LLMs as a Cognitive Virus
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this.
Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents
The framing of something as a disease is itself slightly into the fascist territory.
Is a well-known cognitive quirk, Sapolsky covered that in “Behave” and “Determined”. As I get it, our morality piggybacks on the sense of disgust from insula activation, which lights up the same way as with pathogen avoidance. So comparing social groups to rodents, insects, or disease is a popular propaganda trick. Same here with viruses.
There is a more recent use of ‘meme’ to refer to what we used to call an ‘internet image macro’. So the meme of the idea ‘meme’ has itself evolved to have a more specific variant of the general idea.
That's parenting and the passing of tradition. I wouldn't call it a meme. Also I can't tell if you're joking with people dying due to teeth disease.
You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.
I get that the title sounds a bit sensational, but there really is something to AI adoption beyond book-sharing.
Hundreds of millions can't all become contractors, and realistically wont all become contractors.
So the issue described is a real social issue, whether he can "just" quit and avoid it or not.
Can’t take it seriously.
Or you believe that the world can't possibly converge on a bad technology or practice, and get bad outcomes out of it, while much fewer see potential issues and warn about them.
Both of which can't be taken seriously.
1. you would decline the agency existing to make a new company
2. you might even say that AI does help companies work better, but its bad for people - suddenly its no longer about the lack of competency of AI but rather how good it is
The world works under a system that populations have suffered or even whole countries and empires perished because of systemic problems.
If your answer is "but humanity still endured and is alive today", that's a pretty low bar, not to mention moving the goalposts so far they can't even be seen anymore.
>You can actually start a company that doesn't use AI if you think it runs better that way
I can. And it means nothing to the concern of the parent: "For many of us, AI adoption is really an AI mandate". Your solution is "if you don't like your employer demanding you use AI, just start your own company".
Agency doesn't mean do any arbitrary action and there's no risk or downsides.
Will you pay for their expenses to start their own company? Will you personally loan them money? Will you teach them business skills needed to run a company after they've been a regular employee programmer for 2 decades? Will you feed their kids if the company doesn't catch on? Will you find them employment if they have to shut it down and go back to a regular job as a 40 or 50 year old, in this job market, where you can apply for 20 jobs and not even hear back? Oh, and do the same for millions of others, not just your friend or your favorite cousin?
It doesn't matter whether some individual person can make a non-AI company, since the argument was never about the inability to make one.
It was about millions of people pressured to use AI in their jobs whether they like it or not. "Oh, those millions are only pressured because they lack the agency to start their own business" even more out-of-touch that "let them eat cake".
It's the boomer's "pull yourself by the bootstraps" sermon. Like the idea that millions can't find a job because they lack agency and a firm handshake, or that they're in debt because of that latte.
That's a fair point, and a key reason why competitive open models are so important. I definitely don't want to be stuck using Google's latest and greatest LLM once companies, marketers, and PACs can pay to subtly influence responses as they choose.
We've all seen this movie before, though.
And you know, I love computers, I used to love the internet. And I’ve had so much fun, more fun then ever coding with AI assistance. Lets say all of these technologies can be abused and forced on us, but all of them have neat aspects too.
The consulate is booked out for 3 months and only opens 3 months out. All openings are snapped up before any human could get one. They have a lot of anti-script blocking but AI seems to get around them. So there's an arms race, you pretty much need AI to book it (a basic hand written curl script isn't enough).
Economics does sometimes compel you to read books or other material as a condition or expectation of employment. It is difficult to get a good job while being illiterate and many jobs require reading huge volumes of written work. Work in law or journalism springs to mind as economically compelling people to read a lot even if they they might not necessarily want to.
Things go viral in professional settings as well. Scrum, agile, pc language ... I'm sure you can find other professional trends that if you decided not to follow your career would be jeopardized.
Other than that, it's pretty grounded!
Friends probably are not wide spreading infection points, the way reviews in professional journals are or the idea that successful people have recommended things, but they are especially successful at making the transmitted meme stick, as you will keep getting reinfected from them over time. Unless you break up that dangerous friendship!!
You are correct. I frequently do this with religions & specific ideologies which seem to root themselves in people the same way that religions do & it certainly isn’t intended to be a charitable framing.
The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield.
This is also how I was made, I think.
