Cognitive surrender is the exaggerated off-load of cognitive tasks. Currently the most prevalent form of cognitive surrender is the over-use of LLMs to the point that the person is no longer able to function without generative AI. A person having such a state of mind quite often falls into AI psychosis, completely loses the ability of critical thinking as well as the atrophy of cognitive abilities. Cognitive surrender is not necessarily triggered by LLMs, it can easily be triggered by other things, such as religious fanaticism and blind faith in a doctrine, similar political fanaticism and blind belief of a political narrative, the blind faith in everything a person says due to being viewed as a genius or saint.

You may own or lead a company, in which case you need to ensure this company is successful. Some people may tell you that you need to use chatbots to increase productivity either as an extension or as a replacement of your workforce. You may be an individual who is afraid of being left behind, laid off if you do not at least pretend to be enthusiastic about chatbots. Maybe you genuinely believe that they are making you more productive. But is this really your interest? Are you the one using the chatbot, or is the chatbot using you?

Is your foundation a rock or is it sand?

Recently wistleblowers came out both from Anthropic and OpenAI, stating that AI poses an existential Risk. I think this initiative is not about helping the people to get information, but a carefully crafted trick so that we will speak about the terminator rather than the data centers

Yes, you have heard that correctly. Excellent news, right? Furthermore, you don’t need to invest money, to perform years, you don’t have to travel to Sweden (but nobody stops you if you wish to go there), you don’t have to perform correspondence with famous universities, you do not even need to write a paper about it. Sounds intriguing, right? Yet, I have to be honest with you, because, as always, there is a catch. You won’t be famous for getting the noble prize, you won’t meet famous people just for getting the prize, books will not be written about you and you won’t get money either.

LLMs are not only wreaking havoc in nature through their data centers, being heat waves on a planet that is already heating, causing air pollution disrupting the life cycle of living being sensitive to it as well as noise pollution to disturb even those that are less sensitive to light, wasting water, emitting toxic material, not only causing epistemic collapse by encouraging (and pressurizing) people to outsource their thinking leading to atrophy, not only threatening us, normal people existentially, at least by making us economically irrelevant and taking our political relevance as well, leaving us disempowered, alienated and pushed aside (worse cases are enslaving or killing us, which we must also take seriously as possible scenarios), but they are also insecure.

We are not powerless at all. We’ve got tools.

Epistemology is the philosophical study of human knowledge. That is, when we want to think and study knowledge and knowability, then we turn towards epistemology. Human knowledge was an important matter even before epistemology became a field of study and affects basically everything knowledge-related, including, but not limited to education, science, gathering information in order to form a world view or a political opinion. If we have a robust and trustworthy epistemological framework, then we can gather reliable information for further thinking, research, or simply for informed decision-making. We had such a robust framework up until our recent past when LLMs destroyed it, making a new epistemological framework necessary.

Hannah Arendt was a Jewish-German-American historian and philosopher. In 1933 she was imprisoned by Gestapo for illegally researching antisemitism. Upon release she fled to Paris and she later researched on what happened to her beloved continent, Europe.

Yes, YOU