This might be a stretch but I have a fear AI will make people less mentally engaged in whatever they are doing and over time, it will lead to poor cognitive health. A mass decline in critical thinking and mental health as well.
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I just read a medical article related to excessive "screen time" and child development. Critical thinking wasn't listed admittedly but there was a correlation between increased screen time and poor school performance. AI will no doubt make it worse by putting more inaccurate slop online.
Yeah no having the same thoughts. Outsourcing problem solving to AI and avoiding critical thinking, creativitiy and learning in the process. And added to that all the misinformation and information noise GenAi creates.
I don’t think it’s a stretch. It’s already observable. With more people using chat-gpt and search engines forcing their own ai “solutions” we’re seeing more blind trust in hallucinated results rather than qualified and reviewed answers from experts.
That's why tech bros look for ways to incorporate AI even on stupid stuff like my Logitech mouse's software: because it didn't come to solve any problems. It looked cool, it got lots of money and people are trying to find uses for it to justify the investments.
And when the ROI won't be sufficient enough for the estimated *trillions* that are to be invested in genAI, there will be a huge economic crash. Cause everyday people hate seeing genAI everywhere already. They won't give money for it.
It's not a stretch. I can see that type of dip in how my brain functions in some ways. Like before map apps I actually KNEW the city I lived in. I moved to a new city and now I can't get anywhere without maps and I've been here years. Apply that to most functions of life? Yeah. It's gonna suck.
AI? that's what social media is for.
Videos of people farting on camera, 6 million views
Videos on health and proper diet or anything political, barely 1k views.
We're already there, Trump is the president of the US of A, again ;)
sadly this was already happening long before genAI / GPT technology came out. just look at all the awful "discourse" and lack of media literacy from 2012 era facebook, twitter, etc. genAI is just another forsaken techbro invention accelerating a bad situation.
I've seen firsthand how, instead of thinking for themselves, students asked chatGTP for the answer... to me, that seemed so wild... I don't take a course just to let a machine do my work, that I signed myself up for... (language school) So yeah, it's already happening.
Same. But I also remember the internet was going to make everyone dumb and less inclined to actually learn things because you have Wikipedia in your pocket at all times. And people still mostly learn things or even learn more things than they did before even if its more surface knowledge. But...
Not a good comparison imo, as Wikipedia = freely available information to research and use with sources provided and checked by a community. AI/ LLM = used to automatize thinking and working processes, provides a lot of misinfo/ not clear how info is sourced
Yes I am not saying i'm positive toward letting AI think for me but rather that I think it is similar in how people worried about the new technology then and now.
It absolutely is, not only is it making people poorer in regards to checking things, but they're not using their skills and at some point, if they continue things and use AI, they're gonna forget their skills as well. I have colleagues that use AI to draft emails of all things f
I don’t know there has always been similar takes with a lot of things over the centuries. I think the rise of talking head figures online are far more a risk for critical thinking as they are seen as fact with zero checks or balances and that gets feed into the data sets making it far worse.
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AllriHere’s a polite and friendly closing response:
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All right! Best of luck in the tournament!
Combined these can be a recipe for disaster, especially in safety critical tasks.
AI taking all our jobs or turning against humanity Skynet-style are the good case scenarios.
The most probable scenario from all the genAI is that people will become just incredibly dumb and numb, Wall-E style
Here's the thing though: every one of those [X] (internet, computers etc etc) came to solve specific problems that wouldn't be solved without them.
GenAI doesn't solve any problems. It just replaces the products of complex human thought.
Facebook/TikTok/Twitter/Instagram - all use AI to keep you engaged.
The easy way to keep people engaged is sensationalism, rage bait, etc.
And critical thinking requires deep concentration, but social networks are designed to distract.
Videos of people farting on camera, 6 million views
Videos on health and proper diet or anything political, barely 1k views.
We're already there, Trump is the president of the US of A, again ;)
..BUT what i was going to end with is that the internet HAVE made us stupider in some ways haha, especially some parts of it