Technology

I don't see how that's any indicator of cognitive decline.

Also people had notebooks for ages. The reason they remembered phone numbers wasn't necessity, but that you had to manually dial them every time.

The other day I saw someone ask ChatGPT how long it would take to perform 1.5 million instances of a given task, if each instance took one minute. Mfs cannot even divide 1.5 million minutes by 60 to get get 25,000 hours, then by 24 to get 1,041 days. Pretty soon these people will be incapable of writing a full sentence without ChatGPT's input

Edit to add: divide by 365.25 to get 2.85 years. Anyone who can tell me how many months that is without asking an LLM gets a free cookie emoji

I already have seen a massive decline personally and observationally (watching other people) in conversation skills.

Most people now to talk to each other like they are exchanging internet comments. They don't ask questions, they don't really engage... they just exchange declaratory sentences. Heck most of the dates I went on the past few years... zero real conversation and just vague exchanges of opinion and commentary. A couple of them went full on streamer, like just ranting at me and randomly stopping to ask me nonsense questions.

Most of our new employees the past year or two really struggle with any verbal communication and if you approach them physically to converse about something they emailed about they look massively uncomfortable and don't really know how to think on their feet.

Before the pandemic I used to actually converse with people and learn from them. Now everyone I meet feels like interacting with a highlight reel. What I don't understand is why people are choosing this and then complaining about it.

They’ll have forgotten how to remember anything.

That doesn't require a few years, there are loads of people out there already who have forgotten how to have a conversation

Especially moderators, who typically are the polar opposite nog the word. You disagree with my factually incorrect statement? Ban. Problem solved. You disagree with my opinion? Ban.

Similarly I've seen loads of users on Lemmy (and before or reddit) that just ban anyone who asks questions or who disagrees.

It's so nice and easy, living in a echo chamber, but it does break your brain

I could remember so many phone numbers nowadays I just click their names on my rectangle, the future sucks and is weakening us !

People don't memorize phone numbers anymore? Why not? Dialing is so much quicker than searching your contacts for the right person.

I still remember all my family’s phone numbers from when I was a kid growing up In WV in the 70s

I currently have my wife’s number memorized and that’s it. Not my mom, my kids, friends, anybody. I just don’t have to. It’s all in my phone.

But I’m also of the opinion that NOT having this info in my head has freed it up for more important things. Like memes and cat videos 🤣

But seriously, I don’t think this tool, and AI is just a tool, is dumbing me down. Yes I think about certain things less, but it allows me to ask different or better questions, and just learn differently. I don’t necessarily trust everything it spits out, I double check all code it produces, etc. It’s very good at explaining things or providing other examples. Since I’m older, I’ve heard similar arguments about TV and/or the Internet. LLMs are a very interesting tool that have good and bad uses. They are not intelligent, at least not yet, and are not the solution to everything technical. They are very resource intensive and should be used much more judiciously then the currently are.

Ultimately it boils down to if you’re lazy, this allows you to be more lazy. If you don’t want to continue learning and just rely on it, you are gonna have a bad time. Be skeptical, questioning, employee critical thinking, take in information from lots of sources, and in the end you will be fine. That is unless it becomes sentient and wipes us all out.