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Playing in the Creek

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346 points c1ccccc1 | 1 comments | 11 Apr 25 05:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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DrSiemer ◴[11 Apr 25 08:42 UTC] No.43651677[source]▶
So many articles and comments claim Ai will destroy critical thinking in our youths. Is there any evidence that this conviction that many people share is even remotely true?

To me it just seems like the same old knee-jerk luddite response people have to any powerful new technology that challenges that status quo since the dawn of time. The calculator did not erase math wizards, the television did not replace books and so on. It just made us better, faster, more productive.

Sometimes there is an adjustment period (we still haven't figured out how to deal with short dopamine hits from certain types of entertainment and social media), but things will balance themselves out eventually.

Some people may go full-on Wall-E, but I for one will never stop tinkering, and many of my friends won't either.

The things I could have done if I had had an LLM as a kid... I think I've learned more in the past two years than ever before.

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1. dsign ◴[11 Apr 25 09:20 UTC] No.43651975[source]▶
> Ai will destroy critical thinking in our youths

I don't think that's the argument the article was making. It was, to my understanding, a more nuanced question about if we want to destroy or severely disturb systems at equilibrium by letting AI systems infiltrate our society.

> Sometimes there is an adjustment period (we still haven't figured out how to deal with short dopamine hits from certain types of entertainment and social media), but things will balance themselves out eventually.

One can zoom out a little bit. The issue didn't start with social media, nor AI. "Star Wars, A New Hope", is, to my understanding, an incredibly good film. It came out in 1977 and it's a great story made to be appreciated by the masses. And in trying to achieve that goal, it really wasn't intellectually challenging. We have continued in that downhill for a bit, and now we are in 16 second stingers in TikTok and Youtube. So, the way I see it, things are not balancing out. Worse, people in USA elected D.J. Trump because somehow they couldn't understand how this real-world Emperor Palpatine was the bad guy.