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Comment by Amekedl | Hacker News Reader

depending how hard the "the brain is a muscle" saying applies, there is no way using LLMs/chatbot systems/AI is not going to deteriorate your brain immensely.

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when i was younger, we didnt have cellphones. i had ~20-30 phone numbers memorized, at least. i also used to remember my credit card number. my brain has not deteriorated now that i have offloaded that to my phone.

point being: it depends on how you use it. if you offload critical thinking to ai, you will probably (slowly) atrophy your critical thinking muscles. if you offload some bullshit boilerplate or repetitive tasks or whatever, giving you more time overall to do the critical thinking part, you will be fine.

> my brain has not deteriorated now that i have offloaded that to my phone.

Is there empirical evidence that you haven't? You wouldn't necessarily be the best judge

do you want a reference from a published journal or something? links to my last mri? how do you want me to answer this?

bring some empirical evidence that using ai rots the brain, and in the meantime, i will think about whether or not its worth trying to answer your request in earnest.

There is no way for you to know that you aren't slightly less sharp having offloaded the memorization of those phone numbers. Who is the judge? It's a nonsensical question from a scientific perspective because it's impossible to prove either way.

We could speculate that simple acts like memorizing phone numbers probably do make the average person slightly sharper, in a similar way to trivial brain games helping to stave off alzheimer's.

In I,Robot, Will Smith prefers to drive himself because he doesn't trust AI. But we are moving towards self driving as it would be more safer. Would you trust a calculation more if it was done by hand using log tables? Having vehicles allowed us to create sports like dirt bike riding or monster truck racing. Yes something is lost but something is also gained. We move up the layer of abstraction.

That is not the same situation. Writing is a thing we do to communicate with other people, and to engage our own thinking. It's creative, it's exploratory, and it's a human-to-human practice. It is a top-level abstraction. The only higher you could possibly go is beaming your thoughts directly into someone else's brain.

Also it irks me to compare writing to a calculator's log function or a self-driving car. There are absolute correct/perfect outcomes in those situations (the log function produces the correct number, the car drives you to your destination without injury or unnecessary danger). That is not the same for most things AI is attempting to be used for.

Creating graphic arts is also a form of communication. But Procreate makes it easier, even for novice to create amazing art. Consider an aircraft, the pilot is given just few knobs to fly the plane but it still takes you from one location to another. The aircraft is indeed very complex than the knobs given but we can hide most of that complexity underneath the knobs assuming happy path flights most of the time. The higher abstraction I am talking about is the future jargons themselves. AI will allow us to create far more complex stories. Imagine one complex jargon represented by a mandelbrot fractal (to paint a picture of the complexity involved), another represented by burning ship fractal. What kind of operations can I do with these two complex ideas. Can I explore a complex conceptual space with it? We would just say to the AI, subtract one fractal from another and it would handle the details (the definitons, references, related ideas in a free form manner). This is exploration itself. Procreate gives you brushes. AI gives you something similar in conceptual space.

If your body is in good shape, stopping exercise won't make you deteriorate that quickly. What I wonder is, will people get in good shape in the first place.

What I mean is as someone with lots of experience, I don't care about me not learning about the basics anymore as much as someone in their 20s and 30s maybe should.

I think this is backwards.

Not sure what you mean by quickly. Back when I was in racing shape, if I stopped my training plan for as little as two weeks, (probably less actually, but I'm being conservative here) I would have a measurable drop in fitness.

Now, as someone who regularly walks the dog and bikes to work, I've got "less to lose" and probably wouldn't deteriorate as much.

Aerobic fitness is hard to shake, but neuromuscular changes can be lost very quickly

And here I was thinking how clever an example I was giving :)

See the recent article suggesting use of navigation apps may correlate in populations to increased Alzheimer’s. Will it happen to you? Maybe, maybe not. Life’s a box of chocolates!

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