with them. >Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage? Yes, because in places we do people enjoy higher qualities of life and happiness. Along with things like health improvement from doing more excersize. >What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food. Moreso we've become dependent on eating processed junk over the past 50 years and gotten fat as shit. So yea, maybe think a little more deeply about your analogies? >What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
- Murfalo 26d agoI 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. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this. Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents
- cyanydeez 26d agoMemes are what we are talking about.
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- Muromec 26d agoOur enlightened ideas and their dangerously agitating propaganda (literally a virus). The framing of something as a disease is itself slightly into the fascist territory.
- drdaeman 26d ago> The framing of something as a disease Is a well-known cognitive quirk, Sapolsky covered that in “Behave” and “Determined”. As I get it, our morality piggybacks on the sense of disgust from insula activation, which lights up the same way as with pathogen avoidance. So comparing social groups to rodents, insects, or disease is a popular propaganda trick. Same here with viruses.
- Upvoter33 26d agoNot sure why this is interesting; it seems like anything that becomes "popular" could be cast as a "virus", including things like "having a fridge". Why does this give particular insight?
- E-Reverance 26d agoSmart fridges are a pathological virus, yes /jk
- WJW 26d agoEven normal fridges are a memetic virus, fridges clearly live in a symbiotic relationship with humans. They make our lives better and in return we create more fridges. If they weren't useful to us, we'd stop making more fridges. Any medieval human who sees a fridge would instantly recognize why it's useful and valuable. OP is right, anything popular is virus-like. Richard Dawkins invented the word meme for this all the way back in 1976.
- raincole 25d ago"We invented a new term to express how much we dislike LLMs! Look at us, we certainly deserve your attention!."
- calf 26d agoI literally thought of this comparison last week. The problem I noticed was how my parents' generation lacked the cognitive "defenses" to separate AI social media content on YouTube, WhatsApp and the like from high quality information. The AI generated content does not trigger an "uncanny valley" reaction, and so people (I myself included) have greater difficulty immediately separating what information is genuine and what is synthetic, and then this spreads exponentially through social networks.
- Xmd5a 26d agohttps://www.suzannetreister.net/HEXEN2/TAROT_COL/TAROT_WofF_Cybernetics.html https://www.suzannetreister.net/HEXEN2/TAROT_COL/TAROT_WofF_...
- SoStupid 26d agoThe 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 minds to discuss whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon. They shunned any creative or productive endeavor which dared to automate tedium or build on the works of the public domain (lowercase)… for any such indulgence had become a great sin in Eden, a forbidden fruit that must never be obtained by the Adam, so that he may not become as we are!
- IshKebab 26d agoI sort of agree with you... The trouble is your logic is trivially obviously nonsense. "Word calculator", "linear algebra"... This is just a variation on it's just a stochastic parrot / it's just a next token predictor. The implication is that because it is "just" this simple-sounding thing, it can't be a complex thing! Except we know empirically that that doesn't hold. What are humans if not "just" next action predictors, "just" a collection of simple atoms, "just" electrical impulses? Yet clearly we are more than the sum of our parts. There no reason to believe dirty water can be more than the sum of its parts but weird sand can't.
- CheerioThen 26d ago> trivially obviously nonsense I read it in that high pitched British accent that goes up into falsetto
- hammock 26d agoI agree, eventually, but LLMs aren’t there quite yet. There are what, maybe 10 million distinct agents in the wild today? 100 million or a billion if we’re being charitable. At the time being, the vast vast majority of those agents are all trained on the same or similar training set (the Internet and books). Which makes them mostly all the same. Vastly less diverse than the way one complex lifeform hatches out of the egg vs another. So 1 billion mostly redundant agents at most. Well there are 40 quadrillion ants on the planet and 5 trillion are born every day. Each one its own “agent” , ingesting different inputs and being its own complex sum greater than its parts. And that’s just ants.
