New cognitive skills in the age of AI tailored information
safjan.com
safjan.com
Reading the comments it seems likely that the article is itself LLM-generated blogspam, in which case it won't be aware of the potential for hallucinated facts.
I was thinking the other day that we really need a new term for this. In 2016 we had "post-truth", but that implies humans deliberately making stuff up to deceive people, for whatever reason, but LLMs making stuff up don't really knowingly do so, and don't really have a motive. There is the term "consensus reality", but the danger is that with more and more LLM-generated content appearing on the internet, which may ultimately pollute future training, we may find "consensus" isn't sufficient to determine reality any more. Perhaps the new term for what we're heading towards could be something like the "post-reality" era, or something like that.
Not sure what the solution to this is either, other than withdrawing from the mainstream internet and sticking to the small known pockets of human resistance (while they still exist).
We have the same sources for truth we’ve always had. Trusted sources. Trusted sources for textbooks, articles, etc..
Really this is just postmodernism; the general collapse in epistemic certainty leading to viewing reality purely in terms of text. "Il n’y a pas de hors-texte" (Derrida); there is nothing outside the text. GPT would have to agree with Derrida, because it knows nothing but text. It has "all" the text, or at least all the text that could be found and fed to it, but nothing outside that.
(and likewise it really accelerates "Sokal hoax" questions!)
Marshall McLuhan is really the techno-prophet of our era.
I like LLM as much as the next guy on HN, but whatever this blogspam is describing is not backed by reality.
If you prompt it with a better query, you'll get a better response.
The second search it went into much more detail, although I refreshed, it seems like searching the same thing again forces a regenerated longer response.
https://i.imgur.com/CnjCsa6.png
Edit: I tried a different query with “laker latest result”. It answers that the latest game was on March 8th (tomorrow), but it couldn’t find the result. So you might want to try it instead
They are up against traditional web search which has about a 30 year head start. There is a dissonance where some seem to think these aren't useful yet I see people getting a ton of use out of them.
Life on this planet has evolved from primitive organisms whose only goal is to propagate through spacetime (in time = survive, in space = reproduce), as this is the de facto only initial goal you may encounter serendipitously, when the trait we judge is... in fact propagation though spacetime (i.e. to exist, you need to know how to keep existing).
In the quest of adapting better to our environment and each other, we needed ways to predict the environment, hence development of sensors, actuators and the function in between them that reads this input and produces output - cognition & intelligence.
Life has been developing cognition starting with basic instincts fight or flight, then increasingly complicated associative thought, social cognition, abstract cognition, speech, formal models (like math, logic) etc.
Then our culture took off, and we needed to evolve faster than we could. So as a crutch, we started producing an augmentation for ourselves to help with the high end of cognition, formal communication & computation, in the face of books, printing, computers solving linear algebra systems, arithmetic, math & logic problems, programming systems, the Internet.
But now this technology is starting to eat back down the evolutionary tree of cognition, it has started reproducing associative thought (neural networks) and the associated with them cognitive skills, like speech, abstract reasoning and so on.
We evolved bottom-up.
Technology is evolving, through our own hands, top-down.
We... are not developing new cognitive skills. We're losing them to technology.
We no longer do math by hand. We use computers. We no longer maintain complex formal systems by reading instructions and following them - we program computers to. We no longer remember facts - we look them up on the Internet.
Now we're starting to no longer go through the effort of creating art & speech from scratch, we're delegating this to diffusion and transformer models.
We're losing cognition. And this process won't stop. We can't just decide to stop it, because we're dependent on technology. If technology ceases to be, society ceases to be, billions will die.
So our only options is to continue ceding cognitive territory to AI, and eventually become its puppets, and eventually AI will have no purpose for us, and it'll stop supporting us entirely.
Since the start of humanity, we made tools to make things easier for us, we don't fish with our hands anymore for a reason.
