The Decline of Human Cognition
The other day, I saw a tweet that intrigued me deeply.
It was about a developer who complained about not being motivated by coding anymore:
I just cannot make myself code anymore. It feels too slow and requires too much energy. My brain refuses to concentrate and demands using an LLM shortcut. Do you feel something like this?
— Andriy Burkov (@burkov) December 20, 2024
I understand where he’s coming from.
In fact, this has been a topic of discussions lately, with Tiktok, and Instagram Reels. People are consuming more and more short, dumb, and dopaminergic content. Everything is fast, loud, in-your-face, with subtitles, and plot twists, and colorful…
This pattern of media consumption is a never-ending loop of anxiety that feeds off itself. The more you consume, the more you feel like you need to consume.
The problems start when you can’t sit still with your own thoughts for minute without wanting to scroll on your phone.
It bleeds into your social life, when you can’t pay attention to a friend speaking, and have to be checking your phone all the time.
It affects your education, when you can’t read more than a few lines of a book without getting distracted. That is, if you even read books, and not go asking AI for the answers.
It makes you distracted, lazy, uninterested.
The Greek Philosophers had an interesting view on this subject: the concept of eudamonia (fulfillment), that was about personal growth and character development, not simply living easy, comfort.
They believed that a truly meaningful life requires effort and virtue. A little farfetched from our current system which rewards outcomes by any means necessary, especially if they were reached quickly, and without cost.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to get out of this loop. But you and I, we can be a part of the new Renaissance by simply “slowmaxxing”.
you need to be slowmaxxing. you need to be reading long, fat books. you need to be making 48-hour chocolate chip cookies. you need to spend hours watching wildlife, you need to spend 15+ min making your coffee. you need to breathe in and breathe out. you need to be slowwwwwwwwwww.
— blue (@bluewmist) December 15, 2024
AI may as well surpass all of the human beings combined in terms of intelligence and computation. It doesn’t mean you should dumb down, and not try to improve yourself.
In fact, AI could tell you anything about any book we have access to, in our history. But it wouldn’t be able to have you experience the journey of reading these books.
Further reading: The Dark Side of AI: Tracking the Decline of Human Cognitive Skills