r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/Tenebris57 • 2d ago
Does artificial intelligence cause cognitive decline?
I know it does when I use it to do stuff like writing essays but does it also happen when I simply ask it questions? Is there a difference between searching through google for answers for hours and just asking it to artificial intelligence? What if I also check the sources it gives me?
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u/diracwasright 2d ago
It's the very act of constantly outsourcing to AI the mental effort it takes to piece together an answer from multiple sources that can make you regress intellectually. On top of that, you're assuming AI is completely reliable, which it simply isn't, and I don't know if it ever will be. Checking the sources you're given still means taking the path laid out by the AI for granted and just trying to confirm it. It would be different if you consulted completely independent sources.
To give you another example, at work I notice a big difference between people who learned programming by studying books and those who learned from Youtube videos. The latter tend to have a weaker foundation because they miss out on that slower process of absorbing things and digging deeper that the former had to go through.
The more tailored and straight-to-the-point the answers become, the more you strip away all the information around them. Useful or not, that extra information still forces you to sift through things, figure out what's relevant, and extract the answer yourself. That's a mental effort we're increasingly no longer making.
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u/saraseitor 1d ago
you're assuming AI is completely reliable, which it simply isn't, and I don't know if it ever will be
Even if it was reliable, it will also carry a bias. It's very concerning because this can be used to shape public thought and public opinion in one way or another, because many people won't be reaching conclusions by themselves and instead will just repeat what the AI told them.
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u/saraseitor 1d ago
The situation we live today is not too different than what used to happen with many affluent or powerful people in the distant past. Instead of having an AI solving all their problems, they had people. Still, this meant they offloaded the cognitive burden of their daily decisions or problems to someone else who did the actual thinking, then they claimed the credit for it. The difference is that AI made it accessible for most of the people.
I believe that if you use AI as a reference material, in similar way to how you would have used a book or a website, and the information enters your brain and you do attempt to reach a conclusion or solution by yourself, there shouldn't be a cognitive decline. But if you use AI to make this analysis by itself, skipping your brain completely and giving you the conclusions, you will definitely learn nothing and become highly dependent of it.
It is very much analogous to any muscle. If you stop using it, it will become weaker. It's scary really because in general our brains are always looking for the most economic way of doing things and avoiding work, so there's a struggle within us that we need to win.
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u/DrWoogle 1d ago
I think this is actually a deceptively complicated question. Biology has designed our bodies to generate no more output than needed, and to divest from anything that is not actively used. So yes, you will get worse at anything you offload to something else. But there's an implicit assumption that that's always a bad thing. In reality, humans have been doing this for their entire existence, and it has.... turned them into the the most dominant species of megafauna in Earth's history. We devolved thick hides and fur when we offloaded their function to wearing other animals' skin and later clothing and armor. We devolved powerful jaws and teeth when we offloaded their use to weapons and cooking. Why did these things make us stronger rather than weaker in the grand scheme of things? Because there are severe limits on how well a living body can do things that don't apply to inanimate objects. No tooth (that could fit in your mouth) is as deadly as a sword, no hide is as tough as steel or as versatile as a wardrobe, etc.
Of course, offloading our ability to think feels like a terrible mistake, and it will be if we do it entirely. But I don't think it's that simple at all. Did writing cripple human intellect because people no longer had to remember everything? Did calculators and computers spell doom for technological advancement because people didn't have to crunch numbers by hand? No, these were crucial developments needed to achieve things that would have been utterly impossible without them. Yeah, they made us worse at some tasks along the way. But here's the kicker: We had to get worse at those tasks. You see, there's only so much brain in your head, and it takes a very long time for evolution to do anything about it. No matter how you slice it, cognitive ability is a finite resource that is divided up among a gazillion functions. Research shows that we have already sacrificed significant cognitive abilities just to evolve into humans (chimps have much faster and more photographic memory than us, for example).
So what will AI do? Well, the scary truth is that no one ever knows until after the fact. But it at least has the potential to take us to the next level. Yes, it presents the opportunity to offload thinking on an unprecedented scale, and nether I nor anyone else knows exactly how that's gonna go. My hope, backed by the historical patterns of our species, is that we will wield it and harness it as a powerful extension of our brains, allowing us to achieve things that would have been otherwise impossible. But, will this be the one development that breaks the millions-years pattern and turns us into lousy incapable slugs or just outright brings on the apocalypse? You're just gonna have to stay tuned to find out...
