Did you read the article? That’s not the argument. At all.
Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid
Libra@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
Oh lawd, another ‘new technology xyz is making us dumb!’ Yeah we’ve only been saying that since the invention of writing, I’m sure it’s definitely true this time.
LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
everett@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
The article literally addesses this, citing sources.
bassomitron@lemmy.world 5 days ago
You’re being downvoted, but it’s true. Will it further enable lazy/dumb people to continue being lazy/dumb? Absolutely. But summarizing notes, generating boilerplate emails or script blocks, etc. was never deep, rigorous thinking to begin with. People literally said the same thing about handheld calculators, word processors, etc. Will some methods/techniques become esoteric as more and more mundane tasks are automated away? Almost certainly. Is that inherently a bad thing? Not in the majority of cases, in my opinion.
And before anyone chimes in with students abusing this tech and thus not becoming properly educated: All this means, is that various methods for gauging whether a student has achieved the baseline in any given subject will need to be implemented, e.g. proctored hand-written exams, homework structured in such a way that AI cannot easily do it, etc.
AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 5 days ago
I think you are underestimating that some skills, like reading comprehension, deliberate communication and reasoning skills, can only be acquired and honed by actually doing very tedious work, that can at times feel braindead and inefficient. Offloading that on something else (that is essentially out of your control, too), and making that a skill that is more and more a fringe “enthusiast” one, has more implications, than losing the skill to patch up your own clothing or calculating things in your head. Understanding and processing information and communicating it to yourself and others is a more essential skill than calculating by hand.
I think the way the article compares it with walking to a grocery store vs. using a car to do even just 3 minutes of driving is pretty fitting. By only thinking about efficiency, one is in risk of losing sight of the additional effects actually doing tedious stuff has. This also highlights, that this is not simply about the technology, but also about the context in which it is used - but technology also dialectically influences that very context. While LLMs and other generative AIs have their place, where they are useful and beneficial, it is hard to untangle those from genuinely dehumanising uses. Especially in a system, in which dehumanisation and efficiency-above-contemplation are already incentivised. As an anecdote: A few weeks ago, I saw someone in an online debate openly stating, they use AI to have their arguments written, because it makes them “win” the debate more often - making winning with the lowest invested effort the goal of arguments, instead of processing and developing your own viewpoint along counterarguments, clearly a problem of ideology as it structures our understanding of ourselves in the world (and possibly just a troll, of course) - but a problem, that can be exacerbated by the technology.
Assuming AI will just be like the past examples of technology scepticism seems like a logical fallacy to me. It’s more than just letting numbers be calculated, it is giving up your own understanding of information you process and how you communicate it on a more essential level. That, and as the article points out with the studies it quotes - technology that changes how we interface with information has already changed more fundamental things about our thought processes and memory retention. Just because the world hasn’t ended does not mean, that it did not have an effect.
I also think it’s a bit presumptuous to just say “it’s true” with your own intuition being the source. You are also qualifying that there are “lazy/dumb” people as an essentialist statement, when laziness and stupidity aren’t simply essentialist attributes, but manifesting as a consequence of systematic influences in life and as behaviours then adding into the system - including learning and practising skills, such as the ones you mention as not being a “bad thing” for them to become more esoteric (so: essentially lost).
To highlight how essentialism is in my opinion fallacious here, an example that uses a hyperbolic situation to highlight the underlying principle: Imagine saying there should be a totally unregulated market for highly addictive drugs, arguing that “only addicts” would be in danger of being negatively affected, ignoring that addiction is not something simply inherent in a person, but grows out of their circumstances, and such a market would add more incentives to create more addicts into the system. In a similar way, people aren’t simply lazy or stupid intrinsically, they are acting lazily and stupid due to more complex, potentially self-reinforcing dynamics.
You focus on deliberately unpleasant examples, that seem like a no-brainer to be good to skip. I see no indication of LLMs being exclusively used for those, and I also see no reason to assume that only “deep, rigorous thinking” is necessary to keep up the ability to process and communicate information properly. It’s like saying that practice drawings aren’t high art, so skipping them is good, when you simply can’t produce high art without, often tedious, practising.
Highlighting the problem in students cheating to not be “properly educated” misses an important point, IMO - the real problem is a potential shift in culture, of what it even means to be “properly educated”. Along the same dynamic leading to arguing, that school should teach children only how to work, earn and properly manage money, instead of more broadly understanding the world and themselves within it, the real risk is in saying, that certain skills won’t be necessary for that goal, so it’s more efficient to not teach them at all. AI has the potential to move culture more into that direction, and move the definitions of what “properly educated” means. And that in turn poses a challenge to us and how we want to manifest ourselves as human beings in this world.
Also, there is quite a bit of hand-waving in “homework structured in such a way that AI cannot easily do it, etc.” - in the worst case, it’d give students something to do, just to make them do something, because exercises that would actually teach e.g. reading comprehension, would be too easy to be done by AI.
