Have to take commentary by non tech folks speaking about tech with a grain of salt and perspective since the tech is changing so fast both in capability and application.
Research can be more of a lagging indicator than a leading indicator with AI.
> The viral analogy does not imply that LLM-human interactions are intrinsically parasitic.
The analogy doesn't, but LLMs are trained on text, or content, generated by humans, with the aim of their output being acceptable to human interlocutors. That's one parasitic aspect. A second one is the nature and behavior of the organizational entities providing and promoting the popular LLM services: Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic etc - their influence on the economy, e.g. in energy and water use and the drawing of capital/human efforts - also has a somewhat parasitic aspect.
Leads me to think of a related topic, the Cost of Cognitive Debt. I think it is about time that we start to quantify what it means that we no longer grasp major parts of our systems and infrastructure. Once we quantify it, we can start to reason about how to address it.
If this is interesting, message me about my “elves”
They are the cognitive construct I fortified in my mind and in my code before the models began producing their own training materials. My approach is based on two decades of coding without ai.
The immunization is becoming increasingly more valuable as people begin understanding the market in which I do business.
I have the $8/month ChatGPT 'GO' plan. I generally use it in the traditional 'text query'/'text response' type format, but yesterday I was driving back on the freeway from another state and decided to use the Android app's voice feature and was kind of shocked. The latest 'Live 1 Instant' mode is surprisingly natural. It's convivial, and responsive in the manner of an interested, enthusiastic sparing partner, in pretty much whatever wild thing you want to discuss, from a moment to moment basis, if that's what you want. It's eerie in the way that you can interrupt it and re-point the direction of the discussion.
re: 'but a crutch for those who rely on them.' - I was telling a friend about yesterday's experience this morning and was telling him that I could easily see certain populations of people who might become overly reliant on (or completely subsumed by) these new classes of tools being released. They are compelling in a way that they weren't 18 months ago.
I am very confused as to why LLM proponents insist that I can be left behind by a technology that takes almost 0 seconds to adopt. In the event that I realize "Oh no, I got left behind!" I can just ask an LLM to catch me up.
Hmm maybe it always feels "different" to every generation going through automation of something previously un-automated, but don't you feel that to some extent this is different.
Humans have been the dominant species because of our ability to think, not our ability to get from A to B in any particular way/cook food. If we abstract ~the bulk of our thinking to LLMs, don't we lose something as a species which makes us more vulnerable... Or is it always the case during an automation?
The core idea being that each time humanity was going to exceed the carrying capacity of its environment, we invented a new technology which increased the headroom. Obviously this ratchet only goes in one direction. The only way to go backwards is collapse.
We're in the midst of figuring out what the tradeoffs are of LLM usage - all the things you list are already mostly known and found worth it. You trade a tiny amount of time and fuel to cook food in exchange for not getting sick. How is that relevant to anything?
> What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
In evolutionary time, we lost the ability to digest raw meat because we offloaded so much of process of the digestion to the cultural technology of cooking.
Do you like the looks of a future where that happens but for thinking?
I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from).
There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this.
Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents
Is a well-known cognitive quirk, Sapolsky covered that in “Behave” and “Determined”. As I get it, our morality piggybacks on the sense of disgust from insula activation, which lights up the same way as with pathogen avoidance. So comparing social groups to rodents, insects, or disease is a popular propaganda trick. Same here with viruses.
Wasn't aware that memes were an accepted part of evolutionary biology. They're not inherited like genes through reproduction that are subject to natural selection via biological fitness. Or any other evolutionary mechanism.
The word was invented by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist. He described their reproduction with variation under selection pressure, which is the definition of the evolutionary mechanism.
The is a more recent use of ‘meme’ to mean the much more specific ‘internet image macro’; a particular instance of the general idea of a meme.
Memes are inherited. You brush your teeth because your parents do. Memes are subject to selection via biological fitness. The people who didn't brush their teeth died sooner of tooth disease, so those who brushed their teeth had more children. Memes mutate. You don't brush your teeth identically to your parents.
>Memes are inherited. You brush your teeth because your parents do. Memes are subject to selection via biological fitness. The people who didn't brush their teeth died sooner of tooth disease, so those who brushed their teeth had more children. Memes mutate. You don't brush your teeth identically to your parents.
That's parenting and the passing of tradition. I wouldn't call it a meme. Also I can't tell if you're joking with people dying due to teeth disease.
You explained the idea perfectly, which is a great way to see how flawed it is. To say the least, the main driver behind toothpaste adoption was not mass fatalities!
