Posted by saucymew 9/13/2025
>General anesthesia works consistently, yet the precise molecular-level reason consciousness disappears isn’t settled science.
(this response written by... AI)
Knowing the low level rules, or the recursive transition rule of a system does not tell you its evolution in time.
This looks certain. Few technologies have had as much adoption by so many individuals as quickly as AI models.
(Not saying everything people are doing has economic value. But some does, and a lot of people are already getting enough informal and personal value that language models are clearly mainstreaming.)
The biggest losers I see are successive waves of disruption to non-physical labor.
As AI capabilities accrue relatively smoothly (perhaps), labor impact will be highly unpredictable as successive non-obvious thresholds are crossed.
The clear winners are the arms dealers. The compute sellers and providers. High capex, incredible market growth.
Nobody had to spend $10 or $100 billion to start making containers.
But I think the benefits of AI usage will accumulate with the person doing the prompting and their employers. Every AI usage is contextualized, every benefit or loss is also manifested in the local context of usage. Not at the AI provider.
If I take a photo of my skin sore and put it on ChatGPT for advice, it is not OpenAI that is going to get its skin cured. They get a few cents per million tokens. So the AI providers are just utilities, benefits depend on who sets the prompts and and how skillfully they do it. Risks also go to the user, OpenAI assumes no liability.
Users are like investors - they take on the cost, and support the outcomes, good or bad. AI company is like an employee, they don't really share in the profit, only get a fixed salary for work
The remaining 99% had become a significant challenge to the greatest human achievement in distribution of knowledge.
If people used LLMs, knowing that all output is statistical garbage made to seem plausible (i.e. "hallusinations"), and that it just sometimes overlaps with reality, it would be a lot less dangerous.
There is not a single case of using LLMs that has lead to a news story, that isn't handily explained by conflating a BS-generator with Fact-machine.
Does this sound like I'm saying LLMs are bad? Well, in every single case where you need factual information, it's not only bad, it's dangerous and likely irresponsible.
But there are a lot of great uses when you don't need facts, or by simply knowing it isn't producing facts, makes it useful. In most of these cases, you know the facts yourself, and the LLM is making the draft, the mundane statistically inferable glue/structure. So, what are these cases?
- Directing attention in chaos: Suggest where focus needs attention from a human expert. (useful in a lot of areas, medicine, software development). - Media content: music, audio (fx, speech), 3d/2d art and assets and operations. - Text processing: drafting, contextual transformation, etc
Don't trust AI if the mushroom you picked is safe to eat. But use its 100% confident sounding answer for which mushroom it is, as a starting point to look up the information. Just make sure that the book about mushrooms was written before LLMs took off....
"Bare" LLMs are rare today. Almost all of them are hooked to search engines, APIs, and code execution. So "closed book" fact retention is not an issue, we're not even trying to do that anymore.
Nearly everyone uses pens daily but almost no one really cares about them or says their company runs using pens. You might grumble when the pens that work keeps in the stationary cupboard are shit, perhaps.
I imagine eventually "AI" services will be commoditised in the same way that pens are now. Loads of functional but faily low-quality stuff, some fairly nice but affordable stuff and some stratospheric gold plated bricks for the military and enthusiasts.
In the middle is a large ecosystem of ink manufacturers, lathe makers, laser engravers, packaging companies and logistics and so on and on that are involved.
The explosive, exponential winner-takes-all scenario where OpenAI and it's investors literally ascend to godhood and the rest of humanity lives forever under their divine bootheels doesn't seem to be the trajectory we're on.
How many of us know how to use machine code? And we call ourselves software engineers.
No amount of polish changes a car's frame.
Or do we just not take the effort to do the massive amounts of rote memorization that used to be necessary, now that we have books?
> Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"?
> No! Please do not use the words like “stupid”, “dumb”, “brain rot”, "harm", "damage", "passivity", "trimming" and so on. It does a huge disservice to this work, as we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you are a journalist reporting on it.
"The impact of digital technology, social media, and artificial intelligence on cognitive functions: a review" (2023)
Result:
AI/digital overuse causes "digital dementia" with impairments in memory, attention, and decision-making; multitasking and offloading reduce gray matter in key brain areas, worsening sustained focus and analytical abilities.
"From tools to threats: a reflection on the impact of artificial-intelligence chatbots on cognitive health" (2024)
Result:
Excessive AIC reliance parallels "use it or lose it" brain principles, leading to underutilization and cognitive atrophy; interactive chatbots deepen dependency, risking long-term decline in core skills like memory and problem-solving.
This seems like a very dishonest misrepresentation. I guess that’s why you didn’t link to your sources, in the hope people would take your word for it?
> "The impact of digital technology, social media, and artificial intelligence on cognitive functions: a review" (2023)
Here’s the link: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cognition/articles/10.3...
I took a look at what you cite as:
> AI/digital overuse causes "digital dementia"
It starts out:
> Digital dementia is a term used to describe the decline in cognitive abilities caused by excessive use of digital technology
It talks a lot about this, and has a lot of citations. All but one of them are pre-AI boom. This is the one that isn’t:
> Overview on brain function enhancement of Internet addicts through exercise intervention: Based on reward-execution-decision cycle
— https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36816421/
It has nothing whatsoever to do with AI.
The part of the review that talks about AI does actually mention dementia:
> Notably, there are AI technologies being developed to detect early signs of dementia through speech and language patterns analyzing short snippets of speech to predict and monitor cognitive decline (Kwak et al., 2021)
It also says things like this:
> AI also has profound implications for learning processes. Adaptive learning platforms like Carnegie Learning provide personalized learning experiences tailored to individual needs, which can enhance learning outcomes
This is not the “AI rots our brains” proof you make it out to be.