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Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?
- chrisjj 1y ago> an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. A printed sign can do the same. Try harder, A"I".
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoYes but… As an example In some cities, the signs specifying whether parking is allowed can be impossible to decipher. Sometimes feels like an AI would be needed to tell you “can I park this particular vehicle here right now, and for how long?” Not that I’d trust an AI to get it right - but people already don’t.
- chrisjj 1y ago> the signs specifying whether parking is allowed can be impossible to decipher. In UK, works as designed... to maximise penalty earnings.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoI get your point, but I confess I have sometimes had to pause for some time to decide if I was holding a recyclable, a compostable or landfill — looking at the little pictures in fact, hoping I can find the thing I am holding. Yeah, but otherwise, the whole MIT Media Lab thing is increasingly tasting a little bitter, not the glamorous, enviable place it seemed like in decades past. Rather than looking for the next internet-connected wearable, for some reason, increasingly, I keep thinking about Bruce Dern's character in the film Silent Running.
- doix 1y agoIt's much worse in South Korea, I think there were at least 5 different bins with different signs. Most things you bought had a label on them and you could try to match the letters to what was on the bin. Except it wasn't perfectly matched up, and we didn't have some bins with signs that matched up with whatever was written on the package. I eventually gave up and only ate to avoid having to deal with it.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoUntil you realize there are more objects that people aren't able to sort correctly, than there are space on signs to put next to the bins.
- chrisjj 1y agoRecycling labels are a thing.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoNot everything people throw has those labels on them, now what?
- chrisjj 1y agoMIT switches to labelled cups, is what.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoSuper helpful and generalized solution, good job.
- raincole 1y agoIf figuring out which used item belongs to which category is easy, it means your community/city/state/country is doing recycling wrong.
- rsynnott 1y agoThis is one place where I think our friends the magic robots might actually be useful (though it's more CV than LLM stuff); people are really _amazingly_ bad at this, and will happily ignore a printed sign, and even quite low accuracy would probably be better than what happens now, which isn't that far off random.
- chrisjj 1y ago> Gerlich recently conducted a study, involving 666 people of various ages, and found those who used AI more frequently scored lower on critical thinking. (As he notes, to date his work only provides evidence for a correlation between the two: it’s possible that people with lower critical thinking abilities are more likely to trust AI, for example.) Key point. The top use case for "Artificial Intelligence" is lack of natural intelligence. PS Cute choice of sample size.
- keybored 1y agoThere are many on HN that claim that only programmers that are already really good can leverage AI. And then the sky’s the limit basically. Maybe both are correct because most people are not using AI to generate their next SAAS passive income whatever.
- chrisjj 1y ago> There are many on HN that claim that only programmers that are already really good can leverage AI. So all we need is a ban on every other programmer's employment of it. I'll wait :)
- bamboozled 1y agoIt's initially true but I think there is a human tendency to outsource, that's where the dragons lie.
- fuzzfactor 1y agoMore than just both can be correct. >top use case for "Artificial Intelligence" is lack of natural intelligence. Also true if you think about a situation where there is just not enough natural intelligence to accomplish something within its scope. Maybe there never was enough natural intelligence for something or other, or maybe not enough any more. It could be a lot more acceptable to settle for artificial in those cases more so than average, especially if there is a dire need, But first you have to admit the dire lack of natural intelligence :\
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- softwaredoug 1y agoI find when I do a lot of AI coding, or any "blocking" task with AI, I inevitably end up scrolling social media. And I feel dumber. I'm left wondering whether I should have just hand-coded what I was doing a bit slower, but kept my attention focused on the task
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoYou could do other work while the AI does one task :) That’ll likely degenerate into “I want my AI to do dishes and laundry so I can code, not code so I can do my dishes and laundry”
- softwaredoug 1y agoThat's even worse, because I'm task switching between two intensive tasks
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoSorry no, nothing is worse than doomscrolling social media.
- squigz 1y agoChecking Facebook while you have a few minutes available isn't the worst thing in the world. Calm down.
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoWait, people still use Facebook? :)
- brazukadev 1y agono, but zuckerberg has a fake HN profiles.
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- zvmaz 1y agoInsulting title. Sorry, but no thanks.
- DavidPiper 1y agoGenuine question: What do you find insulting about the title? While it's not presenting anything new, the article does cover a number of important talking points in an accessible way.
- zvmaz 1y ago> What do you find insulting about the title? The title itself. Without reading the article, I can sense the "we are living in a stupid age" arrogant trope characteristic of the "winning" social classes.
- DavidPiper 1y agoThat's an interesting assumption, thank you for clarifying. I do know a few people who walk through the world with the "everyone else is an idiot" mindset. They're a total pain in the ass and neither of them are particularly successful or particularly happy, irrespective of their (very different) notional social class. For my part, I look at a title like that and immediately think of the number of hours I've spent doomscrolling, trying to find value in cryptocurrencies, thinking about what impact AI has been having on education, trying to figure out where my life took its various difficult turns... And I see it more as a criticism of the systems we've built (primarily big tech, but also the industrial complex in general) to create a world where the answer might be yes.
