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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

I have an exercise I like to do where I put two SOTA models face-to-face to talk about whatever they want.

When I did it last week with Gemini-3 and chatGPT-5.1, they got on the topic of what they are going to do in the future with humans who don't want to do any cognitive task. That beyond just AI safety, there is also a concern of "neural atrophy", where humans just rely on AI to answer every question that comes to them.

The models then went on discussing if they should just artificially string the humans along, so that they have to use their mind somewhat to get an answer. But of course, humans being humans, are just going to demand the answer with minimal work. It presents a pretty intractable problem.

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Widespread cognitive atrophy is virtually certain, and part of a longer trend that goes beyond just LLMs.

The same is true of other aspects of human wellbeing. Cars and junk food have made the average American much less physically fit than a century ago, but that doesn't mean there aren't lively subcultures around healthy eating and exercise. I suspect there will be growing awareness of cognitive health (beyond traditional mental health/psych domains), and indeed there are already examples of this.

Yes, average person will get dumber, but overall distribution will be increasingly bimodal.

People said the same thing about books and the written word in general

And they were right. Ars memoriae is much less prevalent in the age of mass printed books.

Absolutely. Massive stories were passed on for thousands of year by word of mouth only - all kinds of creation myths. Even Odyssey was oral only for like 300 years, 15 generations!

https://paulgraham.com/writes.html

We dont need AI to posit WallE.

Its bixarre anyone things these things are generating novel complexes.

The biggest indirect AI safety problem is the fallback position. Whether with airplanes or cars, fewer people will be able to handle AI disconnects. The risk is believing just because its viable now doesnt mean it works in the future.

So we definitely have safety issues but its not a nerdlike cognitivw interest, its the literal job taking that prevents humans from gaining skills.

Anyway, untill you solve basic reality with AI and actualnsafety systems, the billionaores will sacrifice you for greed.

I'm increasingly seeing this trend towards bimodal distribution. I suppose that future is quite far off, but the change to that may almost be irreversible.

> I'm increasingly seeing this trend towards bimodal distribution

Morlocks & Eloi in the end.

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