Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid

WaitThisIsntReddit@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• Thorry84@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  And for the most part this is true. People who don’t do little calculation puzzles for fun often have trouble with basic arithmetic without getting a calculator (or likely the calculator app on the phone). I know when I’m doing something like wood working and I need to add and subtract some measurements, I use a calculator. I could do it without, but chances are I would make a simple mistake and mess up my work. It’s like a muscle, if you use it, it will become stronger. If you don’t use it, it becomes weaker.

  However there is a huge difference between using a calculator for basic arithmetic and using AI. For one thing, the calculator doesn’t tell you what the sums are. It just tells you the result. You still need to understand each step, in order to enter it. So while you lose some mental capacity in doing the sums, you won’t lose the understanding of the concepts involved. Second of all, it is a highly specific tool, which does one thing and does it well. So the impact will always be limited to that part and it’s debatable if that part is useful or not. When learning maths I think it’s important to be able to do them without a calculator, to gain a better understanding. But as an adult once you grasp the basic concepts, I think it’s perfectly fine not to be able to do it without a calculator.

  For AI it’s a bit different, it’s a very general tool which deals with all aspects of every day stuff. It also goes much further than being a simple tool. You can give it broad instructions and it will fill in the blanks on its own. It even goes so far as to introduce and teach new topics entirely, where the only thing a person knows is what the AI told them. This erodes basic thinking skills, like how does this fit into my world view, is this thing true or false and in what way?

  Again the same concept applies, where the brain is a muscle which needs to be given a workout. When it comes to a calculator, the brain isn’t exercising the arithmetic part. When it comes to AI it involves almost all of our brain.

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