created: Sometime 2024
A recent Microsoft study confirmed what I've been thinking about lately - LLMs can make you stupid. Not in a dramatic, overnight way, but through subtle skill atrophy that happens when you stop exercising certain cognitive muscles.
It's similar to what happened with my piano skills. After playing for six years as a kid, I recently tried reading sheet music and found myself completely lost. The skill is still there somewhere, just really hard to access from not being used. I'm watching the same pattern emerge as I increasingly rely on LLMs for daily tasks - emails, writing, coding, even basic spelling.
In the past few weeks, I've written hundreds of lines of code, and not a single line was written by hand. I can still read and understand code (fortunate to have studied CS before ChatGPT), but I'm less confident about writing complex functions from scratch. This pattern is concerning, but it feels like an inevitable shift in how we work.
I've been thinking about how to maintain cognitive sharpness in this AI-assisted world. For the left side of my brain, I'm diving back into machine learning fundamentals, the goal is to understand AI at the deepest level. It's also partly an ego thing - linear algebra was one of the easier math classes in college, so I can't let these equations keep scaring me. This means implementing things from scratch, doing calculations on pen and paper, and experiencing some learning pain. As Karpathy says, learning should be slightly painful, and honestly, knowledge work including coding no longer feels painful and our brain craves challenge.
For creativity, I've been studying filmmaking for the past couple years, though consistency hasn't been my strong suit. Now that I'm more aware of my cognitive atrophy, I'm committing to at least two hours weekly. I love analyzing movies, breaking down scenes, understanding what makes stories work. The ability to be creative and tell good stories is going to be exponentially more important as we go forward.
In terms of passive learning, reading books is probably the best. I am lately gravitating toward history and sci-fi. Most nonfiction, especially self-help related books, can be summarized without much information loss.
I'm actually totally okay with some skills getting atrophies like coding and basic writing.Fighting automation seems futile. But it's interesting to imagine a future where doctors can't diagnose, architects can't build, and programmers can't code if they don't have AI. What if electricity goes out when a surgeon is still performing an operation? It will be interesting to observe the second-order effects of this.