Some people are used to thinking deeply and concentrating, but are also curious and they are using LLMs to get more information faster. So for them, the use of LLMs seems fruitful. What I wonder is whether the tendency of letting the LLM do some of the work will affect them too, eroding, in the long term, their concentration powers.

I've learnt more since the advent of LLMs than I did in the 10 years prior. And it's not just me; that is most people's experience with LLMs. But most of those people would also concur with your apocalyptic thinking. AI is the apocalypse for thinking, except for me, only I am smart enough and experienced enough to maintain my cognitive ability while using LLMs.

And this on top of the economic apocalypse of removing a lot of jobs and not creating any new ones within a society that doesn't seem to function without money flowing.

AI will just create a bimodal society which already seems to be developing. You get people who'll use AI for what it's good for and people who'll stop use their brain and critical thinking skills until we develop 'real' artificial intelligence which can continually learn and can exist on a powerful laptop rather than some super computer, then these things will be better than any human ever at cognitive tasks. All in all, i think we are human cognitive superiority will disappear in the next 10-30 years. The people alive should try to build a equitable society while they are alive so that the benefits of this technology benefit the many over the few.

In history, some of the best educated aristocrats had live tutors for education. Was their cognitive ability impaired by having expert instructors? When textbooks were generated did they impede the ability to think about problems or advance it? Does one have to expend every hour of previous effort to collect knowledge in order to understand and advance further? Does AI have the effect of tutors or textbooks, or something else?

It's weird how lazy people are unwilling to take the advice:

> Stop using the lazy answer box, it will make you lazy.

One I noticed recently I was talking to a young child who was so excited about programming and showing me what he had made it and how. I couldn’t show him any of the code for what I have made recently because it was just videcoded.. we could both share the same interest in making things but I felt like this is going to be a big gap in intergeneraltional knowledge sharing. Even if he wants to learn there is going to be less incidental chances to hear the details from someone older who’s also really doing it.

Most human knowledge is a handful of things re-stated in different semantics or cultural language

In IT things like "protected memory" are just access control problems; under the hood the algorithms to solve either rely on same physical machine state patterns; test if current user should have access to this memory (RAM or disk) and react accordingly to the test.

At the language layer though we encapsulate both in different function names and git check ins

It's bizarre

Given the number of photons and possible angles for light to bounce around would not be shocked if standing in the woods during the so-called "golden hour" observing the God-rays filter through flora is zapping our brains with more information than all the text we read on screens

A walk in the woods feels so refreshing because every where our eyes look its layers of geometric and color gradient information never repeating themselves in subtle ways; lighting up a larger gradient in our brain than the normalized minimalism inherent to text does in order for us to understand each other

Sitting at a screen however, is sitting at a screen. All that's missing is the electrodes from the computer to your brain so the obviousness its a lab experiment is unmistakable

Time to stop being friends with a computer that doesn't care you exist and go socialize

"Its probable that AI will roll out much faster than humans can develop that skill of using it in a way that increases not decreases human knowledge over time." Source? That for sure is a bold claim. How to even measure 'human knowlegde'?

Right! Have the same experience myself. I think we approach dangerous levels when people outsource thinking to a model. There is great value in having one's own judgement, and that takes more than just reading and consulting with an LLM.

> that AI looks like an apocalypse for human thinking

People who like to think will keep doing that. People who don't aren't already doing a lot of thinking...

So pretty much things are going to go as usual..

I constantly oscillate between AI could conceivably be the end of human thinking and it’s just a tool for humans. You read the news and see a world we could become obsolete, then using it says otherwise. It’s not that I don’t think frontier models aren’t smart, but they’re so goal oriented and I can’t see a world where their goal is high level enough where it could sustain “living” decades without its context window needing to be cleared to achieve said goal

It very much looks similar to how once cars stopped needing maintenance the average owner mechanical skill cratered, and once the driving aids/"self"-driving was added, actual driving skill cratered too

> I have to say honestly, that AI looks like an apocalypse for human thinking [ Im glad Tao is warning people, I just dont think many people will listen ]

It's also coming after the social media attention span crisis, and AI fits into that very well, giving a burst of dopamine for being able to "do" stuff you never taught yourself (and being ignorant enough about the topic to not even be able to spot any mistakes)

There is a spectrum between using AI as tool and for automation. As humans are lazy, they always go more for the automation end if it accessible. And the human skill at stakes is brain capability. So yes, I agree: AI looks like an apocalypse for human thinking.

I don't understand the rationale trying to equate AI with social media here. Nobody really was ever arguing social media would somehow be good for education or even particularly relevant.

