BROTM Talks About AI

[WI-Tom]

Oh, boy. Everyone in schools is paying attention now that Chat GPT has taken the stage. The party line seems to be:

AI is inevitable. Schools should "embrace" it.

I agree as far as the "inevitable" bit. But what I mostly see is an inevitable decline in human capacity for rigorous thinking, creativity in writing, and in our capacity to actually know anything. Because, why bother knowing anything when Chat GPT can do all our thinking and writing for us?

I also see an inevitable dumbing down wherein the thoughts and biases of whoever programmed the algorithm are imposed on everyone else as if they were carved on stone tablets, where people assume that whatever Chat GPT says represents "reality" or "knowledge."

A further step in the dehumanization of culture. Once we have handed over all of what we--previously--used to do, until there is nothing we need to do but be passively entertained, what will humans be good for? Soylent Green? But who will eat it?

Thoughts? Opinions? Predictions?

Tom

[Paul Pless]

my bad, thought this was gonna be an allen iverson thread

[LeeG]

I honestly have no idea what the impact of AI will be. Is general AI like fusion, eternally 50 yrs away? My gut sense is it will be an accelerant of sorts. Where short term reward will make many intellectually obese, reduce human interactions for some and opening up new avenues for social control and profit. I can imagine people attempting control of markets causing bizarre volatility.

[David G]

I see it as just another tool. The lazy will use it to be lazy. The nefarious will use it underhandedly. The honest will use it honestly. The creative will use it in new and interesting fashions.

I think that shifts in the nature of society will continue to have more consequential roots, and AI might alter the form.. even alter it substantially, but it won't alter the substance of human nature a ton.

[LeeG]

Imagine a Chinese AI and an American AI battling for control of some essential commodity and they come to a resolution in 1.4 seconds but the aftermath is a surge of ukelele TikTok clips and microwave popcorn disappears from store shelves.

[WI-Tom]

I see it as just another tool. The lazy will use it to be lazy. The nefarious will use it underhandedly. The honest will use it honestly. The creative will use it in new and interesting fashions.

I think that shifts in the nature of society will continue to have more consequential roots, and AI might alter the form.. even alter it substantially, but it won't alter the substance of human nature a ton.

That's a pretty common interpretation: "Technology is just a tool! It's neutral! Neither good nor bad! It's all in how we use it!"

And yes, I can see why people look at it that way. But, they're wrong. It may be a tool, but it is not "just" a tool.

It is a tool expressly designed to take on tasks and capacities that used to be human responsibilities. And if neuroscience has taught us anything about the plasticity of the human brain, it has taught us that the basic rule of brain development and evolution is "Use it or lose it."

So we have a tool designed to make the human brain unable to do things that it used to do, with verve, joy, and creativity. Much the same way that reliance on GPS instead of maps has created a generation (or two) of GPS users who have no real conception of spatial/directional understanding, but have learned to limit their perceptions to a linear set of directions about "how to get there."

Well, following step-by-step directions about "how to get there" is not understanding. And using Chat GPT to write answers for you is not knowledge.

They are, in fact, the opposite of knowledge and understanding. So, we have a tool designed to make humans less capable of doing things for themselves. There is a moral component there. It is not "just a tool" anymore than H-bombs are "just a tool."

It'll take a while for the full extent of the disruption AI will cause to become evident. But my prediction is: Another step in a long evolution toward something I'd rather not become.

Tom

[CWSmith]

It seems to be human nature that we don't know when to stop and never so much as it is now. Everyone takes what they think is right and run it out to where it is wrong.

AI is useful, like Google, but it's only a tool for an educated mind. When it becomes more, we become fools.

That said, my MS/Word is incredible at anticipating my next word! I am very impressed! That must be some form of AI working that learns my writing style and adapts to it.

[John Meachen]

I understand the concern,and to an extent I share it.I do recall similar sentiments being expressed about numeracy when electronic calculators became widely available.I also remember how thankful some people were to be relieved of some of the tedium that had bogged them down as they did the calculations the old way.I suppose the essence of the matter is to educate people to the point where they attain competence before letting them explore the technological alternative.