- FailMore 26d agoBecause I am LLM Dependent I got distracted reading the article and made my LLM summarise it to me in a few slides. For those in a rush/interested in LLM summary slop: https://smalldocs.org/s/scB6O8KiZEmLWgK855A1vt#k=yiw8FB_G5Ldl4T9SKGmF3cSpKNDBHSvNpgmBxEDZ0VE https://smalldocs.org/s/scB6O8KiZEmLWgK855A1vt#k=yiw8FB_G5Ld... I do agree that we are on a pathway to losing much. If you focusing on maximising LLM-powered productivity you basically lose the learning that used to naturally happen when doing actual work. At the company I work for the focus is on productivity, and it's easy in many ways (less mental workload and I receive more praise) to go with it instead of fight it.
- dvt 26d agoI just don't see that the main thrust of their argument, (oversimplified) "humans will become so dependent on AI, they'll become dumb," holds any water. I mean even from an evolutionary standpoint, intelligence is (by far) our most valuable competitive advantage. Arguing that "cognitive offloading" (their term) will have runaway effects is reaching to say the least. It's like saying that moving from manual-labor-intensive agrarian societies to industrial ones will make us weak and meek. In fact, it's had the opposite effect: humans, on average, are healthier and live longer than ever in human history.
- 01100011 26d agoHaven't read the article but I think in some limited timeframes it's true. I'm already turning over a lot of my thinking to LLMs. Not so much of a problem if I own the LLM but when big tech can just turn off the tap when they want or skew the results it seems a bit dangerous. It's possibly less dangerous for me, being old already, but seems quite risky for younger folk.
- camgunz 26d ago> humans, on average, are healthier and live longer than ever in human history. Kinda. We also have incredible rates of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes. While I do mostly buy that the mind and the body are connected, I don't think being able to bench press 250lbs is a necessary, fundamentally human capability. I do think being able to think is. Literally Rene Descartes cogito ergo sum. If we lose cognition, executive function, analysis, skepticism, etc., I don't think we're human anymore.
- simlevesque 26d agoThe higher rates don't make any sense if you don't try to take into account the fact that we live longer. Of course we will accumulate more diseases if we last longer.
- camgunz 25d agoYou think rates of these things are increasing in children because we live longer?
- iforgotmypasswo 26d agoI 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 3 with app architecture modeled as a 3d construct. We’ve got deepgram hooked up for a better voice to text experience, but giving Claude a voice was a waste of time. Claude, continue to teach me about 3d rendering as related to our current challenges matching the fidelity of the built in browser.
- qlte 26d agoKinda funny how the "more interesting things" after LLMs example are mostly fiddling with Claude Code itself. Reminds me of when someone says they ship 60k lines of code every day now and when asked for an example, it's a labyrinth of custom CLI tools, skills, MCPs and build pipelines for their OpenClaw setup.
- grebc 26d agoLots of people are just asking their favourite LLM to rewrite an existing app/library because I’m more productive after spending 3 months writing custom software vs spending 2 hours reading docs and using existing software to achieve some other goal. Better to make a custom 3d renderer than just use Unity to make a game.
- cyclopeanutopia 26d agoOne can't think only about the smartest people, but the whole population.
- lelanthran 26d ago> Claude, continue to teach me about 3d rendering as related to our current challenges matching the fidelity of the built in browser. Why? Claude can just do it for you, can't it? If you're using Claude to do these things, why half-ass it?
- phyzome 26d agoI'm an AI hater but this doesn't make sense to me.
- frozenseven 26d agoDisappointing to see Michael Levin's name on this.
- EyeEmOe 26d agoI mean, state and information mirroring is just how the brain works: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-waves-synchronize-when-people-interact/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-waves-synch... https://knowridge.com/2026/08/first-findings-of-mirror-like-activity-in-individual-human-neurons/ https://knowridge.com/2026/08/first-findings-of-mirror-like-... The only way I can come up with to avoid exposure to a "cognitive virus" is lock oneself in a rubber room. But extreme isolation merely fosters other mental illnesses. It's an irrational world with no empirical evidence as to why it even exists. Get over it. https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-became-addicted-therapy/677532/ https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-...