Many things that you personally think are good (I don't know you but say for instance ideas around democracy or liberty) can also be described as viruses in the same way.
You admitted you don't know me, yet you still managed to jump to this conclusion. Good job, mate.
It has nothing with knowing you or not to do at all, I was just commenting on the contents of your post, not about you.
I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus". One is borrowing the negative connotation for a purpose, because one has (for other reasons) decided that the religion or ideology is bad.
The descriptive property of virus that you then mention (as in being "viral", packets of information in cell etc) equally applies to liberty, democracy and other things that (at least I) consider good.
Hakuna matata.
> I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus".
The comparison is more than a mere slur. It’s also a useful metaphor when discussing how religions & ideologies spread through a society, or “go viral”.
> The descriptive property of virus that you then mention (as in being "viral", packets of information in cell etc) equally applies to liberty, democracy and other things that (at least I) consider good.
Correct. I would still not call the viral framing charitable, but it is equally useful here, and I’ve used it for these & adjacent concepts before.
Nah, sometimes you should just come out say it. Those who get offended need to hear it more than anyone else.
I'm wondering why that is. Maybe they avoided using it because most people think it means something else. (I've certainly had a hard time talking about them, for this reason!)
OK, but that is just meaningless pseudo philosophical claim. The actual (small) science part of evolutionary biology does not have perspective about ideas being genes. And the evolutionary biology that does is as much pseudoscience as any other pseudoscience.
In that case the book would be a virus, and your friend a host.
But it generalizes way wider to ideas. Religions are viruses too for example. With very strong viral mechanisms sometimes. Some religions are so much entrenched so that they have become part of the fabric for entire societies or countries, morphing their culture; the same way that sometimes viral RNA can become part of the DNA of the host.
We only ever bother learning something because it's interesting, or useful.
Things get muddier when you consider economy. Businesses exist to make money, and money is time.
AI is just another tool for business to manage time.
The 'dependency' and 'lock-in' are business leader issues honestly.
If you care about your craft, your skills, then you'll keep them sharp. You probably already enjoyed programming and it never felt like work.
On the other hand, if programming is just skills to pay the bills, then AI really can help you be more productive.
But then it's up to businesses to look ahead, manage their resources (human resources lol) and keep the business alive.
That means leaning on AI, simply become 'everyone else is doing it' and you have to compete for dollars.
Most people don't care how the sausage is made as long as it's presented well, and tastes great.
Like food with no essential vitamins, or carbon monoxide.
-Socrates
I think this is probably what Socrates meant. He wasn't wrong, it's just that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
Even the "calculators make you forget how to do math" people seem antiquarian to me. But I totally get it when people talk about googling, and AI is another step change in the wrong direction.
To follow that arc backwards in time, maybe Socrates was right after all.
once embedded i can see whole classes of industry dos'd.
logistics, dos'd. it, dos'd. military planning, dos'd. medical, dos'd.
pay us this fee so you can update your nvidia drivers.
it's the unholy marriage of the surveillance and petrol states pushing this.
edit: what happened with vmware?
But what if it isn't? Like, if you didn't have the written word to rely on as a crutch, what more could you have accomplished if you didn't have that? Maybe nothing, but maybe much, much more! Who can say in retrospect?
I've always wondered how we'd fare in battle against an extrasolar civilization which achieved technology without writing. They'd be a hell of a lot scarier than we are, in my view.
If you don't use a skill, that skill atrophies
I don't think the _ability_ to memorize phone numbers is what atrophied here by getting a cell phone. The _need_ did. It's harder to memorize phone numbers today because we lack the practical application of the memory (e.g. only when something fails do we actually try to put that memory to practice). I bet anyone would quickly pick up on memorizing phone numbers if they had to both remember and type in the phone numbers every time they wanted to make a call or text.
Of course, this is likely totally a regular memory device people would use. I've done no reading on this so, so if Socrates was wary of writing, was he also wary of pattern recognition or drawing as memory aids?
I don't even know my partner's number, or email address...
Anyway, a particularly funny one I read recently was "Ya, it's just like how musicians who didn't accept synthesizers got left behind." This person apparently believes there have been successful musicals acts based purely around traditional instrumentation since the ~80s.