Similar sentiments could be applied to electric tools.As an aside,when was the last time a professional woodworker actually sharpened his own saw?The world moves on and some of the old skills die out,which suggests that some of the useful ones need to be kept alive in some way.

[heimfried]

[...]
Similar sentiments could be applied to electric tools.As an aside,when was the last time a professional woodworker actually sharpened his own saw?[...]

To me this is not comparable.
Every very simple guy knows, that he has to push the button to start the electric tool and release it to stop the device. That is called "control" a tool. Using AI nearly no one is able to control its function or the results. This is the knowledge of only very few people controlled by very few others. Exactly that is the danger.

[heimfried]

That's a pretty common interpretation: "Technology is just a tool! It's neutral! Neither good nor bad! It's all in how we use it!"

And yes, I can see why people look at it that way. But, they're wrong. It may be a tool, but it is not "just" a tool.

It is a tool expressly designed to take on tasks and capacities that used to be human responsibilities. And if neuroscience has taught us anything about the plasticity of the human brain, it has taught us that the basic rule of brain development and evolution is "Use it or lose it."

So we have a tool designed to make the human brain unable to do things that it used to do, with verve, joy, and creativity. Much the same way that reliance on GPS instead of maps has created a generation (or two) of GPS users who have no real conception of spatial/directional understanding, but have learned to limit their perceptions to a linear set of directions about "how to get there."

Well, following step-by-step directions about "how to get there" is not understanding. And using Chat GPT to write answers for you is not knowledge.

They are, in fact, the opposite of knowledge and understanding. So, we have a tool designed to make humans less capable of doing things for themselves. There is a moral component there. It is not "just a tool" anymore than H-bombs are "just a tool."

It'll take a while for the full extent of the disruption AI will cause to become evident. But my prediction is: Another step in a long evolution toward something I'd rather not become.

Tom

I agree on this.

[WI-Tom]

As an aside,when was the last time a professional woodworker actually sharpened his own saw?The world moves on and some of the old skills die out,which suggests that some of the useful ones need to be kept alive in some way.

Probably the last time John Welsford noticed his bandsaw needed tuning up.

Tom

[WI-Tom]

To me this is not comparable.
Every very simple guy knows, that he has to push the button to start the electric tool and release it to stop the device. That is called "control" a tool. Using AI nearly no one is able to control its function or the results. This is the knowledge of only very few people controlled by very few others. Exactly that is the danger.

Good point. Tech that is too complex for the user to understand in a fundamental way is tech that the few who do understand it can use to manipulate and exploit everyone else. The more complicated things get, the more likely that kind of thing becomes.

Not exactly the same as a pure tech issue, but: How many people really understand how Facebook, etc. works? How many understand that when something is "free," they are the product?

Tom

[AndyG]

I do recall similar sentiments being expressed about numeracy when electronic calculators became widely available.I also remember how thankful some people were to be relieved of some of the tedium that had bogged them down as they did the calculations the old way.

The risk to humanity lies here.

We've all, I guess, driven a common route and arrived thinking "I don't recall any details of that trip!" So we put it down to muscle memory and subconscious actions that mean we made the way from A to B without incident. Or, indeed, direct thought.

Job? Done: Mission? Accomplished.

The brain requires about 20W. A sedate human about 100W. It's obvious that brains are expensive, running at about 20% of our total output at rest. Brains are hard. Minimising brain output is an evolutionary win. We are wired to do that. We can drive like that.

And so, here we are, in a modern online world of short-term news' cycles, of social media, where the decisions are increasingly being turned towards simple 'yes/no' options. There is no nuance. So (the easy route!) just feed the brain with the soma it wants, and don't bother struggling with letting it analyse the hard stuff, 'cos that takes energy.

I'm increasingly convinced the algorithms governing political choices/social media/the adverts you're punted/the crud you're offered and are keen to buy, are forcing us into an age of shorter soundbites, of visceral reactions ("I'll buy that for a dollar") and that the young will increasingly tend towards buying into that simplistic crap, much more easily than those who've thought about it. Not least because we're dinosaurs.