IsaamoonKHGDT_6143@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Most of the time technology does not cause a radical change in society except in some cases.
The system eventually adapts to new technology only if that technology can be replicated by anyone, and other problems suddenly appear that the system can’t solve at the same time. It’s just another dark age for humanity, and then it recovers and moves on.
MCasq_qsaCJ_234@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
This has happened with every generation when a new technology changes our environment, and our way of defending ourselves is to reject it or exaggerate its flaws.
Because throughout history, many tools have existed, but over time they have fallen into disuse because too many people and/or there is a faster method that people use. But you can use that old tool.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
This has also happened 100 times correctly to reject actually bad new technologies for every time it has been applied to the wrong technology that turned out to be actually useful.
MCasq_qsaCJ_234@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Are you referring to projects that conceptualize something, but in the end it doesn’t come to fruition because it’s not possible due to lack of funding, lack of interest, it’s impossible, or there’s no technology required to complete it?
Libra@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
People said it about fucking writing; ‘If you don’t remember all this stuff yourself to pass it on you will be bad at remembering!’ No you won’t, you will just have more space to remember other more important shit.
Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf 5 days ago
Social media lead to things like maga and the ruse of Nazis in Europe. It’s not necessarily tech itself that is making us dumb, it’s reeling people in through simplicity, then making them addicted to it and ultimately exploiting this.
Libra@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
No, fear and hatred lead to things like MAGA and the rise of Nazis. Social media makes it easier to fearmonger and spread hatred, no doubt, but it is by no means the cause of those things.
Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf 4 days ago
It definitely is the enabler though. Without social media, propaganda could never have spread as fast. And it also brought together every village idiot. I know of simpleminded people who never uttered a racist word in their lives before. Now all they talk about is how the AfD will save Germany from the brown people. This is literally brainwashing. So I stand by my comment that social media is the cause of all this.
Libra@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
For sure, I even said so.
Social media makes it easier to fearmonger and spread hatred, no doubt
I hate to break it to you though; I grew up during the Cold War and propaganda was literally everywhere before the invention of the internet. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Red Scare?
rbamgnxl5@lemm.ee 5 days ago
Yeah, such pieces are easy clicks.
How about this: should we go back to handwriting everything so we use our brains more, since the article states that it takes more brainpower to write than it does to type? Will this actually make us better or just make us have to engage in cognitive toil and fatigue ourselves performing menial tasks?
How is a society ever to improve if we do not leave behind the ways of the past? Humans cannot achieve certain things without the use of technology. LLMs are yet another tool. When abused any tool can become a weapon or a means to hurt ones self.
The goal is to reduce the amount of time spent on tasks that are not useful. Imagine if the human race never had to do dishes ever again. Imagine how that would create so much opportunity to focus on more important things. The important part is to actually focus on more important things.
At least in the US, society has transformed into a consumption-oriented model. We buy crap constantly, shop endlessly, watch shows, movies and listen to music and podcasts without end. How much of your day is spent creating something? Writing something? Building something? How much time do you spend seeking gratification?
We have been told that consumption is good and it works because consumption is indulgence whereas production is work. Until this paradigm changes, people will use ai in ways that are counterproductive rather than for their own self improvement or the improvement of society at large.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Imagine if the human race never had to do dishes ever again. Imagine how that would create so much opportunity to focus on more important things.
What are the most important things? Our dishwasher broke a few years ago. I anticipated frustration at the extra pressure on my evenings and having to waste time on dishes. But I immediately found washing the dishes to be a surprising improvement in quality of life. It opened up a space to focus on something very simple, to let my mind clear from other things, to pay attention to being careful with my handling of fragile things, and to feel connected to the material contents of my kitchen. It also felt good to see the whole meal process through using my own hands from start to end. My enjoyment of the evenings improved significantly, and I’d look forward to pausing and washing the dishes.
I had expected frustration at the “waste” of time, but I found a valuable pause in the rhythm of the day, and a few calm minutes when there was no point in worrying about anything else. Sometimes I am less purist about it and I listen to an audiobook while I wash up, and this has exposed me to books I would not have sat down and read because I would have felt like I had to keep rushing.
The same happened when my bicycle broke irreparably. A 10 minute cycle ride to work became a 30 minute walk. I found this to be a richer experience than cycling, and became intimately familiar with the neighbourhood in a way I had never been while zipping through it on the bike. The walk was a meditative experience of doing something simple for half an hour before work and half an hour afterwards. I would try different routes, going by the road where people would smile and say hello, or by the river to enjoy the sound of the water. My mind really perked up and I found myself becoming creative with photography and writing, and enjoying all kinds of sights, sounds and smells, plus just the pleasure of feeling my body settle into walking. My body felt better.
