Note: this lemmy post was originally titled MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline and linked to this article, which I cross-posted from this post in !fuck_ai@lemmy.world.
Someone pointed out that the “Science, Public Health Policy and the Law” website which published this click-bait summary of the MIT study is not a reputable publication deserving of traffic, so, 16 hours after posting it I am editing this post (as well as the two other cross-posts I made of it) to link to MIT’s page about the study instead.
The actual paper is here and was previously posted on !fuck_ai@lemmy.world and other lemmy communities here.
Note that the study with its original title got far less upvotes than the click-bait summary did 🤡
Anyone who doubts this should ask their parents how many phone numbers they used to remember.
In a few years there’ll be people who’ve forgotten how to have a conversation.
I don’t see how that’s any indicator of cognitive decline.
Also people had notebooks for ages. The reason they remembered phone numbers wasn’t necessity, but that you had to manually dial them every time.
—a story told by Socrates, according to his student Plato
The other day I saw someone ask ChatGPT how long it would take to perform 1.5 million instances of a given task, if each instance took one minute. Mfs cannot even divide 1.5 million minutes by 60 to get get 25,000 hours, then by 24 to get 1,041 days. Pretty soon these people will be incapable of writing a full sentence without ChatGPT’s input
Edit to add: divide by 365.25 to get 2.85 years. Anyone who can tell me how many months that is without asking an LLM gets a free cookie emoji
Rough estimate using 30 days as average month would be ~35 months (1050 = 35×30). The average month is a tad longer than 30 days, but I don’t know exactly how much. Without a calculator, I’d guess the total result is closer to 34.5. Just using my own brain, this is as far as I get.
Now, adding a calculator to my toolset, the average month is 365.2425 d / 12 m = 30.4377 d/m. The total result comes out to about 34.2, so I overestimated a little.
Also, the total time is 1041.66… which would be more correctly rounded to 1042, but has negligible impact on the redult.
Edit: I saw someone else went even harder on this, but for early morning performance, I’m satisfied with my work
🍪
Pirat gave me an egg emoji, so I baked some more cupcake emojis. Have one for getting it so close without even using a calculator 🧁
I hope your weekend is as awesome as you are
I want a free cookie emoji!
I didn’t ask an LLM, no, I asked Wikipedia:
Edit: but since I already knew a year is 365.2425 I could, of course, have divided that by the 12 months of a year to get that number.
So,
34 months + 6d 3h 30m 35s 999ms 999999 ns (or we could call it 36s…)
Edit: 34 months is better known as 2 years and 10 months.
🍪
You got as far as nanoseconds so here’s a cupcake for extra credit too 🧁
Thank you, you really didn’t have to. That cupcake is truly the icing and it’s almost too much! I’ll give you this giant egg of unknown origin: 🥚 in return, as long as you promise to use it for baking and making some more of those cupcakes for whoever else needs or deserves one within the next few days, hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds and 999999 bananoseconds 🍌
I swear the companies hard code solutions for weird edge cases so their investors are fooled into believing that their LLMs are getting smarter.
You forgot doing the years, which is a bit trickier if we take into account the leap years.
According to the Gregorian calendar, every fourth year is a leap year unless it’s divisible by 100 – except those divisible by 400 which are leap years anyway. Hence, the average length of one year (over 400 years) must be:
So,
Or 2 years and…
1041 days is just about 2y 310d 12h 21m 36s
Wtf, how did we go from 1041 whole days to fractions of a day? Damn leap years!
Had we not been accounting for them, we would have had 2 years and…
Or simply 2y 311d if we just ignore that tiny rounding error or use fewer decimals.
Engineers be like…
1041/365 =2,852
.852*365=310.980
Thus 2 y 311 d. Or really, fuck it 3 y
Edit. #til
The lemmy app on my phone does basic calculator functions.
Seems about right! But really, it often seems pretty useful to me, since it removes a lot of unnecessary information thoughout a content feed or thread, though I usually still want to be able to see the exact date and time when tapping or hovering over the value for further context.
Edit: However, the lemmy client I use, Eternity, shows the entire date and time for each comment instead of the age of it, and I’m fine with that too, but unsure what I actually prefer…
Which client and how?
I already have seen a massive decline personally and observationally (watching other people) in conversation skills.
Most people now to talk to each other like they are exchanging internet comments. They don’t ask questions, they don’t really engage… they just exchange declaratory sentences. Heck most of the dates I went on the past few years… zero real conversation and just vague exchanges of opinion and commentary. A couple of them went full on streamer, like just ranting at me and randomly stopping to ask me nonsense questions.
Most of our new employees the past year or two really struggle with any verbal communication and if you approach them physically to converse about something they emailed about they look massively uncomfortable and don’t really know how to think on their feet.
Before the pandemic I used to actually converse with people and learn from them. Now everyone I meet feels like interacting with a highlight reel. What I don’t understand is why people are choosing this and then complaining about it.
They’ll have forgotten how to remember anything.
That doesn’t require a few years, there are loads of people out there already who have forgotten how to have a conversation
Especially moderators, who typically are the polar opposite nog the word. You disagree with my factually incorrect statement? Ban. Problem solved. You disagree with my opinion? Ban.
Similarly I’ve seen loads of users on Lemmy (and before or reddit) that just ban anyone who asks questions or who disagrees.
It’s so nice and easy, living in a echo chamber, but it does break your brain
I could remember so many phone numbers nowadays I just click their names on my rectangle, the future sucks and is weakening us !
People don’t memorize phone numbers anymore? Why not? Dialing is so much quicker than searching your contacts for the right person.
This is the furthest thing from my experience lol I can type 2 letters in my phone, see the right name and press call. I haven’t memorised a phone number since before the year 2000* (*hyperbole)
I still remember all my family’s phone numbers from when I was a kid growing up In WV in the 70s
I currently have my wife’s number memorized and that’s it. Not my mom, my kids, friends, anybody. I just don’t have to. It’s all in my phone.
But I’m also of the opinion that NOT having this info in my head has freed it up for more important things. Like memes and cat videos 🤣
But seriously, I don’t think this tool, and AI is just a tool, is dumbing me down. Yes I think about certain things less, but it allows me to ask different or better questions, and just learn differently. I don’t necessarily trust everything it spits out, I double check all code it produces, etc. It’s very good at explaining things or providing other examples. Since I’m older, I’ve heard similar arguments about TV and/or the Internet. LLMs are a very interesting tool that have good and bad uses. They are not intelligent, at least not yet, and are not the solution to everything technical. They are very resource intensive and should be used much more judiciously then the currently are.
Ultimately it boils down to if you’re lazy, this allows you to be more lazy. If you don’t want to continue learning and just rely on it, you are gonna have a bad time. Be skeptical, questioning, employee critical thinking, take in information from lots of sources, and in the end you will be fine. That is unless it becomes sentient and wipes us all out.