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A new paper from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University finds that as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less critical thinking, which can “result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.”
https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human-cognition-atrophied-and-unprepared-3/
One of the reason I am personally cautious on Security Copilot and the different startups that write automatic threat hunting queries etc is really simple: I think there's a competitive business advantage to not run off the same cliff as everybody else, at the same time. That's called being Lemmings
What if you hired people who actually knew how to do their jobs well and treat them well and retain them? I think it may work better than replacing all the knowledge workers with Clippy in a suit.
@GossiTheDog but you need to PAY them EVERY MONTH! how obscene
@GossiTheDog I've never quite understood the value proposition of these things for the engineers themselves.
When I'm investigating something, I quite often end up leaping about quite wildly, because I'll see something which triggers "I wonder..." type moments (the _plan_ may be systematic, the process isn't).
You lose the ability to do that _entirely_ as soon as you ask a LLM to look at things for you instead.
@ben @GossiTheDog I agree on this and it's how I go a-hunting around when I see something off.
I can see the value in something doing basic queries upon detection of known elements, but anything new? Nah.
@GossiTheDog if you’re a public company (or VC) and you mention AI, stock line go up, duh.
@GossiTheDog As long as we're all DIFFERENTLY wrong/vulnerable, it's fine. It's once everyone is wrong/vulnerable in the same way that we get a problem.
@GossiTheDog treating people who do their jobs well in a respectable manner does not enhance shareholder value in terms of delivering short-term monetary gains.
@GossiTheDog Not sure if this has any weight for your choice of words. But the myth of lemmings following each other over a cliff was created by an American company in order to make a film more interesting. The crew transported non-migratory lemmings from somewhere else, herded them onto machines that jostled and agited them, then repeatedly herded them to jump off a cliff to their deaths. Because, good footage.
Gotta love Disney.
@GossiTheDog “but we are not a computer company, why should we employ computer people?” Says every company on the planet, which is now a computer company whether they like it or not.
@GossiTheDog that you for this interesting article and research.
So dumb people are going to get dumber as they use less critical thinking and assume AI is correct.
And smart people find any time saving AI gives them is lost having to review the output vs doing it themselves.
Who could have ever imagined that could have be a logical outcome of all this nonsense.
@GossiTheDog I agree. And if we really need to replace some people by AI, let's replace the managers.
@GossiTheDog It appears that critical thinking skills have been degrading a lot longer than AI has been around. Preservation of cognitive skills can no longer be the end game: we must begin to exercise those cognitive skills.
@GossiTheDog I'm sure there is something here... and I'm the last person you'll find who thinks people (especially children) should be drowned in the fever-dream that silicon valley calls AI -- see michael I. jordan : an alternative view of ai: https://youtu.be/3zlDHdtSXt4?t=3)
but isn't this a bit like the "students will get dumb using calculators" argument? When it has been shown many times (keith devlin has some thoughts) that calculators gave room for students to abstract mathematics even more: not just a computor, maths is now about linking together theorems and techniques of higher order to produce results... not just practice the chain rule all day
x7 @GossiTheDog I don't know how to hunt animals in the jungle/forest anymore.
I don't know how to hitch a horse to a wagon either, or hand-crank a car to start.
How many of you know how to hand-program your own computer, in assembly?
Some fair rebuttals.
@GossiTheDog But there's no stopping impede the destruction of labour.
@GossiTheDog jokes on them I'm not using that stuff and my brain is melting away anyway
@GossiTheDog I have made a vow to never touch or interact with anything AI related. If I "need it for a job", that's probably not a place I want to work.
@GossiTheDog TL;DR IA makes you stupid (in the long term)
#Corporations are #people, too, and the more #money they throw at #AI, the more gullible they become.
For now, people raised with critical thinking skills can look at AI output, vet and judge it. Future generations might lose that skill entirely.
@GossiTheDog So my term AI degenerative hits the stup on the head.
I automated things in work through the use of a spreadsheet - in critical thinking was quickly reduced down to 'The spreadsheet is broke, fix it' (An invalid input) and 'The spreadsheet is giving a different result this time, it must be broke. (No, it's supposed to do that)
Nobody really knows what the options are for. And they ask for it to do things it already can - but they just mindlessly click/bypass anyway.
Sheet does in 10 minutes what used to take a day.
@GossiTheDog Can't wait for the machine to stop. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
(D.Burch) 
@GossiTheDog @briankrebs So it's similar to the deterioration of cognitive faculties one experiences based on proximity to a cute kitty, except it's not temporary (and no kitty) 
@GossiTheDog
AI is the new religion to make people stupider. As if religion alone hasn't been doing a good enough job of destroying intelligence.
@GossiTheDog So rather than being an additional tool for research it effectively "dumbs down" it's users.
This makes it a perfect tool for those in power who wish to reduce the ability of their citizens to think and work critically.
Naming no names....