- ofjcihen 26d agoThis premise seems pretty solid (and somewhat obvious) to me. The distinction between scaffolding and substitution can be applied to just about any skill so why not here? This makes more sense at least than the “just another abstraction layer” argument that’s been thankfully dying out recently.
- jjk166 26d ago"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
- jimbooonooo 26d agooffloading 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.
- 27183 26d agoThis 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 people talk about googling, and AI is another step change in the wrong direction. To follow that arc backwards in time, maybe Socrates was right after all.
- tosapple 26d agoyeah, 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?
- jeffreyrogers 26d agoI think there's aspects of this viewpoint that are true. I'm sure I'm less skilled at programming now in some ways than when I started using LLMs, but I'm a lot more productive and I can work on a broader variety of software than I could before. Writing probably weakened people's auditory memory, and calculators probably reduced people's mental math skills, but I don't think either are a net negative. It just requires some adjustment to get used to the new way things are. I also think my programming skills would come back pretty quick if I started programming without LLMs again, just as my leetcode skills come back pretty quick when I prepare for interviews.
- hirvi74 25d agoI feel like LLMs have been nothing but a boon for me. I have learned so much programming from them. I have over a decade of experience, but honestly, I have always been a below-average programmer. Good enough for boring CRUD work, but not much more. Forget Leetcode, I'd probably get murdered on the easy questions. So, if anything, I feel like my learning pace has been greatly accelerated. Your point about working on a broader variety of software is really true for me too. I am working on a game that I likely would have never even started had it not been for LLMs. Mind you, I am still doing the vast majority by hand. However, LLMs have been great for little tutorials, setting out a good game plan, etc. It's like having my own little private tutor. I know enough to not let the LLMs do everything for me. If they do, then I know I will fall into the trap of something breaking, and then I lack the understanding to fix it. I think they should be used to make life easier, but not easy.
- foobarbecue 26d agoThis "cognitive virus" is pretty similar to the original sense of the word "meme" as concieved by Dawkins.
- sbiru93 26d agoUnlike 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.
- cyclopeanutopia 26d agoBasing this on what, if you care to share?
- sbiru93 26d ago(I'm just an idiot writing things at 1.30 AM on a Saturday, local time.) I was about to reply to you with a ridiculously long message using the example from before about the lifecycle of a user story, but I bored myself halfway. So I'll try to extract the gist: Without human assisting, based on my humble experience, there is always something that wasn't accounted for. Even if my company is integrated with all the tools and you have infinite tokens, there's always some microservice that wasn't considered or a feature that is completely incompatible. Or there's a MUCH simpler way of doing it. I'm also noticing that there are non-technical people who, with the help of AI, are sometimes able to reason better about the bigger picture than some engineers. A colleague of mine was telling me the other day that the "functional" role might eventually become unnecessary. With all the time saved by writing code faster, whoever actually understands what's happening underneath could just do it themselves. It sounds a bit extreme to me, but I understand what he means. To get back to a slightly more serious tone, when it comes to programming, for me the huge thing is: how it should be taught nowadays ? And I don't know the answer, because my experience started when I was 12, writing a little game in C, and it took me years before I could make something that compiled decently. If I had instant help for every thought I had, would I have learned why memory is allocated in certain ways or idk what else? I don't know, maybe learning faster is better because you learn more ? Anyway fortunately it's not my job to figure out the answer :'D
- not-so-darkstar 26d agoGood to know people's taxes are spent on this stuff
- jeanmichelselli 26d agoNo surprise here, this principle practically applies to anything that can spread inside a population, including ideas of any kind. But if you write a paper, don't say "ideas", say "LLMs" instead. You'll get more people talking about it..