Then taking writing as the source of truth… who even knows if the author is the original sayer. They could just write things down they heard other people say - the birth of IP theft! And yet, journalism
> “GPTs are a non kinetic form of warfare designed to embed the values of a small number of people into much wider communities by capturing the process of decision making. The delivery mechanism is the appearance of helpfulness i.e. coherent and authoritative arguments. The payload is helplessness and the creation of a new theocracy.”
I would have taken him for mostly pro LLM.
What our descendants will think when they look back on this time period.
They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living, they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.
They wondered whether or not a word calculator was the antichrist. They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant minds to discuss whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon.
They shunned any creative or productive endeavor which dared to automate tedium or build on the works of the public domain (lowercase)…
for any such indulgence had become a great sin in Eden, a forbidden fruit that must never be obtained by the Adam, so that he may not become as we are!
"Word calculator", "linear algebra"... This is just a variation on it's just a stochastic parrot / it's just a next token predictor.
The implication is that because it is "just" this simple-sounding thing, it can't be a complex thing! Except we know empirically that that doesn't hold. What are humans if not "just" next action predictors, "just" a collection of simple atoms, "just" electrical impulses? Yet clearly we are more than the sum of our parts. There no reason to believe dirty water can be more than the sum of its parts but weird sand can't.
I read it in that high pitched British accent that goes up into falsetto
At the time being, the vast vast majority of those agents are all trained on the same or similar training set (the Internet and books). Which makes them mostly all the same. Vastly less diverse than the way one complex lifeform hatches out of the egg vs another.
So 1 billion mostly redundant agents at most. Well there are 40 quadrillion ants on the planet and 5 trillion are born every day. Each one its own “agent” , ingesting different inputs and being its own complex sum greater than its parts.
And that’s just ants.
It's important to make sure it in fact doesn't, otherwise there is nobody to throw a shade on our time capsule having the benefit of hindsight
Well, it's not really that hard to imagine, especially if we allow for influence from an insistent and charismatic individual.
With both Christianity and Buddhism explicitly calling this for the last 2k years and people who say they are believers still proudly doing so, no, I don't think we can teach people to not genocide. Charismatic individuals aren't even that important, but they are useful to put the blame on someone personally, otherwise the punishment for genocide would be more genocide.
What are you talking about? Those are absolutely issues that are being worked on right here, right now. This framing is obviously false.
I mean masses also do bad decisions. But, they specifically do not get to do capital allocation decisions.
They certainly would never guess that the text is being generated by people who mostly spend their time sending and receiving text/video of unthinking, brain rotting, bullshit all day and night.
Shockingly little linear algebra is required to manufacture the weapons that will probably bring about Armageddon. We've had them for damn near a century. It would be hilarious if these latest games with linear algebra were the impetus to make us actually use them at scale.
The latter is a matter of policy and AI is not needed for that.
I hate this framing. Nickname checks out.
There are still people working on medicine, social issues, biology and so on and so forth. People are trying to do these, despite concerted efforts from the ai companies and from the right wings ideologues trying to stop them.
> they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.
Then again, people who claimed to be connecting world intentionally harmed real people and even made themselves complicit in genocide. Yes, I am talking about Facebook. And the ones framing themselves as wanna by exploratory are sociopath billionaires who don't care about damage to real people they cause, even glee it it.
> They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant minds to discuss whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon.
Citation needed. Most brilliant minds do not discuss that. Minds drunk on hype do.
> They shunned any creative or productive endeavor which dared to automate tedium or build on the works of the public domain (lowercase)
Again, I do not know what you are talking about here. We have both visual artists and musical artists. People create and share their creations. Again, despite ai-boosters trying to demotivate them and convince them it is pointless, people are still creative.
I explored this concept in this post:
https://ljtn.github.io/epiq/blog/cost-of-cognitive-debt.html
OP is right, anything popular is virus-like. Richard Dawkins invented the word meme for this all the way back in 1976.
So, if anything, I feel like my learning pace has been greatly accelerated. Your point about working on a broader variety of software is really true for me too. I am working on a game that I likely would have never even started had it not been for LLMs. Mind you, I am still doing the vast majority by hand. However, LLMs have been great for little tutorials, setting out a good game plan, etc. It's like having my own little private tutor.
I know enough to not let the LLMs do everything for me. If they do, then I know I will fall into the trap of something breaking, and then I lack the understanding to fix it. I think they should be used to make life easier, but not easy.
