"We collapse uncertainty into a line of meaning. A physician reads symptoms and decides. A parent interprets a child's silence. A writer deletes a hundred sentences to find one that feels true. The key point: Collapse is the work of judgment. It's costly and often can hurt. It means letting go of what could be and accepting the risk of being wrong."
"What AI performs is very different-in fact, I argue that it's the inverse. When a large language model responds to a prompt, it expands. It takes a single, collapsed input and broadens it into a spectrum of possibilities. Ask it to explain, and it offers ten versions. Need comfort, and it builds a kind of compassion through endless linguistic paths. Of course, its strength is this variety-yet it never commits, and never feels the high cost of consequence."
Human thought narrows possibilities by collapsing uncertainty into committed meaning; that narrowing requires judgment, carries emotional and practical cost, and produces consequence. Decision-making examples include physicians diagnosing, parents interpreting silence, and writers editing toward a single truthful sentence. Large language models operate oppositely by expanding a collapsed input into many alternative expressions, offering variety, comfort, and multiple explanations without committing to any single outcome. Expansion is a design feature that enhances usefulness but lacks the cost-bearing commitment of human judgment. The juxtaposition of collapsing and expanding creates a new shared rhythm of cognition that is powerful yet potentially precarious.
Read at Psychology Today
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