I think I see how you're thinking about it, to see how I see it, consider the following: Memes don't have to be inherited from genetic biological parents. Memes can have their own memetic parents. Like the joke "I feel like I'm the average of my 5 best friends" - our habits, quirks, idiosyncracies, all fit into the framework. It just needs some reproductive medium (human brains). That's why evolutionary biologists would be interested in studying this and things like it. There are epigenetic traits that exist and aren't genes and might be able to self reproduce. To keep the analogy going, consider that things that are catchy are easier to have this "memetic reproduction" so a catchy song might get sung a lot, serving as its fitness condition. So it's a generalization of biological genes to not just dna and rna and physical molecules but any substrate that can carry information. It's familiar to how we call it a 'viral' video.
>"We model transitions among uncoupled, coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can generate tipping points and technological lock-in."
You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.
I get that the title sounds a bit sensational, but there really is something to AI adoption beyond book-sharing.
If you are an employee, the employer has control over how you should do your work. IF you don't like that, transition to being a contractor and sign service agreements where you are going to be paid solely for results not for how you achieve them.
How it reads is that the world has converged on an obviously bad technology. If only you had the chance to control it from top down and you wouldn’t let this mistake happen for you know what’s best for the world. Not only that, it’s double bad because you can’t do anything about it because everyone is under the illusion except you and a few other sensible people. And you would reject the notion that you have agency to change things.
That's the nature of employment relationship. On the flipside, as long as you follow employers rules, you don't bear the responsibility for the results. That's a huge upside that have always balanced out the lack of control over they way you work and your fate for many people.
Tipping points and technological lock-in aren't new (e.g., the printing press, the radio, TV, phones, the internet, etc.). I do absolutely see your distinction, though, that prior technologies may have been less capable of imposing any specific belief system compared to frontier LLMs.
That's a fair point, and a key reason why competitive open models are so important. I definitely don't want to be stuck using Google's latest and greatest LLM once companies, marketers, and PACs can pay to subtly influence responses as they choose.
We've all seen this movie before, though. In the end, the ideas themselves will simply have to compete for survival.
Fair, I may have tried too hard to see the other side of the argument! Sensitive topic of course, but definitely one of the clearer cases where "just put the book down" has not always an entirely available option.
I don’t disagree with you, actually I kind of feel the same about smartphone adoption. It’s basically assumed now that you have a smartphone. You can’t enter some places without a ticket on your smartphone, or can’t order at some restaurants. Government processes are starting to require smartphones. Maybe it will be similar with AI.
And you know, I love computers, I used to love the internet. And I’ve had so much fun, more fun then ever coding with AI assistance. Lets say all of these technologies can be abused and forced on us, but all of them have neat aspects too.
Fwiw i noticed you absolutely can't reasonably get a US Via consulate appt for some countries without AI right now so the requiremnts already begun.
The consulate is booked out for 3 months and only opens 3 months out. All openings are snapped up before any human could get one. They have a lot of anti-script blocking but AI seems to get around them. So there's an arms race, you pretty much need AI to book it (a basic hand written curl script isn't enough).
Oh wow, that’s aweful. Where I used to live this would happen with driving tests. Driving schools would book out all the tests and then re-assign them to their students. So at some point it got so bad that when you’re buying a driving lesson you’re also effectively buying a right to take the test. What could the government possibly do to stop this? Some highly technical solution? How about just making it so you can’t assign the test to another name? Hmm that might be a pretty obvious solution…
Steam also had a pretty nice idea with the Steamdeck. You book appoints for a month in the e.g. 2 weeks prior, but those who get booked and when are randomly chosen amongst all people in those 2 weeks. And then you repeat the same process next month and so on.
>
You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.
Economics does sometimes compel you to read books or other material as a condition or expectation of employment. It is difficult to get a good job while being illiterate and many jobs require reading huge volumes of written work. Work in law or journalism springs to mind as economically compelling people to read a lot even if they they might not necessarily want to.
> Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.
Things go viral in professional settings as well. Scrum, agile, pc language ... I'm sure you can find other professional trends that if you decided not to follow your career would be jeopardized.
Memes replicate and survive or perish like genes, but the environment they have to survive in is the human mind, and the threat that they have to overcome is being criticized. One way to survive this is by being a good idea. So some memes are simply good ideas. But there are various ways a meme can dodge the attack that comes from criticism, and then you get memes that are trendy or holy or crazy or ideological. Since we're not perfect in our ability to criticize (what would that even be like? Sounds terrible) I think there's necessarily a hint of this anti-rational aspect in all ideas. But some of them go all-in on the anti-rational strategy.
Yeah I mean if everything is virus that word seems to hold no meaning =) So thats the reality behind language itself. Communication itself really starts to mean everything and nothing simultaneously, at least as a deeper philosophical truth. You can start to poke holes in jsut about everything this way.
The prevalence of LLM-generated text masquerading as otherwise and incorporated into a significant fraction of all published text distinguishes this info-organism from all others.
