Huh? What about all the open source software you use, did you build all of it?
What about the phone in your hand, did you design that?
HN loves to believe they are the noble few - men and women of math and science, driven by nothing but the pure joy of their craft
But this whole AI thing has been super revealing. Almost everyone here is just the same old same old, only that now that the change is hitting close to home, you’re clutching your pearls and lamenting the days when devs were devs
The younger generation born into the AI world is going to leave you in the dust because they aren’t scared of it
My math teacher used to say that people felt this was about…calculators, imagine that
You are going to end up property of openai and with zero skills. Good luck
Where I'm skeptical of this study:
- 54 participants, only 18 in the critical 4th session
- 4 months is barely enough time to adapt to a fundamentally new tool
- "Reduced brain connectivity" is framed as bad - but couldn't efficient resource allocation also be a feature, not a bug?
- Essay writing is one specific task; extrapolating to "cognition in general" seems like a stretch
Where the study might have a point:
Previous tools outsourced partial processes - calculators do arithmetic, Google stores facts. LLMs can potentially take over the entire cognitive process from thinking to formulating. That's qualitatively different.
So am I ideologically inclined to dismiss this? Maybe. But I also think the honest answer is: we don't know yet. The historical pattern suggests cognitive abilities shift rather than disappear. Whether this shift is net positive or negative - ask me again in 20 years.
[Edit]: Formatting