Ancient brains, medieval institutions, godlike technology. Tristan Harris had some sort of comment like that on a podcast about the challenges posed by AI.

I’m not noticing the decline in my own abilities any more than I had before using them. I finished undergrad 20 years ago and my once sharp math skills had been severely diminished within only 5-10 years. Just simple arithmetic and percentages that I could rapidly do in my head became dependent on calculators/spreadsheets. For all other trivia type knowledge, my brain has offloaded it to the internet RAM in my pocket. It’s a familiar feeling of when some question comes up and I think “oh, I used to know that, let me look it up”. Maybe I just already hit my personal floor of stupidity before LLMs. However, I personally feel a huge mental burden of the state of communication. The contemporary version of it where I have a million threads and conversations im juggling at any given time. Emails, voicemail, chat, online, texts, personal, business, home, children, other family, friends, then there’s the variants like Messages, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. And as overwhelming as it is for me, I’m super under connected than everyone else I know. I quit following most news and all sports, as I just don’t have the bandwidth for it. My brain was molded preinternet and I feel like it’s reaching its max on the analog to digital conversion. Or at least it’s just a really lossy process.

Yeah, I'm 45 and I'm like you - no social media, relatively under connected, and still feel swamped constantly by emails and calls and especially texts. They eat up half my productive time every day, and most of them are things I'm looped in on that I don't even need to respond to. Okay so let's say that's the new cognitive burden. The new escape hatch is "AI". Now you don't need to read your mail or write responses! Let an LLM handle that for you! And now your friends and coworkers will send you AI generated mail anyway, so if you're actually taking the time to read and respond to it yourself you're a chump, right? Noise machines. Humans are noise machines. Ever try to sleep till noon and notice that everyone else seems like they can't feel alive unless they wake up and make the maximum amount of noise and racket possible? What could be better for a gibbering species of ground dwelling apes than a miraculous machine that gibbers for them, to point back and forth at each other?

Nah. What you said there is just an extension of the elimination of friction that the silicon valley has been pursuing for the last 15+ years. But that is just.. well. Their business model. Not a force of nature.

Funny that you mention that. A month ago I started the Duolingo chess course, and just yesterday I noticed that my brain is clearer, more capable of deep thought than it has been in years. It's like stepping out of a fog. I also started CPAP recently, so it's hard to attribute the change to either, but I feel certain that the chess helped.

You do realise most people aren’t in shape right? The idea that most people have the discipline to keep themselves mentally in check is false. We already know this! Millions and billions of people who spend hrs a day consuming media on platforms such as instagram.

> I'd argue that this is an adjustment period that society has to go through. I used to think like this until social media proved there are some tech innovations we just can’t adjust to. 10 years ago you would’ve never caught me supporting any sort of age based social media ban. Now? I don’t think it goes far enough. Fake news ( actual fake news) and misinformation has only gotten worse with it as well. It’s so destructive.

The human is designed to interact with small groups, to understand several smaller groups, and perhaps to imagine a big group of smaller groups. In a literal sense, let's say 100 people per group. At that level the human can actually know and interact with them still. In a city of 100.000 it's still managable to feel you are related and involved to this group-of-groups. In a city of a million, you'll revert to only your own small group and have lost the connection to the collective. The same goes for speed and quantity of input, as to what the human is designed for (not literally designed). Be it social media with it's infinite scrolling, cars racing by as opposed to looking out the window a few times per hour because you see someone/something, constant sound input if you live anywhere remotely busy or work in a busy office. The point I'm trying to make is that the world used to be comprehensible for the human. Some understood a little complexer things, some only the simpler things. Now there is an overload of everything. So, most humans are in survival mode wether they know it or not. Hence the many seekin mindfullness etc No matter, it's an observation, not a judgement or opinion on it. The world will just keep rushing forward. Some have a slight hand in the direction it goes for better (never) or for worse, but spiral it will.

I think there’s a major part of this conversation being omitted, though I am not saying you did it intentionally: “the attention economy.” We have gone from advertising to a system of creating addicts for profit

Definately agree, that was included in the "or for worse" in this sentence I wrote. As for creating the addicts, nobody had a masterplan. It's all the pieces spiraling together, >> The world will just keep rushing forward. Some have a slight hand in the direction it goes for better (never) or for worse, but spiral it will. The systems are too large and self-propulsing for anyone to really control. Consider the rainforest. How many millions of variables interact, nobody is in charge, everything influences everything in a billion different ways. You might say, well we can cut it down, so kind we can control it. Allright, let's continue to spiral. You might build a city there after a few years. Still in charge right. But it get's too hot because there's no vegitation, so you have to change again. And then we find that people keep getting strangely sick, and scientists find some special mushroom that survived and apparantly thrives on the mix of cut trees and diesel fumes and their spores in the air are poisonous. I made that up, but you get the idea hopefully.

The LLMs will gradually cramp more and more adds in their responses in an effort to make a profit. At least now we know why we will start watering our plants with Brawndo.

> Now I work mostly with PhDs who were at the top of every academic environment they've ever been in. And yet I can see their thinking skills rapidly declining as well; many of them can no longer brainstorm, code, think deeply, or write without an LLM present doing 90% of the work. Many of them can no longer sit quietly for even 30 minutes just thinking on their own, which is a required skill for producing original thought. This was my experience even pre-LLMs though (about my own PhD thinking skills too). I blame the amount of random stuff work now involves more than LLMs.

> For adults the cognitive decline won't be as measurable since there's no exam I think this is true of every affliction that adults criticize children and teenagers of I’ve been out of university for a very long time, and I took a community college course and for the first few sessions I couldn't focus or sit still at all. Fortunately I knew that was abnormal and how to conform to a prior version of myself, but I don’t think children have a frame of reference.

> Many of them can no longer sit quietly for even 30 minutes just thinking on their own Sorry, but I highly doubt that. Has a very "old man yells at clouds" vibe.

I doubt it. I'm stupid and I use LLMs a lot but I can still meditate for 30 minutes. But apparently some of the smartest people in the world have lost the skill? But the commenter haven't, because why, they're 15 years older and thus immune to the same LLM-effects? Plus, the issue with people having trouble sitting still for 30 minutes precede LLMs with decades.

Why is it so hard to believe? The young adults now have grown up with short form media and instant gratification / dopamine hits from apps. It's vastly different than people of the same age just a few years ago. Not saying everyone else is immune, but those a few years older have also had a period without it.

> Most people definitely can't meditate for 30 minutes, so if you can do this, it's very impressive. Maybe not traditional meditation, but I have no problem taking a 30 minute plus walk with nothing but my thoughts. It’s actually when I do most of my thinking. The other is in the shower/sauna where devices don’t work anyway.

1. The article itself seems like an LLM summary of a conversation. 2. No US educational institution should ever grade on a curve. Your job is not to compare students but to educate them. Grade curves hide the performance of the educators and process of education in actually improving the skills of students. 3. Both AI and the cognitive and emotional overload from social media taking away brain space may be to blame. Idea: let students report screen time statistics at the beginning of each semester and weekly or at the end. See if and how it correlates with academics.

This tracks, I have read that this generation is the first one since the 1800s that performs worse academically than the previous ones. Experts blamed screens and anything digital in the classroom.

It’s like the greatest teacher. Plus it’s not toxic like social media. Banning it would be a shame.

Social media wasn't always toxic at least not to the degree it is today. LLMs could be potentially a lot worse given the right set of instructions

We're going to find that LLM usage has even worse effects on the mind than the horrific effects we're just starting to be certain of from social media. I'm just not going to use either. See you lads on the other side.