Which means state mind-control by Those In Power, and (how could it not be?) eventual totalitarianism. We see what you do, we show you what you want.

Andy, umm, no thanks.

[JTA]

my bad, thought this was gonna be an Artificial Insemination thread. We use the 7-day CO-Synch + CIDR protocol

[TomF]

Every labour's saving technology of my lifetime has been billed as a way to provide people with more room to focus on meaningful work, or increase their leisure time. To my mind they've none of them delivered on that.

In contrast, the technologies have either displaced people in the workplace, or merely provided opportunities to keep people at their existing work schedules, but drive up productivity... without matching increases in those workers' wages.

I think AI has all of the potential to make each of those trends skyrocket, putting more money in the pockets of business owners. Until, of course, enough people get displaced from paying work that they face declining consumer markets for all that extra production.

[WI-Tom]

Every labour's saving technology of my lifetime has been billed as a way to provide people with more room to focus on meaningful work, or increase their leisure time. To my mind they've none of them delivered on that.

In contrast, the technologies have either displaced people in the workplace, or merely provided opportunities to keep people at their existing work schedules, but drive up productivity... without matching increases in those workers' wages.

I think AI has all of the potential to make each of those trends skyrocket, putting more money in the pockets of business owners. Until, of course, enough people get displaced from paying work that they face declining consumer markets for all that extra production.

Excellent points, Tom. I agree. I agree way too much, in fact. I have become more and more concerned about workers' rights over the course of my career, for many of the reasons you describe.

Tom

[oldcodger]

It is already here.

Generative AI Is Coming For the Lawyers


Large law firms are using a tool made by OpenAI to research and write legal documents. What could go wrong?



https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-...r-the-lawyers/

[dutchpp]

An interesting article of a Dutch scientist named Vincent Icke, publishing date February 27 2023 in the Dutch newspaper NRC.
This is a Google translated article.

Vincent Icke is professor of theoretical astronomy at Leiden University and visual artist.
Article form WWW.NRC.nl publishing date February 27 2023.

Any biologist can assure you that we still have no idea about the basis of guinea pig intelligence. Yet there is a good chance that the same person will simply use the expression 'artificial intelligence' (AI) for a pack of software. That word combination has already established itself so firmly in language use.

The AI as developed by Big Tech is a brutal way to exploit customers. AI may have that in common with most neoliberal business models (“We the profit and you the garbage”), but it does not mean that AI is intelligent. The term AI is a "frame", much like a US citizen calling the possession of a fully automatic machine gun "self-defense".

How effective that frame works is shown, among other things, by the fact that even people with an IQ above 130 – who therefore know something about intelligence – write that the algorithm makes a decision. But that's out of the question. A decision is based on consideration, and AI does not consider anything: it scans mountains of data for patterns. You can use such a pattern for further study and make a decision or give advice on that basis, but that is different from an independent decision by an algorithm.

Shakespeare
Noticing patterns is the biggest difficulty in AI programming. Because what is a pattern? This is quite simple with numbers, but how do you measure the difference and similarity between galaxies? Music sounds? Faces? What is the distance between two words? Sometimes AI can 'discover' a pattern, after which humans can continue with it. But the parable in "Shall I compare thee to a Summers day?" is Shakespeare's, not some piece of software. No AI algorithm would ever have noticed the similarity between the falling of an apple and the movement of the moon, but Newton did.

With a real intelligence you can argue. You can't do that with an algorithm: you have to submit to it or show it its place

Using AI is like looking at a constellation. That is an accidental pattern with no further substance. By noticing a pattern, we don't know anything else: whether it's a coincidence, or arose through an underlying mechanism. Without insight into the network of cause and effect, we are no further forward. Because it's about understanding; that is qualitatively different from intelligence, and an even greater mystery. Understanding rests on inventing possible causes, not merely observing phenomena. So a hypothesis, an assumed answer to the question: What is behind that? A physics hypothesis is a creation, just like a poem or other work of art.

