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Comment on When I was a kid, computers expanded your mind and your freedoms, bringing power to the individual. With AI, now it does the thinking for you, takes your job, gives power only to a few billionaires.

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Hackworth@piefed.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. - Plato on the invention of writing in The Phaedrus

Every notable invention associated with language (and communication in general) has elicited similar reactions. And I don’t think Plato is wholly wrong, here. With each level of abstraction from the oral tradition, the social landscape of meaning is further externalized. But that doesn’t mean the personal landscape of meaning must be. AI only does the thinking for you if that’s what you use it for.

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aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I see these thought-terminating cliches everywhere, and nowhere do its posters pause a moment to consider the specifics of the actual technology involved. The people forewarning about this stuff were correct about, for instance, social media, but who cares because Plato wasn’t a fan of writing, we rode on horses before cars, or the term Luddite exists…etc. etc.

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- Hackworth@piefed.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I talked about the way in which Plato’s concerns were valid and expressed similar fears about misuse. The linked article is about how to approach the specific technology.
  
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  - aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    You didn’t say his concerns were valid. You said you thought he was not “wholly wrong”. Regardless, Plato being a crank about writing proves only that cranks existed before writing. It does nothing to help you interrogate, nor help set you down the path to interrogate the questions asked.
    
    Your referenced article is basically a long-form version of your post, which has a perceivable bias toward the viewpoint that every newly-introduced technology can or will inevitably result in “progress” for humanity as a whole regardless of the methods of implementation or the incentives in the technology itself.
    
    Far from being an instance of skub (pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/) as this perspective indirectly implies that it is (i.e. an agnostic technology / inanimate object that “two sides” are getting emotionally charged about), LLMs (and their “agentic” offspring) are both deliberately and unwittingly programmed to be biased. There are real concerns to be discussed about this technology that posting a quote from an ancient tome do not cover.
    
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    Hackworth@piefed.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    LLMs are both deliberately and unwittingly programmed to be biased.
    
    I mean, it sounds like you’re mirroring the paper’s sentiments too. A big part of Clark’s point is that interactions between humans and generative AI need to take into account the biases of the human and the AI.
    
    The lesson is that it is the detailed shape of each specific human-AI coalition or interaction that matters. The social and technological factors that determine better or worse outcomes in this regard are not yet fully understood, and should be a major focus of new work in the field of human-AI interaction. […] We now need to become experts at estimating the likely reliability of a response given both the subject matter and our level of skill at orchestrating a series of prompts. We must also learn to adjust our levels of trust
    
    And as I am not, Clark is not really calling Plato a crank. That’s not the point of using the quote.
    
    And yet, perhaps there was an element of truth even in the worries raised in the Phaedrus. […] Empirical studies have shown that the use of online search can lead people to judge that they know more ‘in the biological brain’ than they actually do, and can make people over-estimate how well they would perform under technologically unaided quiz conditions.
    
    I don’t think anyone is claiming that new technology necessarily leads to progress that is good for humanity.
    
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