I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from).
There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this.
Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents
Wasn't aware that memes were an accepted part of evolutionary biology. They're not inherited like genes through reproduction that are subject to natural selection via biological fitness. Or any other evolutionary mechanism.
"If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
offloading thinking is a little/lottle bit different than writing to preserve your thoughts versus memorization. it's more analogous to skipping the writing, plugging your ears, and closing your eyes, while you wait for the answer to be presented before you.
What our descendants will think when they look back on this time period.
They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living, they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.
They wondered whether or not a word calculator was the antichrist. They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant minds to discuss whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon.
They shunned any creative or productive endeavor which dared to automate tedium or build on the works of the public domain (lowercase)…
for any such indulgence had become a great sin in Eden, a forbidden fruit that must never be obtained by the Adam, so that he may not become as we are!
If any alien is picking up the text we are generating they must conclude that people in 2026 spend most of their time at the library reading philosophy and having these salons of enlightened reasoned debate if they are so worried about the atrophy of their thinking by LLMs. They don't send electronic communication at the salons or library and are really concerned when they get out with the loss of the culture and thinking they currently have. That is how they are explaining the hysteria they see in the text.
They certainly would never guess that the text is being generated by people who mostly spend their time sending and receiving text/video of unthinking, brain rotting, bullshit all day and night.
> They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living, they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.
What are you talking about? Those are absolutely issues that are being worked on right here, right now. This framing is obviously false.
I sort of agree with you... The trouble is your logic is trivially obviously nonsense.
"Word calculator", "linear algebra"... This is just a variation on it's just a stochastic parrot / it's just a next token predictor.
The implication is that because it is "just" this simple-sounding thing, it can't be a complex thing! Except we know empirically that that doesn't hold. What are humans if not "just" next action predictors, "just" a collection of simple atoms, "just" electrical impulses? Yet clearly we are more than the sum of our parts. There no reason to believe dirty water can be more than the sum of its parts but weird sand can't.
I agree, eventually, but LLMs aren’t there quite yet. There are what, maybe 10 million distinct agents in the wild today? 100 million or a billion if we’re being charitable.
At the time being, the vast vast majority of those agents are all trained on the same or similar training set (the Internet and books). Which makes them mostly all the same. Vastly less diverse than the way one complex lifeform hatches out of the egg vs another.
So 1 billion mostly redundant agents at most. Well there are 40 quadrillion ants on the planet and 5 trillion are born every day. Each one its own “agent” , ingesting different inputs and being its own complex sum greater than its parts.
Not sure why this is interesting; it seems like anything that becomes "popular" could be cast as a "virus", including things like "having a fridge". Why does this give particular insight?
Leads me to think of a related topic, the Cost of Cognitive Debt. I think it is about time that we start to quantify what it means that we no longer grasp major parts of our systems and infrastructure. Once we quantify it, we can start to reason about how to address it.
And like a cult to those of us preferring not to engage, for whatever reason, with everyone and their dog telling us that we should (and sometimes getting quite offended, like our refusal to play that game is a personal attack on them for choosing to).
I feel the premise of this research is wrong, or at least the synopsis phrasing. Smart people like learning. Now we just learn more interesting things.
Weekend me before LLMs: Maybe I’ll chip away at that dependency injection library I’ve been working on. If I spend most of the day I could improve the user facing test framework.
Weekend me after LLMs: Let’s continue work to get Claude Code running in WebXR on a Quest 3 with app architecture modeled as a 3d construct. We’ve got deepgram hooked up for a better voice to text experience, but giving Claude a voice was a waste of time. Claude, continue to teach me about 3d rendering as related to our current challenges matching the fidelity of the built in browser.
I just don't see that the main thrust of their argument, (oversimplified) "humans will become so dependent on AI, they'll become dumb," holds any water. I mean even from an evolutionary standpoint, intelligence is (by far) our most valuable competitive advantage. Arguing that "cognitive offloading" (their term) will have runaway effects is reaching to say the least.
It's like saying that moving from manual-labor-intensive agrarian societies to industrial ones will make us weak and meek. In fact, it's had the opposite effect: humans, on average, are healthier and live longer than ever in human history.
Haven't read the article but I think in some limited timeframes it's true. I'm already turning over a lot of my thinking to LLMs. Not so much of a problem if I own the LLM but when big tech can just turn off the tap when they want or skew the results it seems a bit dangerous. It's possibly less dangerous for me, being old already, but seems quite risky for younger folk.