Speaking of memetics and favorite books, check out There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm who also wrote some seminal short stories including the one that inspired the Alex Garland show Devs. The book is about how to deal with beings that make you forget you ever saw then, a sort of opposite mind virus.
your friend would be a possible infection point (not a virus) for the memes encoded in the book. As a form of memetic transmission a book, if read all the way through, is especially potent - take Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged as an example. Books are many memes assembled together into a stable culture that reinforces the memes. The virtues of selfishness as a meme would be weak and probably die pretty quickly without all the support the book offers.
Friends probably are not wide spreading infection points, the way reviews in professional journals are or the idea that successful people have recommended things, but they are especially successful at making the transmitted meme stick, as you will keep getting reinfected from them over time. Unless you break up that dangerous friendship!!
> Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus!
You are correct. I frequently do this with religions & specific ideologies which seem to root themselves in people the same way that religions do & it certainly isn’t intended to be a charitable framing.
The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield.
>The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield.
The point was that when you do this you participate in name-calling/slurs, not making an argument.
Many things that you personally think are good (I don't know you but say for instance ideas around democracy or liberty) can also be described as viruses in the same way.
Sorry, I didn't mean to make any statements about you personally, at all (and I do feel you are interpreting my comment uncharitably).
I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus". One is borrowing the negative connotation for a purpose.
The descriptive property of virus (as in being "viral") equally applies to liberty, democracy and so on..
It has nothing with knowing you or not to do at all, I was just commenting on the contents of your post, not about you.
> Sorry, I didn't mean to make any statements about you personally
Hakuna matata.
> I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus".
The comparison is more than a mere slur. It’s also a useful metaphor when discussing how religions & ideologies spread through a society, or “go viral”.
> The descriptive property of virus that you then mention (as in being "viral", packets of information in cell etc) equally applies to liberty, democracy and other things that (at least I) consider good.
Correct. I would still not call the viral framing charitable, but it is equally useful here, and I’ve used it for these & adjacent concepts before.
The word meme appears in the paper, but only once (except for keywords and references).
I'm wondering why that is. Maybe they avoided using it because most people think it means something else. (I've certainly had a hard time talking about them, for this reason!)
> That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from).
OK, but that is just meaningless pseudo philosophical claim. The actual (small) science part of evolutionary biology does not have perspective about ideas being genes. And the evolutionary biology that does is as much pseudoscience as any other pseudoscience.
> Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book?
In that case the book would be a virus, and your friend a host.
But it generalizes way wider to ideas. Religions are viruses too for example. With very strong viral mechanisms sometimes. Some religions are so much entrenched so that they have become part of the fabric for entire societies or countries, morphing their culture; the same way that sometimes viral RNA can become part of the DNA of the host.
Not sure why this is interesting; it seems like anything that becomes "popular" could be cast as a "virus", including things like "having a fridge". Why does this give particular insight?
Even normal fridges are a memetic virus, fridges clearly live in a symbiotic relationship with humans. They make our lives better and in return we create more fridges. If they weren't useful to us, we'd stop making more fridges. Any medieval human who sees a fridge would instantly recognize why it's useful and valuable.
OP is right, anything popular is virus-like. Richard Dawkins invented the word meme for this all the way back in 1976.
I literally thought of this comparison last week. The problem I noticed was how my parents' generation lacked the cognitive "defenses" to separate AI social media content on YouTube, WhatsApp and the like from high quality information. The AI generated content does not trigger an "uncanny valley" reaction, and so people (I myself included) have greater difficulty immediately separating what information is genuine and what is synthetic, and then this spreads exponentially through social networks.
What our descendants will think when they look back on this time period.
They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living, they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.
They wondered whether or not a word calculator was the antichrist. They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant minds to discuss whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon.
They shunned any creative or productive endeavor which dared to automate tedium or build on the works of the public domain (lowercase)…
for any any such indulgence had become a great sin in Eden, a forbidden fruit that must never be obtained by the Adam, so that he may not become as we are!
I sort of agree with you... The trouble is your logic is trivially obviously nonsense.
"Word calculator", "linear algebra"... This is just a variation on it's just a stochastic parrot / it's just a next token predictor.
The implication is that because it is "just" this simple-sounding thing, it can't be a complex thing! Except we know empirically that that doesn't hold. What are humans if not "just" next action predictors, "just" a collection of simple atoms, "just" electrical impulses? Yet clearly we are more than the sum of our parts. There no reason to believe dirty water can be more than the sum of its parts but weird sand can't.
I agree, eventually, but LLMs aren’t there quite yet. There are what, maybe 10 million distinct agents in the wild today? 100 million or a billion if we’re being charitable.