I would have thought walking was time I could have spent on more important things. Turned out walking was the entryway to some of the most important things. We seldom make a change that’s pure gain with no loss. Sometimes the losses are subtle but important. Sometimes our ideas of “more important things” are the source of much frustration and unhappiness.
Libra@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
Our dishwasher broke a few years ago.
This is a bad example because going from using a dishwasher to washing dishes is not a big leap in effort required. I doubt many of the people who get to do intellectual work in offices instead of doing back-breaking labor all day on a farm because of technology would agree that going back to that would improve their quality of life. Some of them would certainly find that to be a ‘richer experience’ too, if not for the lack of healthcare and air conditioning.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Yes, agreed, these are relatively minor levels of inconvenience. But I’m not judging anyone for using tech, just observing that it isn’t always so obvious that it’s just better to use it than not.
Kellenved@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
These words are all very pretty but let me ask you this: do you have kids?
floofloof@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Yep, three of them.
Libra@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
Did you get the impression from my comment that I was agreeing with the article? Because I’m very not, hence the ‘It’ll definitely be true this time’ which carries an implied ‘It wasn’t true any of those other times’, but the ‘definitely’ part is sarcasm. I have argued elsewhere in the post that all of this ‘xyz is making us dumb!’ shit is bunk.
R00bot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
You don’t think it’s possible that offloading thought to AI could make you worse at thinking? Has been the case with technology in the past, such as calculators making us worse at math (in our heads or on paper), but this time the thing you’re losing practice in is… thought. This technology is different because it’s aiming to automate thought itself.
Libra@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
Yeah, the people who were used to the oral tradition said the same thing about writing stuff down, ‘If you don’t remember all of this stuff yourself you’ll be bad at remembering!’, etc. But this is what humans do, what humans are: we evolved to make tools, we use the tools to simplify the things in our life so we can spend more time working on (and thinking about - or do you sincerely think people will just stop thinking altogether?) the shit we care about. Offloading mental labor likewise lets us focus our mental capacities on deeper, more important, more profound stuff. This is how human society, which requires specialization and division of labor at every level to function, works.
I’m old enough to remember when people started saying the same thing about the internet. Well I’ve been on the internet from pretty much the first moment it was even slightly publicly available (around 1992) and have been what is now called ‘terminally online’ ever since. If the internet is making us dumb I am the best possible candidate you could have to test that theory, but you know what I do when I’m not remembering phone numbers and handwriting everything and looking shit up in paper encyclopedias at the library? I’m reading and thinking about science, philosophy, religion, etc. That capacity didn’t go away, it just got turned to another purpose.
PunnyName@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Ib this day and age, no, we aren’t offloading for deeper shit. We aren’t getting that extra time to chill and vibe like 50s sci-fi write about.
We’re doing it because there is now a greater demand for our time and attention. From work mostly, but also family and friends (if we’re lucky enough to have those), to various forms of entertainment (which we usually use as a distraction from IRL shit like work).
Libra@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
This seems like a capitalism problem, not a technology problem. That endless drive to greater productivity so that others can extract the bulk of the value thereof for their own benefit instead of the benefit of everyone is a big part of what’s eating up the purported leisure-time. But also that’s a choice you can make: I choose to spend my spare mental capacity learning about how the world works and engaging with ideas about how it ought to work. If people choose to spend that extra capacity doom-scrolling social media and keeping up with the virtual Joneses or whatever then that’s on them, but I’m not here to judge, I do that sometimes too. Life takes it out of you, sometimes you just need some low-effort destressing. But the point stands: offloading labor (mental or otherwise) to technology and then turning that time/energy/etc to stuff that’s more important is just how humans work.
R00bot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
The people who were used to the oral tradition were right. Memorising things is good for your memory. No, I don’t think people will stop thinking altogether (please don’t be reductive like this lmao), just as people didn’t stop remembering things. But people did get worse at remembering things. Just as people might get worse at applying critical thinking if they continually offload those processes to AI. We know that using tools makes us worse at whatever the tool automates, because without practice you become worse at things. This just hasn’t really been a problem before as the tools generally make those things obselete.
Libra@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
Except people didn’t stop memorizing things. I went to school in the 1970s - unarguably a long-ass time after we stopped using the oral tradition as the primary method to transmit culture) and I was memorizing shit left and right. I still remember those multiplication tables, ‘in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue’, etc 40-odd years later.
Sorry, I thought it was pretty clear that I was expressing skepticism at the idea that anyone actually thought this.
If you have evidence that suggests that people got worse at remembering things between, say, ancient Greece and the Industrial Revolution I’d love to see it.
Likewise if you have evidence that people stopped thinking with the invention of books, the calculator, computers, the internet, etc, don’t be shy about it.
You assume that offloading some mental processes to AI means we will stop practicing them. I argue that we’ll just use the capabilities we have for other things. I use ChatGPT to help me worldbuild, structure my writing projects, come up with thematically-consistent names, etc, for example, but it’s not writing for me and I still come up with names and such all the time.