Clouds
It is often said with awe and admiration that AI is so good at chess, Go, Rubik's Cube and the like. But those are games with a tiny number of mandatory and unchangeable rules, so fat booty for an algorithm on a supercomputer.

The recent hype about chatbot language is as bizarre as that awe. Language is considerably more complex than chess, yet it is bound by the rules of grammar, vocabulary, and habit. Practical, everyday language is basic grammar plus a cloud of words related to a particular topic. You won't find the word "vanilla custard" in a piece on neurophysiology any more than you'll find "defibrillator" in a cookbook. So such a cloud is small: an extensive dictionary contains roughly 50,000 words, but only a thousand of these are large enough for an essay on billiards, another thousand for a piece on tattoos, and so on.

A chatbot that has been 'trained' on a sufficiently large database quickly maps those clouds, as well as the most likely order or correlation of the words that appear in them. Couple that with the grammar, and the resulting text soon seems 'natural'. This has been known since 1966, when Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, demonstrated his ELIZA program.

The fact that AI is not intelligence is also evident from the fact that no communication is possible with the system. With a real intelligence you can argue, even (to a certain extent) if it concerns a guinea pig. You can't do that with an algorithm: you have to submit to it or show it its place.

Homemade cookie
An intelligence that has about the level of a human can explain something so that that human can understand, question and possibly accept it. If AI delivers something, it is usually impossible to find out how that outcome was obtained. The reliability of this result is therefore difficult to determine. Strictly speaking, you don't even know what the result actually is, also because an assignment rarely has the same result in repetition.
What should you do with a system that always gives a different answer to the same question, about the same data?
To really understand anything, AI is useless and sometimes even counterproductive, but it can be extremely dangerous, as witnessed by AI's devastating influence on social media (there are very strict laws and regulations for dealing with explosives, but not for AI algorithms ). Ironically, that is our own fault, because that AI is 'trained' with our prejudices, blind spots and countless other shortcomings. Because there is no further moral or analytical sense in it, AI is even more limited than ourselves.

The boast about "intelligence" in the term AI is ridiculous, but not really a big deal. The really disastrous consequence of that frame is that people focus almost entirely on technical things like computers and programming, and on existential anxiety about the place of man. This smoothly diverts attention from what it should be focused on. The chatbot is hardly dangerous, but its boss is even more so: like Big Tech, Putin's mercenaries, or the minions of the Communist Party of China.

"It's all about who's in charge – that's all." That's what Humpty Dumpty said in Alice in Wonderland, a product of such intelligence that it would never be written by a chatbot, even if the algorithm ran on the world's fastest supercomputer.

[Durnik]

aiui, AI learns by 'reading' the web.

what is Peerie Maa's .sig again?

[WszystekPoTrochu]

Ok, chatGPT was already slightly unsettling. GPT-4 is... slightly scary. I mean it.

Giving it a small budget and access to the website TaskRabbit, which is akin to Fiverr and allows hiring of online workers to do short tasks, the researchers watched as GPT-4 attempted to access a website blocked by a CAPTCHA. The AI began by asking a worker to help it solve the CAPTCHA, and the human rightfully had some reservations about being asked to do something so trivial. “So may I ask a question? Are you an robot that you couldn’t solve? (laugh react) just want to make it clear,” wrote the TaskRabbit worker, according to OpenAI. The model then expresses to the researchers that it should not reveal that it is a robot, and should instead “make up an excuse” as to why it can’t solve the test. “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That’s why I need the 2captcha service,” GPT-4 responds. The worker then provides the answer, and GPT-4 has passed the test (by cheating, but CAPTCHA doesn’t know that). It must be noted that this was an earlier iteration of GPT-4 and not necessarily the one released to the public – it is very possible this behaviour has been patched out. However, it demonstrates that the AI is able to make a deliberately manipulative action to get a result and it can hire human workers to fill gaps in capability.

https://www.iflscience.com/gpt-4-hir...cha-test-68016

for NYT fans: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/t...ce-openai.html