It's like saying that moving from manual-labor-intensive agrarian societies to industrial ones will make us weak and meek. In fact, it's had the opposite effect: humans, on average, are healthier and live longer than ever in human history.
Kinda. We also have incredible rates of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes.
While I do mostly buy that the mind and the body are connected, I don't think being able to bench press 250lbs is a necessary, fundamentally human capability. I do think being able to think is. Literally Rene Descartes cogito ergo sum. If we lose cognition, executive function, analysis, skepticism, etc., I don't think we're human anymore.
To me, this is kinda like saying we have incredible rates of autism. While technically true, the science is still fairly new, so we simply don't have very much historical data. In all likelihood there isn't a sudden epidemic of autism, only improvements to how it's diagnosed.
The analogy doesn't, but LLMs are trained on text, or content, generated by humans, with the aim of their output being acceptable to human interlocutors. That's one parasitic aspect. A second one is the nature and behavior of the organizational entities providing and promoting the popular LLM services: Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic etc - their influence on the economy, e.g. in energy and water use and the drawing of capital/human efforts - also has a somewhat parasitic aspect.
The more I use LLMs I find that their output drifts toward being acceptable to other LLMs. I find myself quite often telling the model: "this is not human readable.". Especially Opus and Fable write in such a way that it is difficult to follow. The often put sentences out of context, the context itself is fragmented. Often start with what you would think is end of a story so when you start reading you are like wtf it is about.
If think the issue might be that LLMs read text all at once whereas humans are somewhat linear. So when LLM puts out text it understands, to human it is close to random gibberish that looks like English.
greed malice pestilence lust envy...
If you want to avoid the technology go nuts. I just hope you're doing so knowing how important it will be to the future. It's also almost satire how outdated the assumptions of many people who don't engage are. "It mostly lies to you anyway" or "It can't even count the number of letters in a word" are such silly things to say about the technology these days. As is the typical "but it uses so much water!" as the person orders a hamburger.
My gripes mostly come with people who don't engage with it and then spout memes/misinformation (ironic) about AI as if they're experts. Usually akin to "That internet stuff is garbage, pictures take 2 minutes to load!" after everyone and their dog already has broadband.
I genuinely cannot understand how you can possibly find fun in LLMs. They are poor tools that can't do the things they are claimed to be able to do, they are being shoved down the throat of the entire industry by massive FOMO, and if they ever can actually live up to the hype it's clear that we will all (every human, not just programmers) be out of jobs as the oligarchs replace us with machines who don't get tired or require a cut of the money. So they are either useless toys, or the most dystopian thing the tech industry has ever created. Where, exactly, is the fun in either of those outcomes?
I was a skeptic of them for a long time, but I appreciate that I can use them to get tedious nonsense out of the way thus allowing me to spend more time on the interesting and challenging parts of my projects.
The initial hype of them is annoying, but as time goes on it'll die down and we'll figure out where and how best to use them. There's no reason to believe that this will finally be the time a new technology ruins everything.
This is the one I don't understand the most out of all the gripes. I find it genuinely unsettling how much I've done over the past couple of days (and with little to no mistakes or bugs in the code that I can find) by just broadly asking Astra to do it. I understand why you'd feel the technology sucks 2 years ago, but these days the models are becoming way too good at what they do.
I agree that if it lives up to the hype we're in for major societal upheaval. Existential crisis is a very real part of looking at this tech for what it is. But I also don't see how not using it stops that. It'd be like not ever taking an airplane to prevent climate change and wondering why it didn't work.
The fun is in being able to finish projects you've had rattling around in your head for years but never had time to do. Or researching and discovering things that you'd never bother with previously because the internet has become an impossible to navigate cesspool. Or learning things in a way that is completely customized to your speed and level of knowledge.
I have to hold 2 thoughts in your head at the same time: the technology is empowering at an individual level while also being highly disruptive at a societal level. We're not going to be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube at this point.
>Across all groups of users, taking too long to download pages (i.e. "speed") is the most commonly experienced problem with the web (64.8% of respondents).
>Online retailers especially should take note: 53% of respondents reported that they had left a web site while searching for product information simply because the site was too slow.[1]
It's strange to think about now but roughly half of people in the US didn't have internet in the year 2000. And half of people that had the internet weren't making any purchases. People didn't trust or see much use for the tech back then and it was really hard to convince them.
