Test scores across OECD countries peaked around 2012 and have declined since. IQ scores in many developed countries appear to be falling after rising throughout the twentieth century. Nataliya Kosmyna at MIT’s Media Lab began noticing changes around two years ago when strangers started emailing her to ask if using ChatGPT could alter their brains. She posted a study in June tracking brain activity in 54 students writing essays. Those using ChatGPT showed significantly less activity in networks tied to cognitive processing and attention compared to students who wrote without digital help or used only internet search engines. Almost none could recall what they had written immediately after submitting their work. She received more than 4,000 emails afterward. Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material. A British survey found that 92% of university students now use AI and roughly 20% have used it to write all or part of an assignment. Independent research has found that more screen time in schools correlates with worse results. Technology companies have designed products to be frictionless, removing the cognitive challenges brains need to learn. AI now allows users to outsource thinking itself.
Before I used Google Maps regularly, I would be more aware of road layout while driving and soon become capable of navigating any town I visited regularly, without a map. It’s weird to drive through a place I last visited twenty years ago, knowing that last time I was there I’d navigate based on memory, but now I’m completely leaning on that device to do it for me. That mental faculty might not be absolutely lost, but I don’t use it and I don’t suppose I would ever have developed it if I were learning to drive today.
Perhaps it’s obsolete, and a modern brain can now use those resources for something more relevant. Over the course of human history we have developed tools to use our finite mental resources more effectively, but never without a price. Socrates feared that the use of writing would weaken our memory and true understanding. I’m sure he was right, at least about the memory, but it was worth the price. Without writing, nobody would know what Socrates thought about anything.
But with AI, we’re not enabling ourselves to do more and develop new faculties, because AI seeks to be our universal crutch. Perhaps under other circumstances it could be better, but the entities pushing AI want us to be compliant consumers hypnotized by a endless stream of advertising slop. Fundamentally, they are not incentivized to help us develop our potential. They want to replace us.
There was a Twitter exchange Erich did the screenshotted rounds a year or so ago, which went something like this:
Tweet 1:
Sometimes i spend so long crafting the perfect prompt that i realise what the solution is and don’t even have to ask ChatGPT
Tweet 2:
Bro just discovered “thinking”
Using AI as a rubber duck is what he did. I’ve used you guys in that manner. Quit a couple of asklemmy posts I had started because crafting the question and explaining the issue led me to a resolution.
Before LLMs it was emails to my professor. I’m actually really grateful to have a chatbot available any time of day for this very purpose. Even if I never hit send, it’s so much easier for me to type it all out when it doesn’t feel like I’m just shouting into the abyss.
Yup. Makes me wonder if they teach people rubber duck debugging any more.
They sure do. Just finished a CS degree and it’s still a popular device.
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People were ignorant in previous centuries because they didn’t know better. Today they are willfully ignorant in spite of having the facts available.
Today they are willfully ignorant in spite of having the facts available.
What “facts”, because all kinds of stuff, once vetted by media is now equally represented as “facts” and “Science”, all over social media.
The biggest problem we have right now is confidence bias, because you can find “facts” to support any predjudice, then call it “common sense”.
Critical thinkers are not solely informed by social media.
the issue with becoming more knowledgable about the world is you feel less special.
and people are desperate to feel special. our entire consumer economy is built around exploiting folks insecurities and convincing them that their purchases make them better than other people.
Looking around at my family, neighbors and coworkers getting hoodwinked by AI left and right… yeah that tracks.
Not me. Because I am smart.I know because I’m smart. If I were stupid, I wouldn’t know. See?
So simple!
I guess, yes? When social engineering is stronger than free will and common sense then I’d call that gullible/stupid.
I could say anything is a crutch that removes the burden from our minds. Calculators remove the burden of doing basic math and map apps remove the burden of maintaining a mental map. Both of these can result in a person who can’t independently do basic calculations or navigate and won’t understand the methodology behind the calculations. Now if this is a problem is open to debate.
Now using AI to avoid learning is a problem since it results in fraud. “I claim I understand this but I don’t.”
This is a great conversation because I’m one of those people who’s terrible at arithmetic, but quite good at math. As in: I can look at a function, visualize it in 3D space, see what different max, mins and surfaces are dominated by what terms etc, but don’t ask me to tally a meal check. I’d be useless at applying any math without a calculator.
Similarly, there’s a lot of engineers out there that use CAD extensively that would probably not be engineers if they had to do drafting by hand.
The oatmeal did a comic that distilled this for me where they talked about why they didn’t like AI “art”. They made the point that in making a drawing, there are a million little choices made reconciling what’s in your head with what you can do on the page. Either from the medium, what you’re good at drawing, whatever, it’s those choices that give the work “soul”. Same thing for writing. Those choices are where learning, development, and style happen, and what generative AI takes away.
That helped crystalize for me the difference between a tool and autocomplete on steroids.
Edit: to add: you’re statement “I claim to understand but don’t” hits it on the head and is similar to why you have to be careful if plagiarism in citing academic review papers. If you write YOUR paper in a way that agrees with the review but discuss the paper the review was referencing, and, even accidentally, skip over that the conclusion you’re putting forward is from the review, not the paper you’re both citing, that’s plagiarism. Notion being you misrepresented their thoughts as your own. That is basically ALL generative AI.
A slashdot post? Is it Y2K?
from the not-very-good-at-analogies dept
Slashdot is like a canned fart in a bottle forgotten in the attic. Open up the bottle, take a sniff… welcome back!
Oh, hey, what’s this article about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory that stupidity enabled Nazis?
Hur hur… Bonhoeffer. You’re mom’s a Bone Hoeffer.
Yeah, I was recently introduced to Bonhoeffer, his insight is incredible and the fact that similar mistakes are taking place today.
Peter Turchin is as close to Hari Seldon I think we’ll have, his models point to a lot of turmoil in the future.
Damn I was going to blame the co2 in the atmosphere
Devo was right.
I want someone to do a study of people who graduate from St johns vs people from say nyu or similar and how they function in today’s society.
the individual matters more than the education. i know several st johns graduates whose personality is yes-men. i have a liberal arts education from an ivy and 95% of my peers at uni thought it was stupid and just wanted job skills. they didn’t give a fuck about learning or education, they just went there so they could get a job at goldman or similar and get rich or because their parents told them had to. they thought i was mentally ill for valuing liberal arts and focusing on education rather than getting a big fat paycheck after graduating.
a Socratic education only works if you already inclined towards skeptical inquiry. you can’t educate people into skepticism, it’s really an emotional disposition. normal people do not want to think anyone than they want to run marathons. only a small percentage of people are inclined to such activities.
i taught philosophy for 3 years, about 500 students. maybe a dozen of them actually learned anything… the other 490 were just there for a requirement/grade/elective and did absolutely did not give a fuck other than thinking quoting Plato make them sound smart and win arguments, or help them further entrench themselves in their delusional conspiracy mindset. had about 50% of my students actively argued for exploiting slaves for business profits, because all that mattered was their own wealth.
for every liberal atheist skeptic linux genius here on lemmy, there about a 100+ people who believe the opposite out there in the real world.
Nice, thanks for sharing your experience.
I’ve only known a few go through St John’s and they are all very intelligent, yet partially disconnected from modern life, sort of like the Amish.