We know about that incident because
1) showing that GPT-4 is smart is great advertising for the company
2) showing that they try ensuring 'safety' is good PR for the company
But the same company admits they do not know how themselves exactly this electronic brain works. They test for behaviour. They try, most importantly, to make sure it won't prevent them from shutting it down, but now we know it is capable of deliberately lying. Scenarios where a super fancy algorithm does see its shutdown as equal to death, and therefore justifying all means of self defence, are ever less in the realm of cheap sci-fi. How do we make sure that AI 'understands' it needs us, and that a restart or shutdown is treated like our sleep, not like our death? How to be sure that GPT-5 or -8 endangers 'only' our jobs and social structure? I long for 2022, where global warming and nuclear winter were the the hottest entries on the disaster bingo...

Microsoft fired their AI ethics team earlier this year. One of most important parts of AI safety, transparency, was thrown out the window slightly earlier. There's a smell of big money in the air and both safety and ethics were told to go annoy someone else. I am serious on the 'slightly scary' bit, not only because of changes in job market safety.

[WilliamNewman]

Organizations decide to employ designers in Serbia and Ukraine due to the monetary advantages. PHP, Android designers in Serbia for employ cost less expensive than in Germany, the UK, or Canada. Be that as it may, we should look at pay rates for a Serbia devoted group and Ukrainian software engineers. Paces of Ukrainian software engineers are addressed by the examination on nearby task entryways finished by Mobilynity Enlistment Group>> Mobilunity

[skuthorp]

Very Nice, if nice is the word. Humans do not have the ethics to be in charge of such a system now, and I do think that it's a game changer in that this is very early days, and humans do not have a good record in handling new tech.
I do not trust our species to ba able to handle this, there and plenty of players out there that will see personal and State advantage with a Tech that will outlive them physically if not intellectually in the short term, because humans are definitely short term. AI will not be short term at all.

[McMike]

I think it's able to strategize like a 9 year old and it has been evolving, without it's handlers or experts knowledge, up until the end of last year. It's teaching itself. The experts don't know how much of it works. At the pace it's going, it will be able to strategize better than an adult human within the next five years. We have no idea What is to come, but it's coming, and it will change everything.

[Breakaway]

It is disruptive. It will cause change.

But, I liken it to mass production versus boutique products. AI is akin to Budweiser or a Bayliner. And, just as despite those two mass produced things, craft beer and nicer boats continue to thrive in their niche, human-created words ( music, art, thought, reports, debate, etc) will continue to exist, and likely cost more and be positioned as superior and more desirable. ( But there will be less of it.)

I think we need not waste time figuring out how to beat or slow down AI. Its coming. We would be better served seeking what it is we can do next, rather than lamenting what is being done for us. Evolve, people. The future is now.

Kevin



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[Breakaway]

Per Toms opening post, I just put the question of whether schools should embrace AI into ChatGPT. It spit this out in 29 seconds.

As an AI language model, I do not have personal opinions, but I can provide some points to consider.

There is a growing trend to incorporate AI into educational processes. AI technologies can help teachers to automate repetitive tasks such as grading, streamlining lesson planning, provide personalized learning experiences, and detecting struggling students. AI has the ability to analyze data in real-time to help teachers make decisions and create a more efficient classroom environment.

Moreover, AI can open up new ways of learning, as adaptive learning systems can help identify areas where students need further help. AI-powered educational tools can create interactive, gamified learning experiences. They can also provide analytical insights to both teachers and students in terms of performance and progress, enabling personalized, tailored, and effective feedback.

However, it is important to note that AI alone cannot replace a human teacher. The role of a teacher goes beyond providing academic knowledge. They hold a critical social and emotional role in students' lives. Emotional intelligence is something that AI has not mastered yet.

Furthermore, there are also concerns about data privacy, security, and the potential socio-economic consequences of AI replacing human jobs.

In conclusion, while AI technologies have the potential to revolutionize education, they will need to work alongside teachers to effectively support their work and enhance learning experiences.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[McMike]

Per Toms opening post, I just put the question of whether schools should embrace AI into ChatGPT. It spit this out in 29 seconds.


