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446 points walterbell | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.271s | source
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BrenBarn ◴[] No.43577934[source]
It's become almost comical to me to read articles like this and wait for the part that, in this example, comes pretty close to the beginning: "This isn’t a rant against AI."

It's not? Why not? It's a "wake-up call", it's a "warning shot", but heaven forbid it's a rant against AI.

To me it's like someone listing off deaths from fentanyl, how it's destroyed families, ruined lives, but then tossing in a disclaimer that "this isn't a rant against fentanyl". In my view, the ways that people use and are drawn into AI usage has all the hallmarks of a spiral into drug addiction. There may be safe ways to use drugs but "distribute them for free to everyone on the internet" is not among them.

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aprilthird2021 ◴[] No.43578036[source]
The other thing is that the second anyone even perceives an opinion to be "anti-AI" they bombard you with "people thought the printing press lowered intellect too!" Or radio or TV or video games, etc.

No one ever considers that maybe they all did lower our attention spans, prevent us from learning as well as we used to, etc. and now we are at a point we can't afford to keep losing intelligence and attention span

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mike_hearn ◴[] No.43579063[source]
I think people don't consider that because the usual criticism of television and video games is that people spend too long paying attention to them.

One of the famous Greek philosophers complained that books were hurting people's minds because they no longer memorized information, so this kind of complaint is as old as civilization itself. There is no evidence that we would be on Mars by now already if we had never invented books or television.

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1. aprilthird2021 ◴[] No.43594910[source]
But it possibly did lower our ability to memorize? We may be didn't need that ability to be so high to go to Mars or whatever.

I'm just saying, it's possible that reliving our minds of various tasks worked incrementally each time until a point it didn't anymore. Same way our liberal and egalitarian progress as a society worked great until all our countries started having birth rate problems? I mean, not trying to start another argument. The point is. Something (technological progress, social progress, even financial progress) can be great until we hit a point of no return where things collapse.