> humans, on average, are healthier and live longer than ever in human history.
Kinda. We also have incredible rates of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes.
While I do mostly buy that the mind and the body are connected, I don't think being able to bench press 250lbs is a necessary, fundamentally human capability. I do think being able to think is. Literally Rene Descartes cogito ergo sum. If we lose cognition, executive function, analysis, skepticism, etc., I don't think we're human anymore.
The higher rates don't make any sense if you don't try to take into account the fact that we live longer. Of course we will accumulate more diseases if we last longer.
> We also have incredible rates of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes.
To me, this is kinda like saying we have incredible rates of autism. While technically true, the science is still fairly new, so we simply don't have very much historical data. In all likelihood there isn't a sudden epidemic of autism, only improvements to how it's diagnosed.
Because I am LLM Dependent I got distracted reading the article and made my LLM summarise it to me in a few slides. For those in a rush/interested in LLM summary slop:
I do agree that we are on a pathway to losing much. If you focusing on maximising LLM-powered productivity you basically lose the learning that used to naturally happen when doing actual work. At the company I work for the focus is on productivity, and it's easy in many ways (less mental workload and I receive more praise) to go with it instead of fight it.
Not anymore than ants or any other species that's spread across the planet. A virus is something co-opts the replication machinery of a host to make more copies. That's not what humans do.
Since this idea may have come from the first Matrix movie, it's ironic that the character who espoused the idea, Agent Smith, became an actual virus in the 2nd and third movies.
We're in the midst of figuring out what the tradeoffs are of LLM usage - all the things you list are already mostly known and found worth it. You trade a tiny amount of time and fuel to cook food in exchange for not getting sick. How is that relevant to anything?
I'm making the point that the viral sensationalism in this article can be equally applied to automobiles, computer, telephones, calculators, and toothbrushes.
If the article had merely been what you said "is AI worth the cost" then I would not have taken issue with it.
> What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
In evolutionary time, we lost the ability to digest raw meat because we offloaded so much of process of the digestion to the cultural technology of cooking.
Do you like the looks of a future where that happens but for thinking?
Even if AI were superhuman at all thinking tasks, that doesn't mean we'd lose our abilities.
Chess and games can be a lot more demanding than a lot of people's work lives - and AI is already superhuman there.
The heaviest thing I need to lift in my daily life is a laptop and yet I've gotten significantly stronger over the last few years from strength training.
If AI took over all the boring but hard things I'm required to do it'd free up lots of time for me to spend thinking about things, and solve problems I find more interesting.
I’ve encountered several people now who consult LLMs constantly for nearly every decision. Some proportion of people will absolutely cede their thinking to these things, and some already have.
Hmm maybe it always feels "different" to every generation going through automation of something previously un-automated, but don't you feel that to some extent this is different.
Humans have been the dominant species because of our ability to think, not our ability to get from A to B in any particular way/cook food. If we abstract ~the bulk of our thinking to LLMs, don't we lose something as a species which makes us more vulnerable... Or is it always the case during an automation?
The core idea being that each time humanity was going to exceed the carrying capacity of its environment, we invented a new technology which increased the headroom. Obviously this ratchet only goes in one direction. The only way to go backwards is collapse.
This premise seems pretty solid (and somewhat obvious) to me. The distinction between scaffolding and substitution can be applied to just about any skill so why not here?
This makes more sense at least than the “just another abstraction layer” argument that’s been thankfully dying out recently.
I literally thought of this comparison last week. The problem I noticed was how my parents' generation lacked the cognitive "defenses" to separate AI social media content on YouTube, WhatsApp and the like from high quality information. The AI generated content does not trigger an "uncanny valley" reaction, and so people (I myself included) have greater difficulty immediately separating what information is genuine and what is synthetic, and then this spreads exponentially through social networks.
> The viral analogy does not imply that LLM-human interactions are intrinsically parasitic.
The analogy doesn't, but LLMs are trained on text, or content, generated by humans, with the aim of their output being acceptable to human interlocutors. That's one parasitic aspect. A second one is the nature and behavior of the organizational entities providing and promoting the popular LLM services: Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic etc - their influence on the economy, e.g. in energy and water use and the drawing of capital/human efforts - also has a somewhat parasitic aspect.
> with the aim of their output being acceptable to human interlocutors.