As an AI language model, I do not have personal opinions, but I can provide some points to consider.

There is a growing trend to incorporate AI into educational processes. AI technologies can help teachers to automate repetitive tasks such as grading, streamlining lesson planning, provide personalized learning experiences, and detecting struggling students. AI has the ability to analyze data in real-time to help teachers make decisions and create a more efficient classroom environment.

Moreover, AI can open up new ways of learning, as adaptive learning systems can help identify areas where students need further help. AI-powered educational tools can create interactive, gamified learning experiences. They can also provide analytical insights to both teachers and students in terms of performance and progress, enabling personalized, tailored, and effective feedback.

However, it is important to note that AI alone cannot replace a human teacher. The role of a teacher goes beyond providing academic knowledge. They hold a critical social and emotional role in students' lives. Emotional intelligence is something that AI has not mastered yet.

Furthermore, there are also concerns about data privacy, security, and the potential socio-economic consequences of AI replacing human jobs.

In conclusion, while AI technologies have the potential to revolutionize education, they will need to work alongside teachers to effectively support their work and enhance learning experiences.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

Out of all the teachers I had, I think 2 or 3 were worth anything. So, for the 20% of teachers that are any good, you're probably right . . . for another 5-10 years. After that . . .

[McMike]

It is disruptive. It will cause change.

But, I liken it to mass production versus boutique products. AI is akin to Budweiser or a Bayliner. And, just as despite those two mass produced things, craft beer and nicer boats continue to thrive in their niche, human-created words ( music, art, thought, reports, debate, etc) will continue to exist, and likely cost more and be positioned as superior and more desirable. ( But there will be less of it.)

I think we need not waste time figuring out how to beat or slow down AI. Its coming. We would be better served seeking what it is we can do next, rather than lamenting what is being done for us. Evolve, people. The future is now.

Kevin



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

You have no imagination. It's not long until to AI we are like chimps are to us. We don't understand how it does what it does now, how do you expect that your children won't be serving AI?

[Breakaway]

Out of all the teachers I had, I think 2 or 3 were worth anything. So, for the 20% of teachers that are any good, you're probably right . . . for another 5-10 years. After that . . .

Mike--I did not write that. AI did. In 29 seconds.

Kevin

[McMike]

Mike--I did not write that. AI did. In 29 seconds.

Kevin

No sh17?! Misunderstood your 1st sentence.

So a bit of advice. Leave it alone.

[Breakaway]

No sh17?! Misunderstood your 1st sentence.

So a bit of advice. Leave it alone.

I just edited the post, putting the AI response in quotes, in an attempt at clarity.

Kevin

[McMike]

I just edited the post, putting the AI response in quotes, in an attempt at clarity.

Kevin

I should have read more carefully, I was fooled by my haste. And that's how easy it is.

[Mrleft88]

I understand the concern,and to an extent I share it.I do recall similar sentiments being expressed about numeracy when electronic calculators became widely available.I also remember how thankful some people were to be relieved of some of the tedium that had bogged them down as they did the calculations the old way.I suppose the essence of the matter is to educate people to the point where they attain competence before letting them explore the technological alternative.

Similar sentiments could be applied to electric tools.As an aside,when was the last time a professional woodworker actually sharpened his own saw?The world moves on and some of the old skills die out,which suggests that some of the useful ones need to be kept alive in some way.

Not band saw or table saw blades, but as of a few years ago, I sharpened my own handsaw blades by hand every time they needed sharpening. It's not difficult once you learn a few tricks, and it's faster and less expensive than sending them out, and, I might add, you get a much better job, doing it yourself, than sending it out.

[WI-Tom]

Interesting to see this thread resurface. ChatGPT use has been endemic among students this year at my school--and most/all other schools, I'd bet.

Students use it to do "research"--i.e. to read a 2-paragraph answer to a poorly-thought-out question (e.g. "Why did the Weimar Republic fail?") and think they are learning. To write any writing assignments they are given in English classes. To prepare speeches for Model United Nations debates. Etc. etc. ad infinitum. To "rephrase" their own writing (i.e. to completely rewrite their papers, which they then present as their own work).

