I primarily externalize my cognition by taking digital notes in Markdown, using Obsidian. I would also include digital timers (especially in personal devices like smartphones) and whiteboards or sticky notes.
The Extended Mind
The Extended Mind (book) is a great place to start on extended cognition
Parts
Link to original
- Thinking with Our Bodies
- Thinking with Our Surroundings
- Thinking with Our Relationships
The book came out at the end of 2021 and the Building a Second Brain book came out around six months later and is essentially part (4) above - “thinking with apps” (where someone else or most likely a profit-driven business decides your system constraints).
Forecasting
In 2022 I had an earlier incarnation of this garden, written prior to ChatGPT’s release. In it, I wrote:
What comes after thinking with apps? I would say (5) is “thinking with code” and (6) would be “thinking with AI” […] What I think is magical about thinking with code though, compared to (4) and (6), is that the process of writing the code involves *encoding* -- unambiguously -- your intention for that code.
Part 5 - Thinking with Code
Transclude of thinking-with-code
Brief thoughts on (6)
I had previously written:
I think that (5) is kind of bleeding-edge right now, in the sense that it is time-consuming and I will likely explore many routes that are wastes of time (partly due to lack of previous exploration, partly due to my not knowing about prior work). I think it is worth it, and I’ll have a detailed record of the entire process.
That means that (6) is probably not within reach right now. Just like futuristic medicine, there are surely use-cases today that are legitimate under particular circumstances. My biggest concerns are the difficulty in tracing ML “reasoning” as well as potential bias. I don’t want to pay a corporation money to use their blackbox that is going to think for me. I need to be able to trust my system.
As of late 2024-04, I still don’t see anyone doing anything paradigm-breaking with generative AI although Llama 3 looks extremely promising. In my personal experience with GPT-4, it has gotten pretty consistently worse over time. I’m happy to be building My Tinker Cast instead of investing in LLMs, for now. That said, the actor model makes LLMs a pretty natural fit once the time is right. I need to learn more about the ethics around Llama 3 in particular.