The more I use LLMs I find that their output drifts toward being acceptable to other LLMs. I find myself quite often telling the model: "this is not human readable.". Especially Opus and Fable write in such a way that it is difficult to follow. The often put sentences out of context, the context itself is fragmented. Often start with what you would think is end of a story so when you start reading you are like wtf it is about.
If think the issue might be that LLMs read text all at once whereas humans are somewhat linear. So when LLM puts out text it understands, to human it is close to random gibberish that looks like English.
Have to take commentary by non tech folks speaking about tech with a grain of salt and perspective since the tech is changing so fast both in capability and application.
Research can be more of a lagging indicator than a leading indicator with AI.
I can't disagree enough with this. Not everything needs to be understood in a technical context. Technology intersects with society, and understanding its impacts on that society is vital.
They're specifically not using the term "virus" pejoratively, but rather distinguishing the social mechanism LLMs seem to have from something as simple as a "meme".
I am very confused as to why LLM proponents insist that I can be left behind by a technology that takes almost 0 seconds to adopt. In the event that I realize "Oh no, I got left behind!" I can just ask an LLM to catch me up.
If this is interesting, message me about my “elves”
They are the cognitive construct I fortified in my mind and in my code before the models began producing their own training materials. My approach is based on two decades of coding without ai.
The immunization is becoming increasingly more valuable as people begin understanding the market in which I do business.
There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this.
Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents
The framing of something as a disease is itself slightly into the fascist territory.
-Socrates
What our descendants will think when they look back on this time period.
They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living, they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.
They wondered whether or not a word calculator was the antichrist. They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant minds to discuss whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon.
They shunned any creative or productive endeavor which dared to automate tedium or build on the works of the public domain (lowercase)…
for any such indulgence had become a great sin in Eden, a forbidden fruit that must never be obtained by the Adam, so that he may not become as we are!
It's important to make sure it in fact doesn't, otherwise there is nobody to throw a shade on our time capsule having the benefit of hindsight
They certainly would never guess that the text is being generated by people who mostly spend their time sending and receiving text/video of unthinking, brain rotting, bullshit all day and night.
What are you talking about? Those are absolutely issues that are being worked on right here, right now. This framing is obviously false.
"Word calculator", "linear algebra"... This is just a variation on it's just a stochastic parrot / it's just a next token predictor.
The implication is that because it is "just" this simple-sounding thing, it can't be a complex thing! Except we know empirically that that doesn't hold. What are humans if not "just" next action predictors, "just" a collection of simple atoms, "just" electrical impulses? Yet clearly we are more than the sum of our parts. There no reason to believe dirty water can be more than the sum of its parts but weird sand can't.
At the time being, the vast vast majority of those agents are all trained on the same or similar training set (the Internet and books). Which makes them mostly all the same. Vastly less diverse than the way one complex lifeform hatches out of the egg vs another.
So 1 billion mostly redundant agents at most. Well there are 40 quadrillion ants on the planet and 5 trillion are born every day. Each one its own “agent” , ingesting different inputs and being its own complex sum greater than its parts.
And that’s just ants.
I read it in that high pitched British accent that goes up into falsetto
I explored this concept in this post:
https://ljtn.github.io/epiq/blog/cost-of-cognitive-debt.html
greed malice pestilence lust envy...
Weekend me before LLMs: Maybe I’ll chip away at that dependency injection library I’ve been working on. If I spend most of the day I could improve the user facing test framework.
Weekend me after LLMs: Let’s continue work to get Claude Code running in WebXR on a Quest 3 with app architecture modeled as a 3d construct. We’ve got deepgram hooked up for a better voice to text experience, but giving Claude a voice was a waste of time. Claude, continue to teach me about 3d rendering as related to our current challenges matching the fidelity of the built in browser.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-waves-synch...
https://knowridge.com/2026/08/first-findings-of-mirror-like-...
The only way I can come up with to avoid exposure to a "cognitive virus" is lock oneself in a rubber room.
But extreme isolation merely fosters other mental illnesses.
It's an irrational world with no empirical evidence as to why it even exists. Get over it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-...
It's like saying that moving from manual-labor-intensive agrarian societies to industrial ones will make us weak and meek. In fact, it's had the opposite effect: humans, on average, are healthier and live longer than ever in human history.
Kinda. We also have incredible rates of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes.
While I do mostly buy that the mind and the body are connected, I don't think being able to bench press 250lbs is a necessary, fundamentally human capability. I do think being able to think is. Literally Rene Descartes cogito ergo sum. If we lose cognition, executive function, analysis, skepticism, etc., I don't think we're human anymore.
To me, this is kinda like saying we have incredible rates of autism. While technically true, the science is still fairly new, so we simply don't have very much historical data. In all likelihood there isn't a sudden epidemic of autism, only improvements to how it's diagnosed.
https://smalldocs.org/s/scB6O8KiZEmLWgK855A1vt#k=yiw8FB_G5Ld...
I do agree that we are on a pathway to losing much. If you focusing on maximising LLM-powered productivity you basically lose the learning that used to naturally happen when doing actual work. At the company I work for the focus is on productivity, and it's easy in many ways (less mental workload and I receive more praise) to go with it instead of fight it.
What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
Yes.
>Because we've become dependent on them?
Because we're burning the planet down with them.
>Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage?
Yes, because in places we do people enjoy higher qualities of life and happiness. Along with things like health improvement from doing more excersize.
>What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
Moreso we've become dependent on eating processed junk over the past 50 years and gotten fat as shit.
So yea, maybe think a little more deeply about your analogies?
>What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
Is cooking food a virus? Should we facilitate reversibility in our food cooking?
Since this idea may have come from the first Matrix movie, it's ironic that the character who espoused the idea, Agent Smith, became an actual virus in the 2nd and third movies.
We're in the midst of figuring out what the tradeoffs are of LLM usage - all the things you list are already mostly known and found worth it. You trade a tiny amount of time and fuel to cook food in exchange for not getting sick. How is that relevant to anything?
I'm making the point that the viral sensationalism in this article can be equally applied to automobiles, computer, telephones, calculators, and toothbrushes.
If the article had merely been what you said "is AI worth the cost" then I would not have taken issue with it.
In evolutionary time, we lost the ability to digest raw meat because we offloaded so much of process of the digestion to the cultural technology of cooking.
Do you like the looks of a future where that happens but for thinking?
Chess and games can be a lot more demanding than a lot of people's work lives - and AI is already superhuman there.
The heaviest thing I need to lift in my daily life is a laptop and yet I've gotten significantly stronger over the last few years from strength training.
If AI took over all the boring but hard things I'm required to do it'd free up lots of time for me to spend thinking about things, and solve problems I find more interesting.
It seems clear to me that people will continue to think, but in different ways.
I hate to bring this analogy up again, but it seems impossible to escape: did losing the ability to do long division really impact humanity?
Humans have been the dominant species because of our ability to think, not our ability to get from A to B in any particular way/cook food. If we abstract ~the bulk of our thinking to LLMs, don't we lose something as a species which makes us more vulnerable... Or is it always the case during an automation?
> Or is it always the case during an automation?
Obviously. Any time we make a useful discovery and begin using it, we become dependent on using it.
The core idea being that each time humanity was going to exceed the carrying capacity of its environment, we invented a new technology which increased the headroom. Obviously this ratchet only goes in one direction. The only way to go backwards is collapse.
But... It's worked so far?
Yes?
Toothbrushes! What will we do if we come to rely on toothbrushes??? The use of toothbrushes travels from person to person exactly like a virus!!!
This makes more sense at least than the “just another abstraction layer” argument that’s been thankfully dying out recently.
The analogy doesn't, but LLMs are trained on text, or content, generated by humans, with the aim of their output being acceptable to human interlocutors. That's one parasitic aspect. A second one is the nature and behavior of the organizational entities providing and promoting the popular LLM services: Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic etc - their influence on the economy, e.g. in energy and water use and the drawing of capital/human efforts - also has a somewhat parasitic aspect.
The more I use LLMs I find that their output drifts toward being acceptable to other LLMs. I find myself quite often telling the model: "this is not human readable.". Especially Opus and Fable write in such a way that it is difficult to follow. The often put sentences out of context, the context itself is fragmented. Often start with what you would think is end of a story so when you start reading you are like wtf it is about.
If think the issue might be that LLMs read text all at once whereas humans are somewhat linear. So when LLM puts out text it understands, to human it is close to random gibberish that looks like English.
Research can be more of a lagging indicator than a leading indicator with AI.
Or in other words: the humanities are good.
They are the cognitive construct I fortified in my mind and in my code before the models began producing their own training materials. My approach is based on two decades of coding without ai.
The immunization is becoming increasingly more valuable as people begin understanding the market in which I do business.