A few years ago I ran across some discussions of GPS:

• This Is Your Brain on GPS Navigation: Parts of the brain that are used to navigate and plan routes aren’t active when directions are fed to us.
• Why You Should Stop Using GPS Navigation

Now there are similar concernes about AI:

• Will an overreliance on Copilot and ChatGPT make you dumb? A new Microsoft study says AI ‘atrophies’ critical thinking: “I already feel like I have lost some brain cells.”
• Microsoft says AI tools such as Copilot or ChatGPT are affecting critical thinking at work – staff using the technology encounter ‘long-term reliance and diminished independent problem-solving’
• ChatGPT Is Poisoning Your Brain…
• Are We Letting AI Code for Us — and Killing Our Skills?
• AI makes us dumb, researchers show
• Using AI Makes Your Brain Lazy, Even After You Stop Using It, New Study Shows
• Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
• Does AI make you more stupid?

As is often the case, science fiction saw this coming long ago. From Frank Herbert’s Dune:

• “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
• “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

I have mixed feelings about this. I am 74 years old and hence am terrified of “cognitive decline,” which we have often heard about in discussion of some public figures. I have not used LLM’s, and I even feel guilty about using the GPS on my phone. When I do that I try to avoid turn-by-turn directions, which I have loathed and despised for decades, long before smart phones existed. Instead I prefer to pull up a map and study it. I have loved maps since before I went to High School. My father was a linguistic geographer and i absorbed that from him.

However, having worked with computers since February of 1967, I am fascinated by the technology. I have installed an LLM on one of my computers. However, having done so, I could not think of anything to do with it. I may try it again, since the technology has evolved significantly in the past 18 months and doing this on my low-end systems is more practical. But I still don’t know if I would actually use such a thing.

This is sort of like me and computer games. A few times I have installed them, but having done that, I have had no interest in playing them. Getting the software to work is the game for me.