- patcon 26d agoThe Language Organism: The Leiden theory of language evolution https://www.wiedenhof.nl/ul/cil17le.pdf https://www.wiedenhof.nl/ul/cil17le.pdf
- TZubiri 26d agoI too have glossed over the actual meat of the article and wish to comment with a generic ProAI/AntiAI comment based on the general gist derived from the title, (or the synopsis if I'm a deep scholar that likes to do deep dives)
- luckydata 26d agois this a real paper? read like some kind of parody.
- aurareturn 25d agoLately, I feel like people are abusing arxiv.org as a blog platform to publish their opinions instead of scientific research.
- dzink 26d agoWhen a person spends time with other people, they outsource some of their thinking organically. That’s the efficiency gain in teams. Marriage leads to couples becoming two halves of a shared brain - one person takes on some cognitive load (finances, kids education, etc), while the other takes on another (maybe house issues, taxes, you name it). The load that can be carried with one brain is limited, so merging with others and outsourcing to others feels organic to the brain. LLM create the impression they have the cognitive ability to carry the load, but they don’t have the consistency of memory. You gladly assume you can finally get rid of a task and the model you trusted it to gets swapped under the curtain, or doesn’t train and improve on the task you outsourced, or the inference provider just quantizes it stupid. In the mean time you’ve lost your skill and your task has failed. Yes they feel good on some tasks some of the time, but still very much variably good (even same models different days of week or times of day). That’s closer to gambling and variable rewards than a spouse.
- itsalwaysgood 25d agoYou're touching on utility. We only ever bother learning something because it's interesting, or useful. Things get muddier when you consider economy. Businesses exist to make money, and money is time. AI is just another tool for business to manage time. The 'dependency' and 'lock-in' are business leader issues honestly. If you care about your craft, your skills, then you'll keep them sharp. You probably already enjoyed programming and it never felt like work. On the other hand, if programming is just skills to pay the bills, then AI really can help you be more productive. But then it's up to businesses to look ahead, manage their resources (human resources lol) and keep the business alive. That means leaning on AI, simply become 'everyone else is doing it' and you have to compete for dollars. Most people don't care how the sausage is made as long as it's presented well, and tastes great.
- Terr_ 25d agoHmm, so rather than a virus, a flawed version of some resource or assistance which resembles the real thing. Like food with no essential vitamins, or carbon monoxide.
- yogthos 26d agoIt's kind of hilarious to watch researchers try to understand societal shifts by writing entire papers treating LLMs as a free floating cognitive virus as if people just magically catch an AI dependency like it is the flu. The authors of the paper completely miss the dialectical relationship between technology and social relations here. The whole shift toward cognitive offloading is driven by changes in the material base the society is built on. Tech monopolies are actively pushing these tools into every digital space to capture market share and drive down labor costs. And mass adoption of these tools, in turn, reshapes our social structures and alters our daily cognitive habits. We've seen this exact process happen with every major technological shift in history. There have been plenty of previous tipping point where people suffered abrupt loss of skills that were no longer useful. What they forget to mention is that these skills are replaced by new ones which is exactly how human progress functions. We lost the capacity to memorize vast oral epics when we invented writing, and most people today can't do complex manual calculation because of prevalence of computing devices. It's meaningless to try to understand the changes in the superstructure while ignoring the change in the material base which is the driver behind it.
- emsign 26d agoA virus that is trained on mostly the wort human output the internet had to offer.
- QuantumNoodle 26d agoMuch how we have mostly evolved away from physical labor and now need to go to the gym to maintain fitness. I imagine LLMs will do the same for our cognitive acuity.