Personally I think AI at least has the potential to be one of the greatest tools to have a positive impact on education. We basically democratized access to an infinitely patient and capable high level tutor that can tackle any topic at any level of abstraction.

I regularly, like at least several times a day, find myself doing random deep dives on some topic triggered by some question where prior maybe I would have read a wiki page or just dismissed it due to the barrier of entry to get to what I was interested in.

A recliner for the mind.

I’m constantly learning from LLMs. Claude Opus is like a Wikipedia I can talk to while I am riding my bike. I can learn all about optics, point spread function and FWHM, and more. My mechanical engineer coworkers are using the tools to learn how our software system works.

Sure you don’t need to learn coding syntax anymore. I mean some knowledge is helpful but the machine can explain it. I never learned assembly language - compilers were doing a great job with that by the time I started. Not to say it isn’t useful, but I learned a lot about higher level concepts instead.

If the average human in twenty years isn't far more cognitively capable than the average human now, I'll eat my hat (assuming of course, we don't all die).

Between biology advances remediating disabilities, customized outcome-driven education, potential advances in drugs that regulate executive function/memory/etc., improvements in nutrition, improvements in access, reductions in stress, I think we'll see people flourish.

And that's completely ignoring the more out there biological/computer merger style Sci-Fi outcomes, which I believe have a non-zero chance of occurring.

I feel like if you want to tackle hard problems there are plenty out there to tackle and plenty of people who will put money into you doing it. I would rather that people unwilling to do so get out of the way with UBI then force people to work to feed themselves. I suppose that is a rather utopian view not shared by many because of the fears of elites controlling everything but that is also a hard problem that some find worth tackling.

"I have to say honestly, that AI looks like an apocalypse for human thinking [ Im glad Tao is warning people, I just dont think many people will listen ]"

I think back to what happened to the school-aged population during COVID lockdowns; widespread learning loss, mental health deterioration and educational inequalities. Students who were self-driven, tutored, or encouraged by their parents to continue learning flourished, and they were no longer limited by the slower learning pace, distractions, and or downtime (transportation and fill courses/periods). Some students leapfrogged ahead of their peers. Unfortunately, most students were negatively impacted by the situation and are still lagging behind where they should be in terms of foundational skills and knowledge.

I'm thinking AI will follow a similar path. Some people will genuinely excel, utilizing AI to optimize learning; but, most people will offload most work to AI and, more or less, become addicted and dependent to it. Of course, leading to what Tao is referring to as "an apocalypse for human thinking."

> Its probable that AI will roll out much faster than humans can develop that skill of using it in a way that increases not decreases human knowledge over time.

Why is it probable? Does it even need to continue to be rolled out for that damage to be possible? Two genuine questions which I know none of us really have the answers to.

After working with a few people with what I can only describe as "AI psychosis", it seems to me that even excellent frontier models are pretty quickly lobotomized if sycophancy is rewarded and builds up in context.

I don't know if I would call resisting this a skill, but it does take persistent intention and willingness.

> Its probable that AI will roll out much faster ...

I think a sort of acceptance is the real problem.

Just like because of convenience/laziness people will give up against surveillance, I think the same thing will happen with AI.

I have been listening to the book "talking to strangers" by malcolm gladwell

The book is about how people don't understand others.

One point was that people "default to truth" when listening to other people. Basically people default to believe what others are telling them, and it is good for society. But it can be terrible with accomplished liars, specifically liars who seem confident they are telling the truth. He had examples of CIA spies, Hitler and more.

Wow - I was thinking about AI while listening. AI sounds convincing. It doesn't give hints that it might not be telling you the truth. It will confidently give you answers all day long.

The only way to counteract this is to be a critical, pedantic person. But to behave this way is counter to the rules of society. Folks who routinely do this range from unpopular to completely shunned by society. Think about being critical about adtech instead of shrugging it and accepting it.

sigh.

> There are trillions of dollars of investment pushing for humans to trust whatever an LLM says, and very little money behind encouraging people to tackle hard problems themselves and train themselves to think.

Does this mean that everybody who does the latter has a leg up?

What was done was done, and with all the hype we are seeing, we humans will adopt AI as fast as social media.

We can only prepare ourselves for the coming dystopian.

> The current slew of excellent LLMs will probably cause a decades long dip in human cognitive ability.

Lol, right, because every advanced technology we've invented has also caused a dip in cognitive ability? Oh wait, no, they didn't. But one thing did happen each time: a human predicting ominous doom and gloom with nothing to back it up but vague hand-waving and fear.