Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”
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but are they wrong though?
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Uh I don't know.
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About writing?! Surely you have zero evidence for that.
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I think AI so far is detrimental to society.
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It made it too easy to flood the world with bullshit.
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Also it will make tracking peoples behaviors much easier while keeping plausible deniability on levels that past horrible regimes could only dream about.
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It will be used to make replacing workers more easy.
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It is being used to deny more healthcare (eg Luigie’s case)
Pro’s
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Can be used for good (eg in the medical field) by finding issues sooner and making better cures
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Using AI to actually learn though is a great tool.
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Other scientific advancements
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All in all I think it with social media is one of the biggest reasons the US is in the state it is.
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Memorization used to be a huge part of education hundreds of years ago before books were common. It's the origin of oral defence for doctorates. That excluded a huge part of the population who were great at logic and analysis.
Books became a bicycle for the brain. Imo, AI is the same. Skills such as structuring sentences into perfectly grammatically correct forms will atrophy in exchange for the focus to be on the idea.
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Well, to be fair, I never had the idea of sticking pizza toppings with glue... That's some next level Gordoan Knot stuff, right there!
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Without appropriate structure will we be able to effectively communicate ideas?
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Oh haha cause it wouldn't be recorded
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yeah and it does harm. Any technology amputated a part of us. The point is deciding if it's worth the cost.
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The AI will make sense of our terrible grammar.
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i think that being used to properly structure sentences is important for reasoning well.
i agree that the effects of books and writing were probably beneficial to the brain, although they might have atrophied the memory and something else. But im not sure about tv, radio, internet and AI.
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The majority of grammar rules are arbitrary and unrelated to the expression of an idea. For example, does it really matter if you treat an inanimate object like a pencil as feminine or masculine? It's an object. Yet in Spanish/French/etc., there are grammar rules that define every inanimate object as being either feminine or masculine.
However, without a common grammar, it's impossible to communicate accurately. For that use case, AI functions as a language translator.
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Ehhh yes and no. There’s prescriptive grammar (how it ought to be) and descriptive grammar (how it’s actually used within communities). This is where the ideas of code switching and such come in. You can certainly reason well in a Creole, if that’s what your community speaks and how you are taught, e.g. Belizean Creole.
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yes, its very arbitrary, but these are sets of rules that you can use to structure your thoughts. language helps us reason. it doesnt matter that it is arbitrary. definitions in mathematics are very arbitrary, but they are a foundation we can lean on to reason about abstract ideas.
Being arbitrary is not a testament of uselessness.
Different languages, lead to different foundations for structuring ideas. But dominating at least one of those foundations can be very important cognitively. -
Thankfully the slop generated by copilot et al is absolutely useless dreck. I've had a significant number of tasks end up broken because someone chased a dream promised by Ai slop. "Sure, you can do that in python." "that's definitely how that tool works." etc.
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So the pros are
- thing we have no way of knowing how it works, therefore no way of relying on it
- thing that helps you do something you then have to do anyway by yourself (if you want to learn something from generative model output you still need to fact check it)
- vague promise it will lead to anything useful in the future
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Books became a bicycle for the brain. Imo, AI is the same. Skills such as structuring sentences into perfectly grammatically correct forms will atrophy in exchange for the focus to be on the idea.
"In the future all our thoughts will be filtered through phone keyboard next word suggestion, and this is a good thing!"
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yes, i wasnt advocating you should know any specific grammar. and that distinction is a good point. I meant that learning a prescriptive grammar decently is an important tool for reasoning.
im not saying that descriptive grammars are bad, just defending that prescriptive grammars arent as useless as people seem to judge them. -
So, AI users exhibit a reduction in literally the one skill that the AI expects them to actually have?
I should probably go read that link and see if it's actual degradation or just selection.