At the time being, the vast vast majority of those agents are all trained on the same or similar training set (the Internet and books). Which makes them mostly all the same. Vastly less diverse than the way one complex lifeform hatches out of the egg vs another.
So 1 billion mostly redundant agents at most. Well there are 40 quadrillion ants on the planet and 5 trillion are born every day. Each one its own “agent” , ingesting different inputs and being its own complex sum greater than its parts.
If we can usually raise a human to be a good person that wouldn't do genocide I'm sure we can raise an AI, especially since we have direct access to its brain and many, many retries.
It's not about tools, it's about the framing. Given certain events happening (or believed to happen) and being framed in us vs them, genocidal behavior emerges quite often. Then of course people who do it also say they act in self-defence, were provoked, it isn't really a genocide and it was deserved if it was.
With both Christianity and Buddhism explicitly calling this for the last 2k years and people who say they are believers still proudly doing so, no, I don't think we can teach people to not genocide. Charismatic individuals aren't even that important, but they are useful to put the blame on someone personally, otherwise the punishment for genocide would be more genocide.
> They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living, they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.
What are you talking about? Those are absolutely issues that are being worked on right here, right now. This framing is obviously false.
If any alien is picking up the text we are generating they must conclude that people in 2026 spend most of their time at the library reading philosophy and having these salons of enlightened reasoned debate if they are so worried about the atrophy of their thinking by LLMs. They don't send electronic communication at the salons or library and are really concerned when they get out with the loss of the culture and thinking they currently have. That is how they are explaining the hysteria they see in the text.
They certainly would never guess that the text is being generated by people who mostly spend their time sending and receiving text/video of unthinking, brain rotting, bullshit all day and night.
> whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon
Shockingly little linear algebra is required to manufacture the weapons that will probably bring about Armageddon. We've had them for damn near a century. It would be hilarious if these latest games with linear algebra were the impetus to make us actually use them at scale.
> They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living,
There are still people working on medicine, social issues, biology and so on and so forth. People are trying to do these, despite concerted efforts from the ai companies and from the right wings ideologues trying to stop them.
> they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.
Then again, people who claimed to be connecting world intentionally harmed real people and even made themselves complicit in genocide. Yes, I am talking about Facebook. And the ones framing themselves as wanna by exploratory are sociopath billionaires who don't care about damage to real people they cause, even glee it it.
> They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant minds to discuss whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon.
Citation needed. Most brilliant minds do not discuss that. Minds drunk on hype do.
> They shunned any creative or productive endeavor which dared to automate tedium or build on the works of the public domain (lowercase)
Again, I do not know what you are talking about here. We have both visual artists and musical artists. People create and share their creations. Again, despite ai-boosters trying to demotivate them and convince them it is pointless, people are still creative.
Because I am LLM Dependent I got distracted reading the article and made my LLM summarise it to me in a few slides. For those in a rush/interested in LLM summary slop:
I do agree that we are on a pathway to losing much. If you focusing on maximising LLM-powered productivity you basically lose the learning that used to naturally happen when doing actual work. At the company I work for the focus is on productivity, and it's easy in many ways (less mental workload and I receive more praise) to go with it instead of fight it.
I just don't see that the main thrust of their argument: (oversimplified) "humans will become so dependent on AI, they'll become dumb" holds any water. I mean even from an evolutionary standpoint, intelligence is (by far) our most valuable competitive advantage. Arguing that "cognitive offloading" (their term) will have runaway effects is reaching to say the least.
It's like saying that moving from manual-labor-intensive agrarian societies to industrial ones will make us weak and meek. In fact, it's had the opposite effect: humans, on average, are healthier and live longer than ever in human history.
I feel the premise of this research is wrong, or at least the synopsis phrasing. Smart people like learning. Now we just learn more interesting things.
Weekend me before LLMs: Maybe I’ll chip away at that dependency injection library I’ve been working on. If I spend most of the day I could improve the user facing test framework.
Weekend me after LLMs: Let’s continue work to get Claude Code running in WebXR on a Quest 3 with app architecture modeled as a 3d construct. We’ve got deepgram hooked up for a better voice to text experience, but giving Claude a voice was a waste of time. Claude, continue to teach me about 3d rendering as related to our current challenges matching the fidelity of the built in browser.
Kinda funny how the "more interesting things" after LLMs example are mostly fiddling with Claude Code itself. Reminds me of when someone says they ship 60k lines of code every day now and when asked for an example, it's a labyrinth of custom CLI tools, skills, MCPs and build pipelines for their OpenClaw setup.
Lots of people are just asking their favourite LLM to rewrite an existing app/library because I’m more productive after spending 3 months writing custom software vs spending 2 hours reading docs and using existing software to achieve some other goal.