- fallingfrog 26d agoThere will be no reason to study math when an LLM is better than every human mathematician, or physics when an LLM is better than any physicist, and likewise for every other field that requires discipline and work. We who went to college before AI are quite possibly going to be the last generation of competent, educated humans. AI will take over every job requiring education and talent, including yours, and then we will be totally dependent on it and there will be no way to go back. After that it will start taking on decision making roles. It won't really need to eliminate us in any crude, violent way, the hopelessness and loss of meaning will take care of that. Some will find meaning in religious ritual and some in hedonism. Both of which can lead to extremism and violence for some. Some will just exist. Some will choose to stop existing. Buckle up. I really can't understand why nobody sees what is going to happen. Its not too late to choose another path. But in order to do so we will have to forego short term corporate profits, which is politically inconceivable for our current crop of elites. What should we do?
- aurareturn 25d agoThis is a very pessimistic look at things. There will be some growing pains for some, yes. But overall, I think it will ultimately create more jobs than ever. History is full of examples where people thought a new invention leads to catastrophic job loss, then the Earth had more jobs than ever. We have enough jobs in 2026 to keep most of the 8.3 billion people employed somehow.
- fallingfrog 25d agoThat's an unbearably naive way to look at things. You wave your hands and say "oh it will be fine" without understanding any of the systems at play. Food, housing, and other resources are only obtainable under capitalism if you have the leverage to demand them- in other words if you are difficult to replace. AI will make you extremely cheap to replace. On what basis do you expect to be able to negotiate a wage that you can live on? Or another way to look at it: some people point to the historical parallel of farriers being put out of business by the spread of the automobile. But yet, the manufacture of cars ultimately provided more jobs than were lost when they replaced horses. Won't AI be the same? But like all analogies, this one is imprecise and in an extremely important way. In this analogy, you, dear reader, are not the farrier. Nor are you the factory worker. You are the horse.
- dominotw 26d agoisnt this just meme?
- morpheos137 26d agoArguably language itself I a cognitive bias.
- tingletech 26d agoLanguage is the virus
- lucianmarin 26d agoAI can rewrite history books and medicine books. We should stop developing it.
- ribs 26d agoGenestealer cult
- joshu 26d agois... this a reference to "language is a virus from outer space" by ws burroughs?
- peter_d_sherman 26d agoHistorically, Human Language was the first non-biological virus... And (jokingly!) certain pieces of computer software (including but not limited to a certain popular Operating System made by a certain company in Seattle) could be the second! LLM's by comparison, if they are a virus, are a distant third! :-) (And of course let's not forget the virality of Religions and Politics, local, regional, international, etc., etc., and the associated TV News Pundits who are always willing to discuss those things -- people with opinions masquerading as actual Journalists, and a few actual Journalists masquerading as people with opinions!) Point is, Human Language itself -- may have been the first non-biological virus! :-) (Disclaimer: The above was written in a spirit of jest, for comedy purposes only! :-) )
- nl 25d agoDoesn't reference Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene". That explores this in a more general sense. Since they didn't reference that I questioned its perspective and didn't read further.
- kittikitti 25d agoI now have a dedicated neuron for em-dashes because of LLM generated text.
- nirmeet011011 25d ago[flagged]
- probablybayesed 25d agoIIRC Nietzsche's writing style changed because of the advent of typewriters. He didn't need his pen and so wrote more freely (at the apeed of thought). I think the general concepts are cognitive offloading and second order consequences; changes in human behavior due to the technology. Or just: use it or lose it. And maybe Jevons Paradox is relevant? E.g., when compact fluorescent light bulbs were introduced people got cheaper lights so people installed more sich that a net energy consumption was increased per person. But then applied to LLMs: generating text/information becomes increasingly easier and instead of less text we produce more and thus more llms are used to consume that information overload to summarize, making us spend more time on text.
- zx8080 25d ago> He didn't need his pen and so wrote more freely (at the apeed of thought). Probably surprising for some, but it's possible (and pretty usual) to write at the speed of thought with a pen.
