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AI System – Is It Your "Cognitive Exoskeleton" or Simply Your Super-Fast Intern?

10 points| kokhanserhii | 7 days ago

As it turned out, about "AI" there are two completely different understandings of the term "cognitive exoskeleton"...

1. The Generalized-Abstract Understanding

Well, it's clear that there is a generalized-abstract concept: you create text faster, translate faster, format faster, program faster, create reports and reviews faster...

2. The More Concrete Understanding

There is a more concrete concept, when you for your typical mental activity create all kinds of ensembles from sequences of prompts, agents, and so on.

3. My Understanding - True Cognitive Amplification

Well, but I don't like both these concepts. The thing is that I for myself truly discovered the possibilities and power of smart chats when I understood that with their help I can amplify my reason and intelligence. I can with their help invent something new-that which I couldn't have invented without their help. This is the real amplification of your reason and intelligence.

The first-this is to a very significant degree an exoskeleton of a secretary, translator, proofreader, referent. What does reason and intelligence have to do with it here? Not that reason-even intelligence, this is a concept about the ability to solve tasks of a type unknown to you. When I mastered such things, yes, I understood that I can be myself and plus three secretaries in effectiveness and five translators. But I didn't want to be such a multi-personality. I didn't like it. And the well-being, honestly speaking, was like that of a very loaded secretary at one and a half positions.

The second-here you simply order a certain sequence of work of yourself and some programs. Yes, this, of course, is an amplifier of organization, not of intelligence and not of reason. But so one can also call a paper notepad, a daily planner an "exoskeleton of a self-organizer"-simply this one is in computerized and web-service form.

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Question to Readers

And how do you think-where is it better to attach the term "cognitive exoskeleton"?

I in general like more "cognitive exo-wings," because it doesn't look like a skeleton at all and is not one, and also hints for some reason about a cemetery. Real iron exoskeletons remind by appearance of strengthening and solidity, and the word "skeleton" itself reminds only about a cemetery, and also doesn't improve posture at all. This is a slightly different theme-terminological-but I write about this here since the term "cognitive exoskeleton" is already widely occupied for the first two not quite cognitive positions.

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My previous article *"Human and AI. How to Modernize Your Consciousness in 10 Minutes"* examines and positions about a dozen other dimensions regarding your attitude toward artificial intelligence.

11 comments

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anilgulecha|7 days ago

It's not an intern because you can speak at a much higher level of abstraction that in the old world you could only speak with at an architect level.

In the new world this has become the potential expectation at an intern level.. which means forget leetcode - learn to deal with higher level architecture concepts and practice them.

kokhanserhii|7 days ago

Please explain this in more detail. I don't understand. The level of abstraction seems straightforward, even for an intern. Properly understanding this level of abstraction in context, without lengthy explanations, is a completely different matter. Beginners struggle with this, just as AI systems struggle with it (or rather, it's impossible). Of course, I'm talking about the conceptual, anthological context here, not the previous textual "LLM context".

7777777phil|7 days ago

well.. exoskeleton vs intern framing matters less than whose cognition gets amplified. AI converges to the mean through next-token prediction, so it amplifies average thinking well but struggles at the tails. The research on this is pretty clear, human-AI pairs only outperform when the human brings real domain knowledge: https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-impossible-backhand/

kokhanserhii|7 days ago

I read this article when you corrected the link.

I have some solidarity with the author's conclusions and doubts in this article, but he substantiates them with very questionable arguments. That is, he presents not some research, but simply one example where nuances are very important.

HOW did they ask about the plausibility of the tennis video, such that the tennis player said it's not people? Here there's a very big difference - either he would simply be watching tennis and say this, or they asked him "Is this a real game or did artificial intelligence draw it?" This is not some significant research (antiplacebo).

And about the architecture of artificial intelligence systems, the author judges by some very popular-science simplified models. But real models are of course unknown to the general public and are corporate secrets.

The fact that one tennis player pointed to the unrealism of the video doesn't mean he would be able to explain in an artificial intelligence system how to make a realistic video.

kokhanserhii|7 days ago

"Couples are superior to each other" — here

— the concept of couples and their level of exoskeleton proficiency,

— and the concept of "in what way exactly are they superior to each other?"

They are so diverse that conducting any comprehensive, meaningful research is fundamentally impossible at this time. Such research is only possible in a very, very narrow area.

irickt|7 days ago

the link is 404