Better to make a custom 3d renderer than just use Unity to make a game.
I apologize, but I’m laughing as this is like asking why I don’t drive my car through my house when I need to carry something heavy. It wouldn’t work very well!
More directly, because I have a long term memory and do not have fundamental issues differentiating fact from fiction. Just because SOTA models know more trivia than I do doesn’t mean they’re nearly as intelligent in the thirty other ways humans are. They are a tool in your toolbelt. You use them for the things they make easier.
This premise seems pretty solid (and somewhat obvious) to me. The distinction between scaffolding and substitution can be applied to just about any skill so why not here?
This makes more sense at least than the “just another abstraction layer” argument that’s been thankfully dying out recently.
"If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
offloading thinking is a little/lottle bit different than writing to preserve your thoughts versus memorization. it's more analogous to skipping the writing, plugging your ears, and closing your eyes, while you wait for the answer to be presented before you.
yeah, the centralization and concentration of knowledge and ability through reliance in this manner enables the teacher to escrow all your states pencils at any given moment for whatever reason.
once embedded i can see whole classes of industry dos'd.
logistics, dos'd.
it, dos'd.
military planning, dos'd.
medical, dos'd.
pay us this fee so you can update your nvidia drivers.
it's the unholy marriage of the surveillance and petrol states pushing this.
I don’t suppose he was entirely wrong. I would probably be able to recall a lot more (verbatim) if it all had to be stored in me noggin. I think the trade off worthwhile, however.
But what if it isn't? Like, if you didn't have the written word to rely on as a crutch, what more could you have accomplished if you didn't have that? Maybe nothing, but maybe much, much more! Who can say in retrospect?
I've always wondered how we'd fare in battle against an extrasolar civilization which achieved technology without writing. They'd be a hell of a lot scarier than we are, in my view.
Being able to pass on precise information without writing them down would be hella impressive in of itself. Currently we fail with simplest ones after a few hops.
Im 45, and i can tell you getting a cell phone absolutely destroyed my ability to memorize phone numbers. During the 90s when i was in highschool i has all my friends numbers, parents work numbers, etc... memorized, i only know my parents and wife now.
I don't think the _ability_ to memorize phone numbers is what atrophied here by getting a cell phone. The _need_ did. It's harder to memorize phone numbers today because we lack the practical application of the memory (e.g. only when something fails do we actually try to put that memory to practice). I bet anyone would quickly pick up on memorizing phone numbers if they had to both remember and type in the phone numbers every time they wanted to make a call or text.
The modern world has way too much content to commit to memory. Our brains would explode. Maybe 2500 years ago it was still possible to functioned as an adult without writing things down.
If we didn't have writing we wouldn't have to memorize that much stuff. The world would probably be worse for it. But that wouldn't have been obvious in Socrates' time.
There's this fallacy where one defends a modern idea by citing criticism to an old idea, thus positioning their modern idea as revolutionary as the classical one that survived the filter of time.
Ha, indeed! I misguidedly turned to Reddit somewhat recently when the activity on the programming forum I spent most of my time on died down thanks to LLMs. As I got sucked into reading various shit posting on AI, there are multiple quotes daily along these lines. Many are written in a way as if it's the first time anyone has said it (probably most of them are bots). I finally deleted my Reddit account.
Anyway, a particularly funny one I read recently was "Ya, it's just like how musicians who didn't accept synthesizers got left behind." This person apparently believes there have been successful musicals acts based purely around traditional instrumentation since the ~80s.
I think it was only after I had familiarised myself with hermeneutics that I really understood why the written word is problematic and what Socrates took issue with in writing.
The thought of reading someone’s writing without having to meet with them and discuss interactively is similar to using AI instead of working with another person interactively
very interesting perspective, i remember reading thyucledies and he complains about how historians before him would report the first tale they heard, by comparison he worked dilligently to confirm his history (though since he was inventing this process his standards were not quite modern, meaning he didn't rely as much on documentary evidence, and he had a penchant for writing speeches down when it is impossible they are word for word what someone said).
This is the key danger of worshipping LLMs as false gods or oracles. They do not have superior answers, only random noise generated to appeal to simplistic, expedient deference of lazy people. All answers thus generated fall victim to an implicit appeal to authority fallacy.
I think there's aspects of this viewpoint that are true. I'm sure I'm less skilled at programming now in some ways than when I started using LLMs, but I'm a lot more productive and I can work on a broader variety of software than I could before. Writing probably weakened people's auditory memory, and calculators probably reduced people's mental math skills, but I don't think either are a net negative. It just requires some adjustment to get used to the new way things are. I also think my programming skills would come back pretty quick if I started programming without LLMs again, just as my leetcode skills come back pretty quick when I prepare for interviews.
