Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid

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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.

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