4 ms·
People have been afraid of the public getting dumber since the start of mass book printing and has happened with every following new technology since then.
by lordofgibbons 1y ago
People have been afraid of the public getting dumber since the start of mass book printing and has happened with every following new technology since then.
- hk__2 1y ago"In the age of endless books, we risk outsourcing our thinking. Instead of grappling with ideas ourselves, we just regurgitate what we read. Books should be fuel, not crutches—read less, think more." Or even: "In the age of cave paintings, we risk outsourcing our memory. Instead of remembering or telling stories, we just slap them on walls. Art should be expression, not escape—paint less, live more."
- fvdessen 1y agoUnfortunately research shows that nowadays we're actually getting dumber, literacy rates are plummeting in developed countries. [1] https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2024/12/adult-skills-in-literacy-and-numeracy-declining-or-stagnating-in-most-oecd-countries.html https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2024/12/ad...
- bgwalter 1y agoThe IQ in the US started declining since the start of the Internet: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-iq-scores-decline-reverse-flynn-effect/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-... "Leading up to the 1990s, IQ scores were consistently going up, but in recent years, that trend seems to have flipped. The reasons for both the increase and the decline are sill [sic!] very much up for debate." The Internet is relatively benign compared to cribbing directly from an AI. At least you still read articles, RFCs, search for books etc.
- jvanderbot 1y agoAs someone who grew up reading encyclopedias, LLMs are the most interesting invention ever. If Wikipedia had released the first chat AI we'd be heralding a new age of knowledge and democratic access and human achievement. It just so happens unimaginative programmers built the first iteration so they decided to automate their own jobs. And here we are, programmers, worrying about the dangers of it all not one bit aware of the irony.
- cess11 1y agoAs someone who grew up reading encyclopedias, I find LLM:s profoundly hard to find a use for besides crude translations of mainly formal documents and severely unreliable transcriptions. I like structured information and LLM:s output deliberately unstructured data that I then have to vet and sift out and structure information from. Sure, they can fake structure to some extent, I sometimes get XML or JSON that I want, but it's not really either of those and also common that they inject subtle, runny shit into the output that take longer to clean out than it would have to write a scraper against some structured data source. I get that some people don't like reading documentation or talking to other people as much as having a fake conversation, or that their editors now suggest longer additions to their code, but for me it's like hanging out with my kids except the LLM is absolutely inhuman, disgustingly subservient and doesn't learn. I much prefer having interns and other juniors around that will also take time to correct but actually learn and grow from it. As search engines I dislike them. When I ask for a subset of some data I want to be sure that the result is exhaustive without having to beg for it or make threats. Index and pattern matching can be understood, and come with guarantees that I don't just get some average or fleeting subset of a subset. If it's structured I can easily add another interactive filter that renders immediately. They're also too slow for the kind of non-exhaustive text search you might use e.g. Manticore or some vector database for, things like product recommendations where you only want fifteen results and it's fine if they're a little wonky.
- qntmfred 1y agoPlato wrote in Phaedrus This invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.
- nottorp 1y agoThat’s okay, we’re moving to post reading :)
- dockercompost 1y agoWhat did you say?
- nottorp 1y agoI'll have an AI make a tiktok video to summarize my post just for you!
- dockercompost 1y agoThanks! I'll ask NotebookLM to make a podcast out of it!
- Aeolun 1y agoI’m inclined to believe he was right? There’s other benefits to writing (and the act of writing) that weren’t well understood at the time though.
- whatnow37373 1y agoHe was not wrong. We forget stuff all the time and in huge quantities. I can't even remember my own phone number half of the time. Those guys could recite substantial portions of the Homeric epics. It's just that there is more to intelligence than rote memorization. That's the good news. The bad news is that this amorphous "more" was "critical thinking" and we are starting to outsource it.
- Aeolun 1y agoWe’ve probably compensated by ease of information dissemination. We’ve pretty much reached the peak of that now, so the only thing we can do is dumb shit down further? Maybe someone can write one of those AI apocalypse novels in which the AI doesn’t go off the rails at all but is instead integrated into the humans such that they become living drones anyhow.
- netdevphoenix 1y agoPrevious technologies did lessen us in some way: agricultural and industrial revolution did lower the physical requirements to do most jobs. Writing tech lower the human memory requirements for knowledge acquisition. While we increased our output as a result of these technologies we have afforded ourselves the privilege of being physically weaker and having shorter memories as outsource that to the new technology of the day. Fast forward to 202x, and the thing being outsourced to LLMs is our ability to think (to a certain extent). We should expect on average to see a decline in the ability to think critically by your average citizen.