Knowledge in an age of AI
I’ve posted before about AI’s (or rather LLMs) impact on reading and the brain. And the importance of continuing to teach the Liberal Arts to equip us with foundational critical thinking skills. Mastering basic skills before applying this foundational knowledge to develop more advanced skills is being threatened by LLMs which, like previous technologies (think the calculator, the desktop computer) allow us to be cognitive misers and get quick answers with minimal effort. But the effort is important, there is no way we can jump ahead to the more advanced skills without acquiring the more basic skills first. In order for people to successfully grapple with problems computers cannot do, they must work through problems that computers can do. Some already point to the creation of a ‘moronogenic’ society . That we are collectively becoming more stupid. This is a difficult area to establish causality. But perhaps correlations are enough to get us to stop and think.
The main point is that by increasingly outsourcing our thinking to LLMs we are
frequently offloading cognitive work to devices that may cause certain "mental muscles" to atrophy.
The point here is the relationship between working memory and long-term memory. We have limited working memories, so we need to make up for that weakness by storing lots of information in long-term memory. You can’t outsource that information to LLMs: it needs to be in long-term memory so it can be effortlessly and frictionlessly summoned to working memory when needed and combined with information in the environment, where it will produce what we typically call ‘skill’.
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The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI
