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The Allure of Shiny Baubles: AI, Cognitive Passivity, and Social Upheaval
The human act of articulation enriches understanding, not just for the hearer, but also for the one who is doing the work of articulation. Going through the process of putting something into words forces our thought process through a nozzle that imposes coherence and an increase of logical rigor. Putting our thoughts into words not only puts the hearer’s understanding on firmer footing, but actually strengthens the speaker’s own grasp of the subject. This is one reason I believe widespread use of AI language models could have the unintended side-effect of diminishing the sum total of human understanding in the world.
I learned this affect of articulation through experience, when I and my colleagues observed that when we encountered a complicated or thorny bug in our code, surprisingly often, if we put the problem we were having into words, the mere act of articulation made the solution to our problem obvious. The logical structure imposed by putting things into words makes us think more cogently about the problem we are facing.