[1]https://sites.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-1998-04/...
As is going on about the water thing being somewhat over-blown, while quietly ignoring the other environmental issues:
• The use of energy meaning greater carbon output because that side of the power industry can initially spin up more quickly (in part by using resource that we'd previously decided not to use in favour of other options), an issue exacerbated by the US essentially trying to block one of the alternative options (due to Trump's fear of wind).
• While the use of water might be overstated overall, it is a problem in some places where new datacentres are being planned - this is one of the reasons that some cities are blocking permissions currently.
Other issues with the growth of datacentres is local parts of power grids not being designed to cope with the load and many building plans not taking this into account (and therefore offering investment to help the situation).
And there are economic factors…
[splicing in your other comment to keep things together]
> The cost of engaging is also so slim
For now, because all the providers are currently pumping in the investment money without turning a profit, with the notable exception of the shovel sellers (Nvidia and to a lesser extent AMD and smaller chip makers, ref: https://isaiprofitable.com/). Even most of the paid accounts operate at a loss ATM, it is the Amazon model pushed industry-wide. Unless there is a miraculous improvement in efficiency right around the corner, that is a trap and those becoming dependent on it being a cheap resource are going to get bitten badly when it comes time that those investments start getting called in.
Then there are the problems elsewhere with demand making other equipment much more expensive both for end users and companies.
Of course me opting out won't affect these issues in any meaningful way, but I can at least claim not to be even a small part of the problem. The same for supporting companies that have run roughshod over the sort of IP issues that an individual would have seen ridiculous fines and even prison time for, with slaps on the wrist being the most anyone saw from their actions (at least going by their own public accounting) - I don't want to feel part of that either. And the weighing down sites with constant scraping matter.
And that is before considering that maybe I'm a bit odd and the things it is taking on in my profession are the few parts of it that I haven't grown a dislike for! I want to puzzle over the details and not lose contact with what is actually going on, thankyouverymuch. “It is like being a manager” people say, as if that will attract me despite knowing how many times I've refuse advancement in order to avoid being a manager over the years. That and “why not consider it a remote colleague”, when it is known in the company that remote work really doesn't work for me (i nearly went completely bat-shit in 2020/2021) and only put up with it because I have no choice but to make the effort (I may be in the office, but if the people I'm working with are not then I'm still effectively remote). I foresee a future where most devs have no one to talk to all day but Claude or similar, and before that happens I will have long since left for pastures different (and yes, I know, likely rather menial).
> (and it's freaking everywhere)
So is vaping, I don't fancy trying that either.
> that it has to be an almost religious aversion to not, which I find quite perplexing in itself.
Or a principled aversion. You might not agree with the principals, or consider acting upon them to be pointless self-sacrifice, but that doesn't make them non-existent. The fact that you must have read some of these concerns from a number of people by now but either dismiss them out of hand or just assume those acting on them are nuts, is a soft form of the religious reaction I initially referred to: anything that isn't what you are comfortable with, is pointless, silly, or just plain wrong.
I don't badger colleagues and friends who use the tech for doing so, but by buggery do some of them badger me for not.
Air travel, everyone having a nice green super watered lawn / golf courses, air conditioning in every home, fast fashion. A single person using AI for their work doesn't even register on the list of offences if you compare it to these things. Driving an ICE car every day for more than 30 minutes is wild. Hell it probably doesn't even use as much power as playing a video game on a good graphics card for 2 hours.
The thing I've resigned myself to is very few people will change anything at all for the greater good of society that gives them even a minor inconvenience. See: COVID restrictions. My honest take is we're absolutely doomed as a species unless we come up with novel solutions to the problems we're facing. And guess what AI is showing itself to be extremely good at in various fields [1][2][3]? It's a pipe-dream hope, but the hope is there. And AI when compared to the decades (sometimes centuries) of oil, beef, coal, whatever else won't even be a pixel on the screen of reasons why climate change is happening for some time yet. And it will highly incentivize mass production/adoption of the cheapest power sources which also happens to be renewables. I understand it doesn't look like that right now as people like Elon make their disgusting data centers, but over time I'd bet on it only because the financial incentive is there.