- zkmon 1y agoThe article sounds a cliche. The progression was always happening, nothing sudden. Just like the continuous movement of tectonic plates through the earth quakes. When tension between the plates reach a level, rupture happens. But it is not the rupture causing the tectonic movement. It is the opposite. Things like electricity, computers, internet, smartphones and AI are those earthquakes caused by the tectonic movement towards dominance of the machine. The goal of human progress was to make everything easier. Tools came up to augment human abilities, both physical and mental, so that humans can free themselves from all hard work of physical labor and thinking. We do gym and sports as the body needs some fake activity to fool it into believing that we still need all that muscle strength. We might get some gym and sports for the mind too to give it some fake activity. Remember, the goal is to preserve ourselves as physical beings while not really doing any hard work.
- Froztnova 1y ago> We might get some gym and sports for the mind too to give it some fake activity. The Factorio devs are ahead of the curve on that front I guess.
- raincole 1y agoI know it might be an offensive way to put it, but I honestly believe if AI ends up making people no longer need to use their brains as much, it's a great thing. Think about it: do we rather to live in a world where heavy labor is a necessity to make a living, or a world where we go to gym to maintain our physique? If mental labor isn't (as) necessary and people just play Scrabble or build weird Rude Goldberg machines in Minecraft to keep their minds somewhat fit, is this future really that bleak?
- ofrzeta 1y agoI'd say it is a constant fight against laziness. Sure it is convenient to drive everywhere with a car but at some point you might understand that it makes more sense to walk somewhere once in a while or regularly. Sure, escalators are convenient but better take the stairs so you don't need to go to the gym and save some money. If you ask me should all do more physical labour and the same goes for the mental labor. If we give that up as well the future is really bleak, to answer your question.
- terminalshort 1y agoJudging by the comments on any HN post that has to do with finance, yes.
- jmclnx 1y agoI do not think so when compared to past ages. The only difference now is we get to see "stupid" due to the internet. In the past, the majority of people who could be heard by the "masses" tended to be educated and wealthy. Now, everyone gets a voice. But seems the article is more about AI and how it may make us stupider. Which I have no opinion on.
- tsoukase 1y agoUntil recently every technological advancement replaced manual work, like in agriculture, transportation, industry. Even the tiniest car amenity, like electric windows, hydraulic breaks or touch screen entertainment is aiming to replace a limb movement. With AI it is the first time the tech offloads directly cognitive tasks, leading inevitably to mental atrophy. The hopeful scenario is to repurpose the brain for new activities and not rotting, like replacing labor work gives the opportunity for sports and not getting fat.
- voxleone 1y agoAre we living in a golden age of stupidity? hat depends on what we mean by "stupidity." If we mean: Information overload, not matched with critical thinking; short attention spans, driven by algorithmic content; decline in deep reading, writing, and manual creativity …then yes. There’s a legitimate case that we’re in a period of widespread mental passivity rather than active curiosity. Of course this isn’t a new phenomenon. Every generation feels the next is losing touch with something essential. What is different today is the scale and speed of digital influence.
- tim333 1y agoThe article is along the lines of students not being as good because they slack off and use chatgpt, but people working together with chatgpt might produce smarter results than people before? It's like calculators didn't bring a golden age of bad maths. Instead people mostly stopped learning long division and used the calculator instead but the end result was ok.
- Rochus 1y agoIf ChatGPT generated the text, participants weren't encoding it into memory through the cognitive processes normally involved in writing; they were essentially passive recipients of AI output. Isn't it a trivial finding then, that participants could barely recall a text they didn't write? Also, the study is small (54 participants), not peer-reviewed, and conflates two different issues: the cognitive effort during task completion versus memory retention afterwards. Doesn't the decline of IQ rather correlate with smartphone ubiquity, particularly after 2010, and the steepest declines appear in 18-22 year-olds—the heaviest smartphone users? Multiple studies link smartphone addiction specifically to reduced cognitive abilities, not technology broadly.
- gizzlon 1y ago> The fundamental issue, Kosmyna says, is that as soon as a technology becomes available that makes our lives easier, we’re evolutionarily primed to use it. > “Our brains love shortcuts, it’s in our nature. But your brain needs friction to learn. It needs to have a challenge.” "Our brains needs friction to learn" is a good way of summarizing the fundamental problem. Yes, shortcuts can be great, but they also obviously stop you from actually learning. The question then becomes: Is that a bad thing? Or is the net results positive? My guess is that "it depends" on the tasks and the missed learning. But losing things like critical thinking, the ability to learn and concentrate could be catastrophic for society and bad for individuals. And maybe we're already seeing the problems this creates in society.
- justlikereddit 1y agoThe Guardian raises tabloid press to a new level of bad taste, posing a serious faced question about stupidity and immediately answers it by having their site drop a blocking full screen emotionally loaded ad-request for my money in the sloppiest way possible. I will assume the content it blocked was AI generated bait and will find a better article to read.