Cognition however is what defines our very soul. Being human is intricately linked with it in a way that the physical is not. Stephen Hawkings could be an example of that.
Ceding cognition presents a very real and existential problem for humans. What’s left? We have literally no other defining qualities.
About your examples: people are more obese than ever and cars certainly don’t help. Only the elite few have the resources to focus on something as useless as running fast. “We” as a society cannot run fast(er) and I’ll indeed argue that this ability decreased because of technology. Not that I particularly care about running.
But now I'm starting to realize the author may have had deeper reasons to introduce this into the story. Because maybe he saw far into the future, and realized that a future with AI has no humans in it, at all.
As for genes and medicine, medicine DOES change which genes are selected for survival. Sometimes quite literally, such as caring about type 1 diabetics, or in-vitro fertilization, and I doubt you actually have something objective to say here to reject that.
This doesn't imply we need to have no hospitals. But it helps to be aware of the holistic effect of the environment we create for ourselves, because it selects us in ways we don't fully comprehend.
Recently I read an article about rising child obesity in the US, and the recommendation is surgery and better "weight loss drugs". I'll leave it as an exercise to you where this path leads.
Making tools is great. I love that we make tools. I love to make tools, myself. I program, like many here. But the plot twist in that story is that at some point the tools become better, do more of the job, and more, and eventually... the tools don't need us to do the job. They just need us to make them. But as these tools get advanced, eventually we start using tools to make the tools (no modern CPU is designed by hand, BTW). So what happens in the end? Our role decreases, and decreases, and a new loop forms of tools making tools.
And suddenly, we're unnecessary.
And do you know when this moment where we're not necessary comes? When we outsource our "core competency". This is the same situation that led to IBM selling its business to their outsourcing manufacturer, Lenovo, and how DELL almost lost its business. It starts with "we don't need to assemble it, we'll assemble in China". Then "we'll make some more parts in China". Then "we'll design it in China too". And suddenly you're not doing anything, except slapping a logo on it. You're useless. You outsourced your core competency.
Humanity's core competency is intelligence. If AI is better at this... our only role in "the human civilization" is slapping a "human" name on it. There's nothing human left IN it.
I'm far more pessimistic on rest though. Excel and calculators definitely didn't improve my mental math.
I also think there is a real risk of cognitive overload. See the whole attention being shot to bits thanks to internet trend - something along those lines but AI flavoured.
Studying and developing critical thinking is more important than ever before. What people miss when they babble stuff like "math is useless" or "literature is useless" or "history is useless" is that those things are not important by themselves, they are important because you are learning models and tools to interpret the world.
You know, the things that differentiate you from a dumb machine.
Actually it’s the opposite. People will start learning more, because of ChatGPT.
Since I started using ChatGPT I am learning new things on a daily basis, about philosophy, about history, about computer sciences, about algorithms, about all sorts of things.
It’s a lot of fun diving into subjects in a conversational way, with a „teacher“ by my side who never gets tired answering every one of my questions.
Take facts as though they were from an undergrad in the subject pontificating after a few beers.
(Note: I'm not talking about the model being slow to respond, but rather the animation of it typing its response letter by letter quickly starts slowing down, until eventually it hangs, sometimes mid-sentence.)
StableGPT when?
Otherwise, fewer people have access and progress is slower.
See also: the commiditization of GPUs, once it was no longer an SGI product and regular people could get them for $200, all kinds of GPGPU stuff started happening.
I am saying that current education does not give people tools to use LLM and AI. They will spend most of time on problems like "not being racist" or "looking for systemic bias". Others without this baggage will run circles around them, and eat their lunch.
Tech should take more time to think about racism, and bias. All of this by the way is not Marxism. I’ll grant you that the culture war is toxic, but with good faith try to understand where things are coming from. I understand from a conservative perspective some things are obnoxious. That doesn’t mean that liberal arts are not critical thinkers, or Marxist. In fact I would argue they are in some ways better at critical thinking vs the STEM fields.