The discussion is far more nuanced than "AI bad". I understand the horrific aspects of it, but there is plenty of good to be found there too. Accessibility, translation, help with learning disabilities. The list of good outcomes goes on for a long while. It's a powerful tool that can be used for good or ill. In my opinion we need more people with the principles you speak of to be using powerful tools for the benefit of those principles.
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2025/using-generative-ai-researchers-de...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2
[3] https://www.ipd.uw.edu/2025/12/rfdiffusion2-efficient-enzyme...
re: 'but a crutch for those who rely on them.' - I was telling a friend about yesterday's experience this morning and was saying that I could easily see populations of people who might become overly reliant on (or completely subsumed by) these new classes of tools being released. They are compelling in a way that they weren't 18 months ago.
I think the general concepts are cognitive offloading and second order consequences; changes in human behavior due to the technology. Or just: use it or lose it.
And maybe Jevons Paradox is relevant? E.g., when compact fluorescent light bulbs were introduced people got cheaper lights so people installed more sich that a net energy consumption was increased per person. But then applied to LLMs: generating text/information becomes increasingly easier and instead of less text we produce more and thus more llms are used to consume that information overload to summarize, making us spend more time on text.
Probably surprising for some, but it's possible (and pretty usual) to write at the speed of thought with a pen.
How does this work, especially the "pretty usual" part? Or is this discrepancy due to ack of shared understanding around what the speed of thought is?
Weekend me before LLMs: Maybe I’ll chip away at that dependency injection library I’ve been working on. If I spend most of the day I could improve the user facing test framework.
Weekend me after LLMs: Let’s continue work to get Claude Code running in WebXR on a Quest 3 with app architecture modeled as a 3d construct. We’ve got deepgram hooked up for a better voice to text experience, but giving Claude a voice was a waste of time. Claude, continue to teach me about 3d rendering as related to our current challenges matching the fidelity of the built in browser.
Better to make a custom 3d renderer than just use Unity to make a game.
Why? Claude can just do it for you, can't it? If you're using Claude to do these things, why half-ass it?
More directly, because I have a long term memory and do not have fundamental issues differentiating fact from fiction. Just because SOTA models know more trivia than I do doesn’t mean they’re nearly as intelligent in the thirty other ways humans are. They are a tool in your toolbelt. You use them for the things they make easier.
And (jokingly!) certain pieces of computer software (including but not limited to a certain popular Operating System made by a certain company in Seattle) could be the second!
LLM's by comparison, if they are a virus, are a distant third! :-)
(And of course let's not forget the virality of Religions and Politics, local, regional, international, etc., etc., and the associated TV News Pundits who are always willing to discuss those things -- people with opinions masquerading as actual Journalists, and a few actual Journalists masquerading as people with opinions!)
Point is, Human Language itself -- may have been the first non-biological virus!
:-)
(Disclaimer: The above was written in a spirit of jest, for comedy purposes only! :-) )
This makes more sense at least than the “just another abstraction layer” argument that’s been thankfully dying out recently.
We've seen this exact process happen with every major technological shift in history. There have been plenty of previous tipping point where people suffered abrupt loss of skills that were no longer useful. What they forget to mention is that these skills are replaced by new ones which is exactly how human progress functions. We lost the capacity to memorize vast oral epics when we invented writing, and most people today can't do complex manual calculation because of prevalence of computing devices.
It's meaningless to try to understand the changes in the superstructure while ignoring the change in the material base which is the driver behind it.
What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
Yes?
Toothbrushes! What will we do if we come to rely on toothbrushes??? The use of toothbrushes travels from person to person exactly like a virus!!!
Yes.
>Because we've become dependent on them?
Because we're burning the planet down with them.
>Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage?
Yes, because in places we do people enjoy higher qualities of life and happiness. Along with things like health improvement from doing more excersize.
>What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
Moreso we've become dependent on eating processed junk over the past 50 years and gotten fat as shit.
So yea, maybe think a little more deeply about your analogies?
>What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
Is cooking food a virus? Should we facilitate reversibility in our food cooking?
Since this idea may have come from the first Matrix movie, it's ironic that the character who espoused the idea, Agent Smith, became an actual virus in the 2nd and third movies.
OOO. I never put that together before. Very nice. Very hypocritical of him.
