As large language models take over more and more cognitive tasks, researchers are warning this mental outsourcing comes with a cost.

In addition to making people stupid, I wonder what affect will LLMs like Claude will have on programmers? How will new programmers learn if companies start using Claude?

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    513·
    1 day ago

    The vast amount of people don’t understand how their brain works…

    What we think of “us” isn’t our brains, it’s just our consciousness. And that’s just a middle manager that’s getting all types of shit thrown at it.

    Our consciousness can’t tell the difference between the prefrontal lobe handling something, or a laptop with a chatbot open.

    It just takes the input and processes it.

    When we throw stuff to an AI, the part of our brain that normally handles it, just starts doing other stuff.

    If you don’t have the AI, your prefontal lobe doesn’t want to take the old stuff back, it’s already got its plate full with the new stuff it picked up.

    Your consciousness knows the chatbot can puke out an answer, so when your prefrontal love won’t/can’t do it, you just got hyper focused on getting access to the chatbot.

    It’s “making people stupider” but the real problem is it’s abusing how every mammals brain has worked for millions of years. It’s not something people can resist,bits the brain as a whole working as intended. We just didn’t evolve for something that at any moment could become prohibitively expensive.

    Think of how Uber was cheap till people needed it.

    If people get hooked on cheap AI, they’re not gonna be able to survive without it and will pay anything. I think this is why its pushed on coders so hard, they want everyone to use it so everyone becomes dependent on it. Instead of paying for 4-8 years for a degree, people will have to pay monthly for an AI just to earn a living

    That’s the end goal of the techbros. No one being able to work unless they pay for AI.

    • classic@fedia.io
      8·
      23 hours ago

      Asking from a place of agreement, curious if you have any readings to suggest, on that impact to the brain. Always looking for solid content to send along to others

      (beyond this article and the MIT research it cites)

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        72·
        23 hours ago

        on that impact to the brain.

        I mean, I pulled a whole bunch of stuff together in that comment, I’d be shocked if any source existed that touched on every part.

        As far as “us” delegating tasks to other parts of the brain, this looks pretty good:

        The driving force behind human brain evolution

        Although many species can transfer behavior from volitional to habitual function (Poldrack et al., 2005; Barton, 2007; Seger and Spiering, 2011; Krubitzer and Seelke, 2012; Barton and Venditti, 2013), the shift from quadrupedal to bipedal locomotion nonetheless may have been a powerful driver for the rapid elaboration of the distinctively human “delegation” mode of information processing. Bipedality is rare in mammals, seen commonly only in humans and in some apes (Hardman et al., 2002; Alexander, 2004; Doyon et al., 2009). Although bipedality plausibly affords a number of adaptive advantages (e.g., it facilitates surveillance in densely vegetated areas, and frees the arms for other tasks Carrier, 2011), it also imposes a massive information-processing challenge. Compared to the stability conferred by quadrupedal locomotion, a bipedal organism rests its body mass on only two support points. This inherently unstable posture means that even a tiny shift in position will cause a fall, unless the animal instantly detects and responds to that change. Presumably for this reason, quadrupedal animals that resort to bipedality for surveillance typically do so only briefly, or in highly stereotyped poses (as is the case with meerkats). Moving about while bipedal poses extraordinary challenges, whereby the individual must constantly respond to ever-changing subtle shifts in weight distribution (Preuschoft, 2004), reducing its ability to attend to other aspects of its environment (such as the detection of food sources or approaching predators).

        Despite these challenges, adult humans spend little time consciously thinking about maintaining their balance as they move around, except when placed in a challenging circumstance, such as walking on a narrow beam or when leaving a pub. The means of achieving that liberation is very clear as one watches a young child learning to walk. This is a long process, with every step initially requiring full concentration. Through time, however, the skills develop as control over fine motor movements improves–and full concentration on movement is no longer needed as the tasks involved become “automatized” and are delegated to other parts of the brain, such as the basal ganglia (Poldrack et al., 2005; Ashby et al., 2010; Seger and Spiering, 2011; Sepulcre et al., 2012) and the cerebellum (Duncan, 2001; Desmurget and Turner, 2010; Balsters and Ramnani, 2011; Callu et al., 2013). Plausibly, then, the adoption of bipedalism in proto-humans posed a strong selective advantage for individuals with brains capable of using their full processing power to learn bipedalism, but that were also able to delegate the basic tasks of walking and running to “lower” neural centers, freeing up the higher segments for detecting unpredictable opportunities and challenges (be they related to predators, food, or social cues), and rapidly responding to that information.

        In summary, we suggest that (1) the ability to delegate routine tasks from the cortex to other parts of the brain is more highly developed in humans than other species; and (2) that elaboration arose during our evolutionary history because the computational challenges associated with balancing on two legs enhanced individual fitness in proto-humans who were capable of transferring the control of routine tasks in this way. To this we can add (3) that once this “delegation” mode of neural functioning had evolved, it was co-opted for many other cognitive tasks–essentially, liberating the cortex to deal with novel unpredictable events.

        https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4010745/

        Although to be upfront I didn’t take the time to read the whole study, I just skimmed it. I was already aware of how this works from school and just searched real quick for a source

        But that study starts out assuming what pushed us to delegation forward brains was how fucking hard it was to stand on two feet without a giant tail. And once we got good at delegating that away from conscious thinking, why wouldn’t we keep delegating everything else as long as there isn’t an immediate negative consequence?

        • classic@fedia.io
          1·
          16 hours ago

          Thank you. That was a cool read. We squander this amazing organ. I’m with you that it’s hard to find all these concepts in one place. Sapolsky’s lectures captures some of it.

    • Em Adespoton@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      18 hours ago

      It’s pushed on coders because it gives every developer a team of never sleeping junior devs for a fraction of the price.

      And if the competition is doing it, you won’t compete unless you do it too. Until the price matches that team of junior coders.