I feel like LLMs have been nothing but a boon for me. I have learned so much programming from them. I have over a decade of experience, but honestly, I have always been a below-average programmer. Good enough for boring CRUD work, but not much more. Forget Leetcode, I'd probably get murdered on the easy questions.
So, if anything, I feel like my learning pace has been greatly accelerated. Your point about working on a broader variety of software is really true for me too. I am working on a game that I likely would have never even started had it not been for LLMs. Mind you, I am still doing the vast majority by hand. However, LLMs have been great for little tutorials, setting out a good game plan, etc. It's like having my own little private tutor.
I know enough to not let the LLMs do everything for me. If they do, then I know I will fall into the trap of something breaking, and then I lack the understanding to fix it. I think they should be used to make life easier, but not easy.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 29.5 ms ] threadResearch can be more of a lagging indicator than a leading indicator with AI.
The analogy doesn't, but LLMs are trained on text, or content, generated by humans, with the aim of their output being acceptable to human interlocutors. That's one parasitic aspect. A second one is the nature and behavior of the organizational entities providing and promoting the popular LLM services: Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic etc - their influence on the economy, e.g. in energy and water use and the drawing of capital/human efforts - also has a somewhat parasitic aspect.
I explored this concept in this post:
https://ljtn.github.io/epiq/blog/cost-of-cognitive-debt.html
They are the cognitive construct I fortified in my mind and in my code before the models began producing their own training materials. My approach is based on two decades of coding without ai.
The immunization is becoming increasingly more valuable as people begin understanding the market in which I do business.
re: 'but a crutch for those who rely on them.' - I was telling a friend about yesterday's experience this morning and was telling him that I could easily see certain populations of people who might become overly reliant on (or completely subsumed by) these new classes of tools being released. They are compelling in a way that they weren't 18 months ago.
What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
Yes.
>Because we've become dependent on them?
Because we're burning the planet down with them.
>Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage?
Yes, because in places we do people enjoy higher qualities of life and happiness. Along with things like health improvement from doing more excersize.
>What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
Moreso we've become dependent on eating processed junk over the past 50 years and gotten fat as shit.
So yea, maybe think a little more deeply about your analogies?
>What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
Humans have been the dominant species because of our ability to think, not our ability to get from A to B in any particular way/cook food. If we abstract ~the bulk of our thinking to LLMs, don't we lose something as a species which makes us more vulnerable... Or is it always the case during an automation?
The core idea being that each time humanity was going to exceed the carrying capacity of its environment, we invented a new technology which increased the headroom. Obviously this ratchet only goes in one direction. The only way to go backwards is collapse.
But... It's worked so far?
We're in the midst of figuring out what the tradeoffs are of LLM usage - all the things you list are already mostly known and found worth it. You trade a tiny amount of time and fuel to cook food in exchange for not getting sick. How is that relevant to anything?
In evolutionary time, we lost the ability to digest raw meat because we offloaded so much of process of the digestion to the cultural technology of cooking.
Do you like the looks of a future where that happens but for thinking?
There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this.
Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents
The framing of something as a disease is itself slightly into the fascist territory.
Is a well-known cognitive quirk, Sapolsky covered that in “Behave” and “Determined”. As I get it, our morality piggybacks on the sense of disgust from insula activation, which lights up the same way as with pathogen avoidance. So comparing social groups to rodents, insects, or disease is a popular propaganda trick. Same here with viruses.
The is a more recent use of ‘meme’ to mean the much more specific ‘internet image macro’; a particular instance of the general idea of a meme.
That's parenting and the passing of tradition. I wouldn't call it a meme. Also I can't tell if you're joking with people dying due to teeth disease.
You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.
I get that the title sounds a bit sensational, but there really is something to AI adoption beyond book-sharing.
Hundreds of millions can't all become contractors, and realistically wont all become contractors.
So the issue described is a real social issue, whether he can "just" quit and avoid it or not.
Can’t take it seriously.
That's a fair point, and a key reason why competitive open models are so important. I definitely don't want to be stuck using Google's latest and greatest LLM once companies, marketers, and PACs can pay to subtly influence responses as they choose.
We've all seen this movie before, though. In the end, the ideas themselves will simply have to compete for survival.
And you know, I love computers, I used to love the internet. And I’ve had so much fun, more fun then ever coding with AI assistance. Lets say all of these technologies can be abused and forced on us, but all of them have neat aspects too.
The consulate is booked out for 3 months and only opens 3 months out. All openings are snapped up before any human could get one. They have a lot of anti-script blocking but AI seems to get around them. So there's an arms race, you pretty much need AI to book it (a basic hand written curl script isn't enough).
