Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”
Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”
Researchers find that the more people use AI at their job, the less critical thinking they use.
Mule emoji
Calculators made mental math obsolete. GPS apps made people forget how to navigate on their own.
Maybe those are good innovations or not. Arguments can be made both ways, I guess.
But if AI causes critical thinking skills to atrophy, I think it's hard to argue that that's a good thing for humanity. Maybe the end game is that AI achieves sentience and takes over the world, but is benevolent, and takes care of us like beloved pets (humans are AI's best friend). Is that good? Idk
Or maybe this isn't a real issue and the study is flawed, or more realistically, my interpretation of the study is wrong because I only read the headline of this article and not the study itself?
Who knows?
Calculators made mental math obsolete
People love to pretend that. But it's still very important to have decent mental math as an assist to know when someone's bullshiting you.
It's developed by the worst of us and taught by a bunch of shit it read on reddit. You're thinking it might be benevolent?
Do people cry when they step on ant?
Do rich people care when they kill little people?
Why would AI side with the ants or the little people lol
I perceive my advanced tools akin to a broom.
I can mop floors alright, but I also don't want to sit down with a cloth to do it.
If I can't do that myself, and it does that instead of me, that's not just my tool, that's my employee, and the one I now depend on.
'AI' companies sell us billions of hours of other people's labor to replace our own need to interject our experience and ingrain themselves into our routine. Like the coming of ads, it's already normalized. But this time, critical parts of our life has this black box dependancy and subscription.
So, AI users exhibit a reduction in literally the one skill that the AI expects them to actually have?
I should probably go read that link and see if it's actual degradation or just selection.
Spoiler alert : it was just a survey of the reported confidence of folk who admitted to using AI.
I think we already came to that conclusion ourselves, Tiktok made us aware i think...leading to terms like brainrot and slop.
But it's good to see it is recognized.
Thankfully the slop generated by copilot et al is absolutely useless dreck. I've had a significant number of tasks end up broken because someone chased a dream promised by Ai slop. "Sure, you can do that in python." "that's definitely how that tool works." etc.
Well, to be fair, I never had the idea of sticking pizza toppings with glue... That's some next level Gordian Knot stuff, right there!
Also don't forget Europe in the 18th century and how reading was destroying the youth. German Wikipedia has a big ass entry on it.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesesucht
The US Wikipedia entry is just a blurb.
They said the same shit about writing, books, radio, and tv.
I think AI so far is detrimental to society.
-
It made it too easy to flood the world with bullshit.
-
Also it will make tracking peoples behaviors much easier while keeping plausible deniability on levels that past horrible regimes could only dream about.
-
It will be used to make replacing workers more easy.
-
It is being used to deny more healthcare (eg Luigie’s case)
Pro’s
-
Can be used for good (eg in the medical field) by finding issues sooner and making better cures
-
Using AI to actually learn though is a great tool.
-
Other scientific advancements
—
All in all I think it with social media is one of the biggest reasons the US is in the state it is.
So the pros are
- thing we have no way of knowing how it works, therefore no way of relying on it
- thing that helps you do something you then have to do anyway by yourself (if you want to learn something from generative model output you still need to fact check it)
- vague promise it will lead to anything useful in the future
-
About writing?! Surely you have zero evidence for that.
Oh haha cause it wouldn't be recorded
but are they wrong though?
Uh I don't know.
Memorization used to be a huge part of education hundreds of years ago before books were common. It's the origin of oral defence for doctorates. That excluded a huge part of the population who were great at logic and analysis.
Books became a bicycle for the brain. Imo, AI is the same. Skills such as structuring sentences into perfectly grammatically correct forms will atrophy in exchange for the focus to be on the idea.
yeah and it does harm. Any technology amputated a part of us. The point is deciding if it's worth the cost.