On 2/11/25 7:43 AM, glen wrote:
The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdfIt really doesn't seem that different to me from numerical analysis. It shifts the work from doing the computing to declaring what the computing should do.
Spatial Knowledge: I guess it's a cheap comparison but I've watched the impact of handheld mapping and route planning devices (i.e. consumer GPS) and can't say it has actually significantly harmed/changed spatial awareness... Map wonks seem to use dynamic GPS-based mapping apps to enhance their existing experience with paper maps printed years or even decades ago? Those with little spatial/map awareness/interest seem to have leaned more heavily on the tech and possible increased their dependency on the tech without enhancing their spatial awareness/interest particularly. I know plenty of people who have *always* wanted/needed to be topological not geometric... "just tell me how to get there" and today they turn on "driving directions" with voice and "turn left, turn right, etc." as they are told and as long as it works are at least as happy as they used to be when they had a copilot who was doing the navigation and happier than they were when they had to try to read the instructions scribbled on their napkin as they drove, trying to ignore the scribbled (and rarely-to-scale-map-diagram drawn ideosynchratically by someone who *already* knows how to get there? ). If used with a little thought, both modes are enhanced (IMO) by the digital/automated support tools. Although very few automobiles have any paper maps in their glove boxes today... so in that sense, something was harmed/lost? Pre-Digital Information Retrieval: As we know from my incessant anecdote about "keeping company" with LLMs (primarily GPT), I find the conversational mode of "search" very compelling. But I already reformulated my "search" as an anticipatory exercise... first with dictionaries and encyclopedias and libraries by, for example, pulling several books from the stacks at once, ordering them in some mode which helps me work my way through the *imagined* or *foreshadowed* path I am anticipating when I pull the books. I usually had a few words queued in my head when I first opened a dictionary or encyclopedia which became a growing/shrinking queue as I addressed each word on the stack/queue in my head. Conversational Mode of Information Retrieval/Knowledge Development: I don't know if I'm half as capable as Glen in developing a good "strawman argument" but I do find that the conversational mode of constructing my pursuit of information/knowledge/wisdom leads me toward something like that... deliberately asking GPT questions which are either minimal in my assumptions or acutely specific about my implications. What GPT offers which *most* conversants/correspondents do not is an acutely careful ear to listen to my explicit assumptions and an ?unbiased? ability to take those assumptions and my questions and convolve them with their *very elaborate* knowledge base (training) and give me what are very convincing answers. The challenge then becomes recognizing confirmation bias. It *is* rather easy to ask a question in a way which telegraphs to the over-eager LLM to give me answers which are tailored to satisfy the sentiment implied in my question(s).Like all new tools, I do think we are in a phase of accommodation and adoption, like the early days of TV when all performers and producers could generate for some time was Radio Programs with moving images. Or Cinema as recorded Theater. Or Hypermedia as magazines and newspapers with hyperlinks (and <blink> tags?).
I have used GPT very sparingly in "voice-conversational" mode and have been fairly impressed with how well it works. It is patently not the same as chatting with a friend or colleague, nor is it like using voice I/O for the written/typed mode. As those of you who know me in-person, my "conversational affect" in person is somewhat different than my affect here (for better and worse).
The Internet made me a *more capable* but absolutely less-frequent user of paper libraries. Mobile devices with mapping/GPS has made me a *more capable" spatial awareness thinker/navigator/map-reader but actually open many fewer paper maps. In "idiom-conflation", I even find myself occasionally wanting to pinch-zoom a map or look for the little blue dot to find my "current" location. Or wish paper journalism had hyperlinks in them to make it easy for me to tangent to the implications-of or supporting-info for a given line of discussion.
mumble, - Steve
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