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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

I just don't see that the main thrust of their argument, (oversimplified) "humans will become so dependent on AI, they'll become dumb," holds any water. I mean even from an evolutionary standpoint, intelligence is (by far) our most valuable competitive advantage. Arguing that "cognitive offloading" (their term) will have runaway effects is reaching to say the least.

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.

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Haven't read the article but I think in some limited timeframes it's true. I'm already turning over a lot of my thinking to LLMs. Not so much of a problem if I own the LLM but when big tech can just turn off the tap when they want or skew the results it seems a bit dangerous. It's possibly less dangerous for me, being old already, but seems quite risky for younger folk.

> 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.

The higher rates don't make any sense if you don't try to take into account the fact that we live longer. Of course we will accumulate more diseases if we last longer.

You think rates of these things are increasing in children because we live longer?

Higher rates of obesity because we live longer?

> We also have incredible rates of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes.

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.

You think we only recently discovered how to tell if someone is obese?

No, that one is real.

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