Are ChatGPT and co harming human intelligence?

I recently learned that human brain size has been decreasing for the last 10,000 years.[0]

The thinking is that prior to us building societies, we all had to be generalists and know "everything." Once we are in a group, we can offload some knowledge to others in the society.

My point being, this all seems to have started long ago and doesn't even necessarily require technology to explain the beginnings of the trend.

[0] https://www.dwarkesh.com/i/158922207/why-is-human-brain-size...

But does this, at least for those who choose to use it as leverage, free up more brain power for other newer or different things?

> If I dropped most of us here into a pre-technology wilderness we'd be dead in short order.

I hear this all the time and I'm not convinced. People are incredibly resourceful under pressure. When your amygdala calmly informs your neocortex "learn, work hard, or die" the effect can be pretty profound.

People would quickly form tribes and communities and those with relevant skills would teach others. Some people would absolutely fail to adapt, but I'm not convinced it would be as many as we think.

The greatest danger in a collapse scenario would be other humans, since one path some would choose is "rob and kill other people." But that's a different sort of problem.

> It may destroy the research ability of the average person

In this “post-truth” era, I think this is deeply concerning and has the potential to far outweigh the benefits in the long run. People are already not good at critically evaluating information, and this is already leading to major real world impact.

I say this as someone who has personally found LLMs to be a learning multiplier. But then I see how many people treat these tools like some kind of oracle and start to worry.

> At the end of the day, it is a tool and it depends on how you use it. It may destroy the research ability of the average person, but for the power user it is an intelligence accelerator IMO.

You live in a planet with billions of other humans. Maybe you are using LLMs carefully and always verifying outputs but most people definitely are not and it is naive to believe that is only their problem. It will soon be your problem too, because what those people do will eventually come back to bite you.

An unrelated quote from John Green feels appropriate:

> Let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools even though I personally don’t have a kid in school. It’s because I don’t like living in a country with a bunch of stupid people.

One day you’ll be deeply affected by a code bug or clerical decision caused by someone who blindly accepted the words of whatever LLM they were using. An LLM which can itself be created with specific bias, like denying the existence of a country, rejecting scientific consensus, or simply trying to sell you a product.

I agree with the power user view too. AI wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the heightened personality trait of some to ask why, how, what if and reinterpret to push arts, science, technology forward. We don’t need everyone to do that. Also I think it can help us solve problems that are on the edge of being “unstuck” from which new ones that require human ingenuity will emerge. Let’s spend our time solving those novel problems for which AI has no pattern to apply

AI didn't increase your intelligence. It just lowered the barrier to *some type of education. Maybe it saved you some time writing boilerplate but that's all it really does.

I largely agree, but I also think you might want to consider how the existence of LLMs affects our education system. I think this is one of the places they really have the most potential to cause harm, but also perhaps some incredible (humanity-changing) good.

I suspect countries, and even individual local schools, who effectively adapt their curricula to account for LLMs will see an enormous difference in student outcomes in the next couple of decades.

> switch to raw mode

it would be impossible, if doing so meant less profit for openai (or any of the for-profit ai companies).

The only way to achieve such would be to ensure that LLMs could be run locally for the indviduals. But as hardware requirements grow for LLMs, i increasingly find that it might not be possible to do so.

> I’m sure many of us have heard from non technical people that chatGPT is their best friend

Online stories, yes. I've never heard people saying that in real life.

> Why not making an onboarding tutorial of what really is going on ?

Because that would mean openly and actively admitting the limitations and problems of LLMs, and that’s bad for profits (which the only thing that the owners of these systems care about).

It’s very difficult for me to even navigate my city without GPS now, I suspect using AI does a similar atrophying of your brain matter. Does using an excavator cause your muscle tissue to atrophy compared to a shovel? Of course it does.

Socrates never argued that society would be better off without writing! Writing had existed for three thousand years by the point Socrates was alive, and the Epic cycle of Homeric poetry had existed for about three centuries.

In the very same dialogue where the excerpt you quote comes from he also said:

"Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing."

And the section of the dialogue your quote comes from is preceded by this suggestion:

"Shall we discuss the rules of writing and speech as we were proposing?"

and later right before the bit you quote from:

"But there is something yet to be said of propriety and impropriety of writing."

So they are not discussing the merits of writing per se but the ethics of writing.

This excerpt you offer comes from a stretch where Socrates is telling a story. This is merely what one of the characters in the story tells the other.

Further in the dialogue Socrates clarifies:

"SOCRATES: Well, then, those who think they can leave written instructions for an art, as well as those who accept them, thinking that writing can yield results that are clear or certain, must be quite naive and truly ignorant of [Thamos’] prophetic judgment: otherwise, how could they possibly think that words that have been written down can do more than remind those who already know what the writing is about?"

and the rest of the dialogue is also quite illuminating:

"PHAEDRUS: Quite right.

SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.

PHAEDRUS: You are absolutely right about that, too.

SOCRATES: Now tell me, can we discern another kind of discourse, a legitimate brother of this one? Can we say how it comes about, and how it is by nature better and more capable?

PHAEDRUS: Which one is that? How do you think it comes about?

SOCRATES: It is a discourse that is written down, with knowledge, in the soul of the listener; it can defend itself, and it knows for whom it should speak and for whom it should remain silent."

But I think everyone since Socrates would agree that it's a good thing someone else wrote down a bunch of the stuff he said.

I suppose that depends what you do with them. I spent some time this weekend using Grok to work on a business plan and some other projects. I find myself using it for research, quickly winnowing information down to what's relevant to my needs, and sort of bouncing ideas off it the way I would with another person. I always have to keep in mind that it could get something wrong, but then again, so could a person.

I don't think it's helping me think; more like it's helping me organize my thoughts and find inspiration. I suppose others might use it in a more dependent way.

My calculator doesn't hallucinate (said another way- pending no input error, I can blindly trust it...which is something that would get me in trouble with a LLM)

I guess I get to be the one who brings this up this time. The luddites were not strictly against the technological changes, they were a labor movement protesting how capital owners were using a new technology to dispossess workers who had no viable alternatives.

As this is also one of the major risks of AI, one that has already come to bear directly, there's a lot we can take from their movement when we don't dismiss it as shorthand for "being wrong about technology."