Comment on Unified Theory of American Reality
Capricorn_Geriatric@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoliteracy crash course…
I love how today literacy isn’t even a thing. No one talks aboit teaching things (in the EU, at least). It’s all about financial literacy, digital literacy, social media literacy, hell, even (and bear with me here) AI literacy. Yes, really. There’s prpbably 800 of these literacies floating around.
Whoever thought of this is an idiot. The word literacy means one thing: the ability to read and write (and understand what you read/wrote). Nothing more, nothing less.
It isn’t just stupid, it’s also malicious. Kids all over the globe are suffering from poor literacy, and instead of fixing the problem you quite literally shift the goalposts.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
When AI services enshittify by raising their price barriers, or when just… infrastructure generally collapses to a serious degree…
Much of Gen Z and A, either reliant of or just raised on using AI to do their thinking and work for them…
They will basically go feral, they won’t be able to get their fix, a part of their ‘brain’ will have been ‘removed’, and they will literally be dysfunctional.
And I shouldn’t just single out younger people, though its more prevalent and severe with them, there are certainly many millenials and older who’ve also just given up good chunks of their thinking abilities to AI, which is largely a proprietary service that go undergo a price hike just like Xbox or Netflix.
… I used to think the ending to DX Human Revolution was a tropey cop out, that broke from basically the rest of the game’s narrative and gameplay themes, just a zombie apocalypse at the end of your spy thriller.
Now I realize that was the point, maybe still a bit hamfisted or over the top, but… yep, yep, people become reliant on things they aren’t actually 8n control of for just basic day to day living, and then you actually break that, take it away from them?
Yep, zombie apocalypse is not too far off from what would actually play out.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Bro what are you smoking. Gen-Z is getting up their 30s, they’re by far the most vocally anti-AI group out there. The only ones who willingly and readily outsource their brains to it are boomers.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
By most definitions, the oldest Gen Z would have been born in 1997 and would thus be 28, the youngest Gen Z would have been born in 2012 and would thus be 13.
So uh… yeah, yeah, younger Gen Zs are very susceptible to what I described.
And also… sure, a lot of Gen Zs are very anti-AI.
A lot of them are also the very techbro douche bag types that jump from tech scam to tech scam, tell people how AI will make it so much easier for them to do some … thing they have no idea how to do.
Its polarizing, but we have actual data.
read-vip.variety.com/html5/reader/…/default.aspx?…
The people who most often use AI tools every day are Gen Z.
Millennials may be more likely to use them in some professional work capacity, but its Gen Z and younger that… literally just do all their homework and college work with AI tools and thus never learn anything.
Millenials are, you know, too old to have been able to take that shortcut.
Now they use those tools at work, yes, but… take them away, and they will still have some of those core mental capabilities, whereas people who never learned those core abilities… won’t.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
If the oldest Gen-Zer is 28, and youngest is 13, assuming an even distribution, that puts the average Gen-Z is roughly 20 and a half, long past done with school, assuming school means school and does not include university or higher ed and stops at 18, then in fact the vast majority of Gen-Z are done with the vast majority of school.
This invalidates your point, and while I’m curious about your rather odd source link that I’m not clicking till I can verify what that is at the desktop, I doubt it supports your free-associative generational generalisations about ill-defined spooks like “mindset” and some ramblings about tech scams that you happily append to your maybe-true data point about AI tool use.
As one of those “kids these days” who is 27, from my experience, very much including this exchange, boomers and the vast majority of Gen X have absolutely no intellectual capabilities and interacting with one makes it exceedingly obvious.
They often cannot read, and if they can - they cannot read more than a paragraph without getting lost, and they often cannot write properly either.
This makes sense when you consider that even in the laziest pursuit of talking with a chatbot – the average Gen-Zer probably reads more text in a day incidentally than an average Gen Xer reads in their entire life even if they’re fairly well-read.
A thought that’s been popular during the pandemic is how “our brains” weren’t “meant” to process all the information that comes from the internet and that it leads to some sort of overwhelming of the faculties, but in personal anecdote - I’ve never experienced this or even known anyone who has. If I trust my eyes and ears (and pretend like IRL isn’t just another, arguably far more self-serving selective echo chamber than any corporate algo even like the olds do), I could easily conclude that misinformation in general is a phenomenon almost entirely confined to people over the age of Gen-Z.
While the move to video is a real phenomenon, I would argue that it does not by itself evidence a decline in basic intelligence, and is a self-fulfilling prophecy where monetisation on video was much easier to do well due to inherently better CTR/engagement/impact on impressions than traditional banner ads that supported written sides, leading for it to be more widespread and therefore concentrating a lot of useful and entertaining content and information in video, leading people to read less.
Again, though – the above is a side tangent because most Gen-Z were born long before this phenomenon occurred.
And before you bring this up - yes, literacy rates have gone down due to the economic decline/collapse of the western capitalist model and monetary policies of austerity alongside the culture of anti-intellectualism and gerontocracy who perpetuates it like their arteries perpetuate lead in their bloodstream, but again – this does not impact the vast majority of Gen-Z who are done with the vast majority of schooling.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s embarrassing to make such an obvious error in an argument where you claim “kids these days” are somehow dumber.
The skill involved in not simply parroting points that fit your conclusions, but actually understanding what you’re parroting is called critical thinking.
While I’m no scientist and I actually don’t think I’m smart at all, I do think what thinking skills I do have - I owe to exposure to various “tech scams”, making mistakes, examining them, disregarding authority, not blindly trusting, learning the difference between an opinion and truth, and learning to reason correctly.
I focus my equally free-associative personal anecdote observations (the immovable object to the unstoppable force of an overly broad generalisation) on the boomers and the gen-x, but millennials to me while definitely more outwardly intelligent probably due to better education, diet, habit and lesser alcohol consumption, overall they lack a certain rigour and intensity required to truly drill deep.
Looking back at political debates and discussions during the Great financial crash in 2008, it really does feel like I’m watching simpletons talk about rather basic things as if they’re complex and puzzling. I stand on the shoulder of giants etc. etc. but this even applies to ideas that to them and me are equally from the distant past.