Economics does sometimes compel you to read books or other material as a condition or expectation of employment. It is difficult to get a good job while being illiterate and many jobs require reading huge volumes of written work. Work in law or journalism springs to mind as economically compelling people to read a lot even if they they might not necessarily want to.
Things go viral in professional settings as well. Scrum, agile, pc language ... I'm sure you can find other professional trends that if you decided not to follow your career would be jeopardized.
Other than that, it's pretty grounded!
Friends probably are not wide spreading infection points, the way reviews in professional journals are or the idea that successful people have recommended things, but they are especially successful at making the transmitted meme stick, as you will keep getting reinfected from them over time. Unless you break up that dangerous friendship!!
You are correct. I frequently do this with religions & specific ideologies which seem to root themselves in people the same way that religions do & it certainly isn’t intended to be a charitable framing.
The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield.
This is also how I was made, I think.
Many things that you personally think are good (I don't know you but say for instance ideas around democracy or liberty) can also be described as viruses in the same way.
You admitted you don't know me, yet you still managed to jump to this conclusion. Good job, mate.
I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus". One is borrowing the negative connotation for a purpose.
The descriptive property of virus (as in being "viral") equally applies to liberty, democracy and so on..
It has nothing with knowing you or not to do at all, I was just commenting on the contents of your post, not about you.
Hakuna matata.
> I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus".
The comparison is more than a mere slur. It’s also a useful metaphor when discussing how religions & ideologies spread through a society, or “go viral”.
> The descriptive property of virus that you then mention (as in being "viral", packets of information in cell etc) equally applies to liberty, democracy and other things that (at least I) consider good.
Correct. I would still not call the viral framing charitable, but it is equally useful here, and I’ve used it for these & adjacent concepts before.
Nah, sometimes you should just come out say it. Those who get offended need to hear it more than anyone else.
I'm wondering why that is. Maybe they avoided using it because most people think it means something else. (I've certainly had a hard time talking about them, for this reason!)
OK, but that is just meaningless pseudo philosophical claim. The actual (small) science part of evolutionary biology does not have perspective about ideas being genes. And the evolutionary biology that does is as much pseudoscience as any other pseudoscience.
In that case the book would be a virus, and your friend a host.
But it generalizes way wider to ideas. Religions are viruses too for example. With very strong viral mechanisms sometimes. Some religions are so much entrenched so that they have become part of the fabric for entire societies or countries, morphing their culture; the same way that sometimes viral RNA can become part of the DNA of the host.
OP is right, anything popular is virus-like. Richard Dawkins invented the word meme for this all the way back in 1976.
What our descendants will think when they look back on this time period.
They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living, they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.
They wondered whether or not a word calculator was the antichrist. They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant minds to discuss whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon.
They shunned any creative or productive endeavor which dared to automate tedium or build on the works of the public domain (lowercase)…
for any any such indulgence had become a great sin in Eden, a forbidden fruit that must never be obtained by the Adam, so that he may not become as we are!
"Word calculator", "linear algebra"... This is just a variation on it's just a stochastic parrot / it's just a next token predictor.
The implication is that because it is "just" this simple-sounding thing, it can't be a complex thing! Except we know empirically that that doesn't hold. What are humans if not "just" next action predictors, "just" a collection of simple atoms, "just" electrical impulses? Yet clearly we are more than the sum of our parts. There no reason to believe dirty water can be more than the sum of its parts but weird sand can't.
I read it in that high pitched British accent that goes up into falsetto
At the time being, the vast vast majority of those agents are all trained on the same or similar training set (the Internet and books). Which makes them mostly all the same. Vastly less diverse than the way one complex lifeform hatches out of the egg vs another.
So 1 billion mostly redundant agents at most. Well there are 40 quadrillion ants on the planet and 5 trillion are born every day. Each one its own “agent” , ingesting different inputs and being its own complex sum greater than its parts.
And that’s just ants.
It's important to make sure it in fact doesn't, otherwise there is nobody to throw a shade on our time capsule having the benefit of hindsight
Well, it's not really that hard to imagine, especially if we allow for influence from and insistent and charismatic individual.
With both Christianity and Buddhism explicitly calling this for the last 2k years and people who say they are believers still proudly doing so, no, I don't think we can teach people to not genocide. Charismatic individuals aren't even that important, but they are useful to put the blame on someone personally, otherwise the punishment for genocide would be more genocide.
What are you talking about? Those are absolutely issues that are being worked on right here, right now. This framing is obviously false.
I mean masses also do bad decisions. But, they specifically do not get to do capital allocation decisions.
They certainly would never guess that the text is being generated by people who mostly spend their time sending and receiving text/video of unthinking, brain rotting, bullshit all day and night.