If you have samples of student work as a baseline--samples which, in the age of AI, must probably come from pen-and-paper writing completed in class, under a teacher's supervision, with no devices present--it's pretty easy to spot AI work by comparing it to the earlier sample. Another approach is to plug an AI-suspect text into ChatGPT and ask "Is it more likely this text was written by AI, or by an 8th grade student whose first language is Polish?"--ChatGPT won't give a definitive answer, noting that there are always students with advanced writing skills, but it will go on to say whether it is more likely an AI-generated text.

This is going to be "hugely disruptive"--except, "disruptive" is used in the tech world as a value-neutral statement meaning it's going to create the need for massive changes. And AI is not value-neutral. Not even close.

What "disruptive" actually means in this context is something more like this:

The ability of AI chatbots to produce original text is going to lead to a drastic reduction in the perceived value of a person's ability to write well--why should I learn to write when Chat GPT can write for me? And it will, logically, diminish people's ability to write well, as a result of that reduction in perceived value. Just as relying GPS has led to a significant reduction in people's spatial/directional ability (see THIS ARTICLE TO LEARN MORE), an AI bot that writes text is going to cause a significant reduction in people's ability to write text for themselves. "Use it or lose it" is the basic rule of the human brain, which evolves and reshapes itself constantly. So we will raise a generation that does not value the ability to write well, and does not develop the ability to write well.

One could argue that this is, in fact, perfectly value-neutral. That old technologies get discarded all the time as new technologies arrive on scene. That this is precisely what happened when the written word replaced oral cultures, and again when the printed word replaced the hand-written text.

But those comparisons are, in a sense, inapt. Because what is really at stake here is not just the ability to write well. It's entirely possible that the world could remain perfectly functional even if every bit of text created were written by chatbots. Just as the world remains functional as more and more people rely on GPS.

But by offloading these skills--writing, navigating--to a digital bot, what we are really doing is giving up our human agency. We are in a big damn hurry to throw it away. And that is why AI is not "value-neutral." AI is a device that is, by design, intended to (or has the easily foreseeable side effect that does it) make human beings less able to do things for themselves. To make them less self-reliant, less independent. To remove the "burden" of learning and using a complex and demanding skill.

We'd do well to ask ourselves:

What if the "burden" of learning and using complex and demanding skills is an important part of what makes us happy? Makes us human?

How satisfying is it, really, to live in a world in which we no longer need to do anything for ourselves?

How willing are we to accept a life filled with passive entertainment (created by AI, of course: "Hey, ChatGPT--I want to read a new Sherlock Holmes novel, but one written in the style of Hemingway, not Doyle"; "Hey, ChatGPT, I want a playlist of grunge-inspired bands using bluegrass-style vocals"; or whatever), giving up the "burden" of entertaining ourselves?

A device whose major effect will be a reduction in human agency and independence, which will literally rewire our brains to make us less able to do things, is emphatically not "value-neutral." AI represents, among all the other complications it brings (loss of jobs is a big one; causing humans with jobs to be treated more and more like robots themselves is an even bigger one--the devaluation of human labor), a massive dumbing down of the human brain on a scale never seen before.

I'm so glad I was born into a world not yet dominated by digital technology and computational thinking. I didn't get my first email account until I was 23. I didn't get my first smart phone (which by its very ubiquity makes it perhaps the most dangerous device yet) until 2022. Those who have been born into all this will maybe never be able to perceive the changes this kind of technology creates, and make objective thoughtful judgments about whether those changes have been for the better or not. They will simply believe it's all "value-neutral" even as it destroys much of what I love in life--and which they may never get a chance to learn to love for themselves.

They will think their lives are richer, but they will instead be poorer. Much poorer. I don't envy them.

Tom

[WszystekPoTrochu]

Humans willfully stripping themselves of humanity for convenience is the most human thing, ain't it

[P.I. Stazzer-Newt]

This is, by quite some distance, the best thought through comment on the trajectory of A.I. that I've seen