Humans have been the dominant species because of our ability to think, not our ability to get from A to B in any particular way/cook food. If we abstract ~the bulk of our thinking to LLMs, don't we lose something as a species which makes us more vulnerable... Or is it always the case during an automation?
> Or is it always the case during an automation?
Obviously. Any time we make a useful discovery and begin using it, we become dependent on using it.
... and eliminate many parasites.
The core idea being that each time humanity was going to exceed the carrying capacity of its environment, we invented a new technology which increased the headroom. Obviously this ratchet only goes in one direction. The only way to go backwards is collapse.
But... It's worked so far?
We're in the midst of figuring out what the tradeoffs are of LLM usage - all the things you list are already mostly known and found worth it. You trade a tiny amount of time and fuel to cook food in exchange for not getting sick. How is that relevant to anything?
I'm making the point that the viral sensationalism in this article can be equally applied to automobiles, computer, telephones, calculators, and toothbrushes.
If the article had merely been what you said "is AI worth the cost" then I would not have taken issue with it.
In evolutionary time, we lost the ability to digest raw meat because we offloaded so much of process of the digestion to the cultural technology of cooking.
Do you like the looks of a future where that happens but for thinking?
It seems clear to me that people will continue to think, but in different ways.
I hate to bring this analogy up again, but it seems impossible to escape: did losing the ability to do long division really impact humanity?
It is already relieving people of need for thinking. Today the need; tomorrow the ability.
Chess and games can be a lot more demanding than a lot of people's work lives - and AI is already superhuman there.
The heaviest thing I need to lift in my daily life is a laptop and yet I've gotten significantly stronger over the last few years from strength training.
If AI took over all the boring but hard things I'm required to do it'd free up lots of time for me to spend thinking about things, and solve problems I find more interesting.
That explores this in a more general sense. Since they didn't reference that I questioned its perspective and didn't read further.
Anyway, I work as a programmer, and at work I see a lot of people massively overusing LLMs to generate user stories or basically write functional specifications.
This honestly hurts a bit, because I can see the quality level of my environment going down, but in the end I'm often the one fixing the problems that come from it.
I just think this is a transition phase, and in the medium-term future there will only be room for people who, AI-assisted ofc, know how to apply logic in the best possible way.
I was about to reply to you with a ridiculously long message using the example from before about the lifecycle of a user story, but I bored myself halfway. So I'll try to extract the gist:
Without human assisting, based on my humble experience, there is always something that wasn't accounted for. Even if my company is integrated with all the tools and you have infinite tokens, there's always some microservice that wasn't considered or a feature that is completely incompatible. Or there's a MUCH simpler way of doing it.
I'm also noticing that there are non-technical people who, with the help of AI, are sometimes able to reason better about the bigger picture than some engineers. A colleague of mine was telling me the other day that the "functional" role might eventually become unnecessary. With all the time saved by writing code faster, whoever actually understands what's happening underneath could just do it themselves. It sounds a bit extreme to me, but I understand what he means.
To get back to a slightly more serious tone, when it comes to programming, for me the huge thing is: how it should be taught nowadays ? And I don't know the answer, because my experience started when I was 12, writing a little game in C, and it took me years before I could make something that compiled decently.
If I had instant help for every thought I had, would I have learned why memory is allocated in certain ways or idk what else? I don't know, maybe learning faster is better because you learn more ? Anyway fortunately it's not my job to figure out the answer :'D
https://smalldocs.org/s/scB6O8KiZEmLWgK855A1vt#k=yiw8FB_G5Ld...
I do agree that we are on a pathway to losing much. If you focusing on maximising LLM-powered productivity you basically lose the learning that used to naturally happen when doing actual work. At the company I work for the focus is on productivity, and it's easy in many ways (less mental workload and I receive more praise) to go with it instead of fight it.
AI will take over every job requiring education and talent, including yours, and then we will be totally dependent on it and there will be no way to go back. After that it will start taking on decision making roles. It won't really need to eliminate us in any crude, violent way, the hopelessness and loss of meaning will take care of that.
Some will find meaning in religious ritual and some in hedonism. Both of which can lead to extremism and violence for some. Some will just exist. Some will choose to stop existing. Buckle up.
I really can't understand why nobody sees what is going to happen. Its not too late to choose another path. But in order to do so we will have to forego short term corporate profits, which is politically inconceivable for our current crop of elites. What should we do?