Shockingly little linear algebra is required to manufacture the weapons that will probably bring about Armageddon. We've had them for damn near a century. It would be hilarious if these latest games with linear algebra were the impetus to make us actually use them at scale.
The latter is a matter of policy and AI is not needed for that.
I hate this framing. Nickname checks out.
There are still people working on medicine, social issues, biology and so on and so forth. People are trying to do these, despite concerted efforts from the ai companies and from the right wings ideologues trying to stop them.
> they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.
Then again, people who claimed to be connecting world intentionally harmed real people and even made themselves complicit in genocide. Yes, I am talking about Facebook. And the ones framing themselves as wanna by exploratory are sociopath billionaires who don't care about damage to real people they cause, even glee it it.
> They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant minds to discuss whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon.
Citation needed. Most brilliant minds do not discuss that. Minds drunk on hype do.
> They shunned any creative or productive endeavor which dared to automate tedium or build on the works of the public domain (lowercase)
Again, I do not know what you are talking about here. We have both visual artists and musical artists. People create and share their creations. Again, despite ai-boosters trying to demotivate them and convince them it is pointless, people are still creative.
https://smalldocs.org/s/scB6O8KiZEmLWgK855A1vt#k=yiw8FB_G5Ld...
I do agree that we are on a pathway to losing much. If you focusing on maximising LLM-powered productivity you basically lose the learning that used to naturally happen when doing actual work. At the company I work for the focus is on productivity, and it's easy in many ways (less mental workload and I receive more praise) to go with it instead of fight it.
It's like saying that moving from manual-labor-intensive agrarian societies to industrial ones will make us weak and meek. In fact, it's had the opposite effect: humans, on average, are healthier and live longer than ever in human history.
Weekend me before LLMs: Maybe I’ll chip away at that dependency injection library I’ve been working on. If I spend most of the day I could improve the user facing test framework.
Weekend me after LLMs: Let’s continue work to get Claude Code running in WebXR on a Quest 3 with app architecture modeled as a 3d construct. We’ve got deepgram hooked up for a better voice to text experience, but giving Claude a voice was a waste of time. Claude, continue to teach me about 3d rendering as related to our current challenges matching the fidelity of the built in browser.
Better to make a custom 3d renderer than just use Unity to make a game.
Why? Claude can just do it for you, can't it? If you're using Claude to do these things, why half-ass it?
More directly, because I have a long term memory and do not have fundamental issues differentiating fact from fiction. Just because SOTA models know more trivia than I do doesn’t mean they’re nearly as intelligent in the thirty other ways humans are. They are a tool in your toolbelt. You use them for the things they make easier.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-waves-synch...
https://knowridge.com/2026/08/first-findings-of-mirror-like-...
The only way I can come up with to avoid exposure to a "cognitive virus" is lock oneself in a rubber room.
But extreme isolation merely fosters other mental illnesses.
It's an irrational world with no empirical evidence as to why it even exists. Get over it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-...
This makes more sense at least than the “just another abstraction layer” argument that’s been thankfully dying out recently.
-Socrates
once embedded i can see whole classes of industry dos'd.
logistics, dos'd. it, dos'd. military planning, dos'd. medical, dos'd.
pay us this fee so you can update your nvidia drivers.
it's the unholy marriage of the surveillance and petrol states pushing this.
edit: what happened with vmware?
But what if it isn't? Like, if you didn't have the written word to rely on as a crutch, what more could you have accomplished if you didn't have that? Maybe nothing, but maybe much, much more! Who can say in retrospect?
I've always wondered how we'd fare in battle against an extrasolar civilization which achieved technology without writing. They'd be a hell of a lot scarier than we are, in my view.
If you don't use a skill, that skill atrophies
I don't think the _ability_ to memorize phone numbers is what atrophied here by getting a cell phone. The _need_ did. It's harder to memorize phone numbers today because we lack the practical application of the memory (e.g. only when something fails do we actually try to put that memory to practice). I bet anyone would quickly pick up on memorizing phone numbers if they had to both remember and type in the phone numbers every time they wanted to make a call or text.
I don't even know my partner's number, or email address...
Anyway, a particularly funny one I read recently was "Ya, it's just like how musicians who didn't accept synthesizers got left behind." This person apparently believes there have been successful musicals acts based purely around traditional instrumentation since the ~80s.
So, if anything, I feel like my learning pace has been greatly accelerated. Your point about working on a broader variety of software is really true for me too. I am working on a game that I likely would have never even started had it not been for LLMs. Mind you, I am still doing the vast majority by hand. However, LLMs have been great for little tutorials, setting out a good game plan, etc. It's like having my own little private tutor.
I know enough to not let the LLMs do everything for me. If they do, then I know I will fall into the trap of something breaking, and then I lack the understanding to fix it. I think they should be used to make life easier, but not easy.