I think the author was quite honest about the weak points in his thesis, by drawing comparisons with cars, and even with writing. Cars come at great cost to the environment, to social contact, and to the health of those who rely on them. And maybe writing came at great cost to our mental capabilities though we’ve largely stopped counting the cost by now. But both of these things have enabled human beings to do more, individually and collectively. What we lost was outweighed by what we gained. If AI enables us to achieve more, is it fair to say it’s making us stupid? Or are we just shifting our mental capabilities, neglecting some faculties while building others, to make best use of the new tool? It’s early days for AI, but historically, cognitive offloading has enhanced human potential enormously.
Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid
oyzmo@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Actually a really good article with several excellent points not having to do with AI 😊👌🏻
bampop@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
joel_feila@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Well creating the slide was a form of cognitive offloading, but barely you still had to know how to use and what formula to use. Moving to the pocket calculator just change how you the it didn’t really increase how much thinking we off loaded.
but this is something different. With infinite content algorithms just making the next choice of what we watch amd people now blindly trusting whatever llm say. Now we are offloading not just a comolex task like sqrt of 55, but “what do i want to watch”, “how do i know this true”.
bampop@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I agree that it’s on a whole other level, and it poses challenging questions as to how we might live healthily with AI, to get it to do what we don’t benefit from doing, while we continue to do what matters to us. To make matters worse, this is happening in a time of extensive dumbing down and out of control capitalism, where a lot of the forces at play are not interested in serving the best interests of humanity. As individuals it’s up to us to find the best way to live with these pressures, and engage with this technology on our own terms.
joel_feila@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
how we might live healthily with AI, to get it to do what we don’t benefit from doing,
Agree that is oir goal, but one i don’t ai with paying for training data. Also amd this the biggest. What benefits me is not what benefits the people owning the ai models
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
The article agrees with you, it’s just a caution against over-use. LLMs are great for many tasks, just make sure you’re not short-changing yourself. I use them to automate annoying tasks, and I avoid them when I need to actually learn something.
andallthat@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I agree. I was almost skipping it because of the title, but the article is nuanced and has some very good reflections on topics other that AI. Everything we find a shortcut for is a tradeoff. The article mentions cars to get to the grocery store. There are advantages in walking that we give up when always using a car. Are cars in general a stupid and useless technology? No, but we need to be aware of where the tradeoffs are. And eventually most of these tradeoffs are economic in nature.
By industrializing the production of carpets we might have lost some of our collective ability to produce those hand-made masterpieces of old, but we get to buy ok-looking carpets for cheap.
By reducing and industrializing the production of text content, our mastery of language is declining, but we get to read a lot of not-very-good content for free. This pre-dates AI btw, as can be seen by standardized tests in schools everywhere.
The new thing about GenAI, though is that it upends the promise that technology was going to do the grueling, boring work for us and free up time for us to do the creative things that give us joy. I feel the roles have reversed: even when I have to write an email or a piece of coding, AI does the creative piece and I’m the glorified proofreader and corrector.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Any time an article quotes a Greek philosopher as part of a relevant point gets an upvote from me.
I certainly value brevity and hope LLMs encourage more of that.