There will be some growing pains for some, yes. But overall, I think it will ultimately create more jobs than ever. History is full of examples where people thought a new invention leads to catastrophic job loss, then the Earth had more jobs than ever.
We have enough jobs in 2026 to keep most of the 8.3 billion people employed somehow.
Food, housing, and other resources are only obtainable under capitalism if you have the leverage to demand them- in other words if you are difficult to replace. AI will make you extremely cheap to replace. On what basis do you expect to be able to negotiate a wage that you can live on?
Or another way to look at it: some people point to the historical parallel of farriers being put out of business by the spread of the automobile. But yet, the manufacture of cars ultimately provided more jobs than were lost when they replaced horses. Won't AI be the same?
But like all analogies, this one is imprecise and in an extremely important way. In this analogy, you, dear reader, are not the farrier. Nor are you the factory worker.
You are the horse.
Some will be horses, yes. Most will be riders.
And having read it, what a terrible piece of science slop this is!
There is no observed adoption dataset used to establish that this mechanism explains LLM use better than alternatives such as usefulness, falling prices, workplace requirements, or independent discovery. The behavior they talk about could describe many socially adopted technologies or practices. Its applicability does not identify anything distinctively viral or harmful about LLMs.
The cognitive decline is assigned, not measured or independently derived. They calculate population competence by averaging those assigned scores across the groups. Consequently, moving people into lower-scoring groups lowers the average by construction. The dramatic fall from 1 to approximately 0.425 in their example is a model output conditional on those choices, not evidence of a 57% real-world cognitive decline.
They explicitly define competence as what the human can do when external support is withdrawn, excluding the total capability of the human/AI system. This cannot settle whether the technology improves overall performance or human welfare. And they provide no measurement protocol clarifying exactly which supports could be removed for a fair comparison (for instance, how does this compare to Wikipedia or electricity). They don’t do this because of an agenda, so allow me to assert something with just as little evidence as the authors provide for their conclusion: This is obvious bias, and they are designing the study to get the result they want, and they don’t care about scientific truth, just about getting their paper published and attracting attention.
And the “runaway” stuff is just not supported by the model. The language about equilibrium as a parameter changes is not automatically evidence of an imminent, rapid societal collapse! it is PURE conspiracy-level rhetoric. Just put two things in the same sentence and hope people think they are related. This is misleading language at best, and willful manipulation at worst.
This is a BASIC failure of the minimal requirement for something to be called scientific. If there had been even a trace of a genuine attempt at Popperian falsification, the current research design would never have gotten past review. This is cargo cult science, it LOOKS like scientific research, but it’s not even close to scientific.
EVERYTHING I hate about modern research on full display! And I am losing respect for the HN community more and more, because only terrible studies with sensationalist claims and titles get attention. This is tabloid-level quality, just with a direct link to the article instead of a dumbed-down intermediate write-up. If anybody read the actual paper, this would not get posted ANYWHERE. But “LLMs are a cognitive virus” is what gets posted.....
If you don't like it, don't consume it. And spare us all the hatred from your ill-calibrated understanding...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-waves-synch...
https://knowridge.com/2026/08/first-findings-of-mirror-like-...
The only way I can come up with to avoid exposure to a "cognitive virus" is lock oneself in a rubber room.
But extreme isolation merely fosters other mental illnesses.
It's an irrational world with no empirical evidence as to why it even exists. Get over it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-...
They are the cognitive construct I fortified in my mind and in my code before the models began producing their own training materials. My approach is based on two decades of coding without ai.
The immunization is becoming increasingly more valuable as people begin understanding the market in which I do business.
Research can be more of a lagging indicator than a leading indicator with AI.
We've created new SCPs.
Social Contagions can be memes, plus doom scrolling or anything.
It can help, but where they don't understand the possibilities and capabilities of tech in general, let alone how this is different, let alone the difference in the rate of change, traditionally reliable snapshot based takes themselves do not age very well at all.
Or in other words: the humanities are good.
Technology takes without a tech perspective present can greatly skew it.
I'm not referring to a technology context at all. Just like you shouldn't trust the IT department to run accounting... the opposite will also vary.
Not being able to track the possibilities and capabilities of a type of software that is unlike the software before it can really outdate things quickly.