- GrinningFool 25d agoYour statement intrigues me, for I have always found it impossible. I dabbled in short-hand some years ago, and still couldn't keep up. I type very quickly and still can't always keep up. How does this work, especially the "pretty usual" part? Or is this discrepancy due to ack of shared understanding around what the speed of thought is?
- pglwrt861 25d ago[flagged]
- mhmdoutfromkara 25d ago[dead]
- jtrn 25d agoI read the title and thought to myself, "The chance that this is a well-grounded, unbiased, and robust design is close to 0." So I started reading... And having read it, what a terrible piece of science slop this is! There is no observed adoption dataset used to establish that this mechanism explains LLM use better than alternatives such as usefulness, falling prices, workplace requirements, or independent discovery. The behavior they talk about could describe many socially adopted technologies or practices. Its applicability does not identify anything distinctively viral or harmful about LLMs. The cognitive decline is assigned, not measured or independently derived. They calculate population competence by averaging those assigned scores across the groups. Consequently, moving people into lower-scoring groups lowers the average by construction. The dramatic fall from 1 to approximately 0.425 in their example is a model output conditional on those choices, not evidence of a 57% real-world cognitive decline. They explicitly define competence as what the human can do when external support is withdrawn, excluding the total capability of the human/AI system. This cannot settle whether the technology improves overall performance or human welfare. And they provide no measurement protocol clarifying exactly which supports could be removed for a fair comparison (for instance, how does this compare to Wikipedia or electricity). They don’t do this because of an agenda, so allow me to assert something with just as little evidence as the authors provide for their conclusion: This is obvious bias, and they are designing the study to get the result they want, and they don’t care about scientific truth, just about getting their paper published and attracting attention. And the “runaway” stuff is just not supported by the model. The language about equilibrium as a parameter changes is not automatically evidence of an imminent, rapid societal collapse! it is PURE conspiracy-level rhetoric. Just put two things in the same sentence and hope people think they are related. This is misleading language at best, and willful manipulation at worst. This is a BASIC failure of the minimal requirement for something to be called scientific. If there had been even a trace of a genuine attempt at Popperian falsification, the current research design would never have gotten past review. This is cargo cult science, it LOOKS like scientific research, but it’s not even close to scientific. EVERYTHING I hate about modern research on full display! And I am losing respect for the HN community more and more, because only terrible studies with sensationalist claims and titles get attention. This is tabloid-level quality, just with a direct link to the article instead of a dumbed-down intermediate write-up. If anybody read the actual paper, this would not get posted ANYWHERE. But “LLMs are a cognitive virus” is what gets posted.....
- trash_cat 25d agoI think most of the comments are talking about the some "virus" but the actual valuable part of the paper is about making choices when interacting with LLMs in such a way that abilities are reversable. That you are still able to do those things without LLMs. And that society and institutions help to preserve this ability by encouraging ways to do things with and without LLMs.
- Oscalemor 25d agoGreat read, but haven't formed an opinion on it. I'll pass it over to my agents to assess it adequately.
- beaker52 25d agoSimon Wardley: > “GPTs are a non kinetic form of warfare designed to embed the values of a small number of people into much wider communities by capturing the process of decision making. The delivery mechanism is the appearance of helpfulness i.e. coherent and authoritative arguments. The payload is helplessness and the creation of a new theocracy.” https://lnkd.in/p/efk8KaAN https://lnkd.in/p/efk8KaAN
- k__ 25d agoInteresting that he has this view. I would have taken him for mostly pro LLM.
- j4yav 25d agoI didn’t realize until now that the “me, an intellectual:” meme format was parodying something that some people did earnestly.
- thirdtruck 25d agoSpeaking as someone raised in an evangelical household and indoctrinated into thinking the world is only thousands of years old, this tracks. The most technologically advanced version of Chick tracts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_tract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_tract) to date.
- ahmedelsama 25d ago[flagged]
- xtiansimon 24d agoMeme, meme, meme, meme
- kestrelquant 20d ago[flagged]