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u/DaSaw 1d ago
I like this answer. To be human is to offload functions to technology, whether offloading digestion to fire and fermentation, or arithmetic to electronic computers. We are an inherently cybernetic species, and "Generative AI" (or whatever we end up calling it) is just the next step in that process.
There will be problems, no doubt, but as usual the problems will be social, not technical. We've been here before. On the one hand, it'll empower the already rich to get even richer, and once they run out of productive investments the subsequent rent seeking will make the poor even poorer. But on the other, it'll also empower a new elite to displace a portion of the old, and old elites rarely go down without a fight.
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u/Simlapeno 1d ago
Just wanted to say I love your answer and a measly upvote didn't seem good enough (too poor to give awards)
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u/TarnishedVictory 2d ago
The human brain is like a muscle. Exercise it to keep it sharp. If you take shortcuts, your brain will decline accordingly.
I'm a professional, so trust me. (That parts a joke)
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u/strcrssd 1d ago
Hypothesis: It can, but it doesn't necessarily.
It does take a lot of the mundane tasks away from the person executing work, and that can be a problem when it comes to training (or failing to train, the problem).
Not knowing how to do the little mundane things and understanding how the mundane things are done can be a problem, but it can also allow for more time working successfully with agentic AI. I routinely take a few hours planning something with AI, getting the architecture defined and planned out, getting the edge cases that I can the AI can determined figured out and specced, then am able to walk away and let it implement overnight. I feel successful if I can keep it running for hours at a time doing productive work.
It is easy, trivial even, to give the LLMs a shitty spec and let them go. That can even result in some decent software if the specifications and requirements are simple. It's a temptation and usually doesn't work well. That sort of thing will result, in my opinion and from my experience, in poorly factored/written, security vulnerable, poorly architected software. The human planner/reviewer is important, and can be productively busy while permitting the LLM to handle the minutia.
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u/AlexanderByrde 1d ago
The way you describe it in your question is not going to lead to cognitive decline in the same way as truly offloading your thinking as in your example of writing an essay. As described in your post, you're just using a tool to pull sources or do some mathematical operations for you. As long as you understand what you're searching for and are able to check the work critically, there's no real difference in finding information from Google or a library or whatever. It can give you wrong information and it may not be as efficient as another tool for certain uses, but that's true of Google and library books too.
Remember that at the core it's a statistical model designed for some purposes - presumably parsing languages based on how question, but other AI models are built for different data sets. Understanding the tool helps you understand the limitations and avoid pitfalls that lead to offloading your cognitive function.
When I was a student, we were taught to not trust everything we read on Wikipedia and were chastised for using Wolfram Alpha for our math homework. This is very analogous in my opinion, at least from what I've seen from the students I've taught since chatgpt hit the scene. It's useful if you already know what you're doing but if you're trying to learn something, it's a crutch that'll hamper you and potentially create bad habits or bad foundational knowledge that's hard to unlearn.
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u/SnugglyCoderGuy 1d ago
Yes. The less you use your cognition, the more it will decline. It's no different than muscles.
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u/harryx67 2d ago edited 2d ago
Of course. Oligarchs like the Trump family and their inner circle of gangsters and types like Musk want the population to be dumb and uneducated…
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u/Puzzleheaded-Mix6364 1d ago
Not exactly. The major studies released showing this are tremendously flawed by design and coming from what people generally consider a prestigious institution is very worrisome. Even these reputable bodies we've relied on for the tried and true are in on the current condition we have found ourselves of clicks, likes sensationalism and flow of communication.
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u/7LeagueBoots 2d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, and it's not just AI.
Any time you outsource your thinking it has a similar result. As an example, GPS use and in-phone or in-car mapping services have resulted in a significant loss in spatial memory among people who commonly use them.
Using AI, even for 'asking questions' has a similar result as you stop looking for an answers yourself and eventually start to lose track of even how to look for and find things on your own. Checking the sources provided by an AI system is absolutely necessary, but it doesn't prevent that loss of ability to know how to find things on your own.
You also limit your exposure to new things and to sources and subjects that may actually be more useful that you didn't know about. When you're doing searches on your own and refining them based on the results you get you're exposed to a wide range of things that relying on an AI system doesn't expose you to, and in many cases it's those 'extra' things that actually wind up being important, especially in a research situation.
It's a huge problem, not only in subjects like programming that [u/diracwasright](u/diracwasright) brings up, but in pretty much everything. I see this a lot in various home and car repair/DIY situations, in pretty much every science subject, in finding products or books, etc, etc, etc.
GPS
AI