“AI” as in the common LLMs that most people think of doesn’t remember anything new for us and doesn’t invent anything new.
The best it can offer is a mathematical chance to make an inference that we might not have already, based on whatever it was trained on. It’s a dice roll on insight, and the house always wins.
Like, people used rely Rolodex’s and calendars to remember phone numbers and birthdays, respectively. In other words, we used to write things down. When I left Facebook, I did literally go through their calendar and write down all my friends birthdays.
Navigation is a skill you have to learn. When I was an EMT, my FTO drilled the basics in to me. I can find my way to a city Ive never been, but I still use a GPS to find a specific place off the major cross streets. People used to give more advice with the destination, now they just say, “oh, come to this XXXX address place” because they assume youll be using a GPS, and the skill to describe “its off of this road” is both becoming lost, and a generational disconnect.
Okay, but its also much rarer to get lost and stranded with no way to get help anymore. You really have to go out of your way to be completely isolated.
The way it’s going…
AI: Happy Birthday! Other notable people who share your birthday: Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Charlie Kirk, and many more great historical figures you should hope to praise!
So, I’m going to start this on two things I’ve seen degrade in people who grew up with computers as a primary source of information versus a secondary source.
First, I’ve seen the ability to look through a document degrade over time as younger people have gotten used to Ctrl+F. The ability to manually look up and scan through a document has degraded. Also, I’ve seen people will then hyperfocus on the paragraph at the detriment of skimming the page.
Second, the ability to read not perfectly legible text has degraded as well. If the document is a poor scan or bad print handwriting, younger people have to practice the skill of reading it which was usually assumed to be had.
So, where do I think this will go in the future with AI?
First, I’m seeing AI used a lot to summarize and those results are being trusted. I see a future where younger people won’t have that ability to process and summarize data because they will be out of practice.
Second, I see the ability to write is going to degrade since people will be out of practice as people rely on AI to write for themselves. That lack of practice is going to have major impacts to critical thinking skills.
With the movie, people will forget how to read.
With the printing press, people will forget how to write.
With the book, people will forget how to remember.
With writing, people will forget how to talk.
Bro, what?
With phone books, we don’t memorize phone numbers any more, we rely on drawn maps to tell us where to go and calendars reminds us of birthdays. What else will we stop remembering once
AIpaper remembers everything for us?With phone books we don’t memorise phone numbers, but we still have to read them a dial them and after a few times we don’t need to look them up anymore. With drawn map we still have to look around and make sure we are correct intersection.
They don’t prevent us from remembering stuff, it’s the things that we used to do that helped us to remember and we don’t do anymore.
How to be human
I remember the new emergency number. It’s 01189998819991197253
How to disagree with people politically but remain friends
While this is an understandable sentiment, expressing this today means different things than 10 years ago.
Should we “remain friends” with those that support an administration that deports people to foreign countries without trial? Is it “just politics” when people are ok with a president that is attacking free speech and freedom of the press? With a president deploying the military to cities with Democrat mayors? I don’t think so. We’re talking about freedom and the future of our country. If you support such corruption and destruction of our democracy, we can’t be friends.
most people don’t care about any of that. they are more focused on the local sports team, their schedule at work, their kids sports games and a million other things.
i mean you can grandstand all you want about it… but it won’t ever change those people’s minds. they have other shit to worry about that federal politics, which is largely background noise to them.
your error is thinking other people think about politics like you do. they don’t. they don’t think about it at all.
The majority of Germans in the late 1930’s weren’t members of the Nazi party either. The majority of Germans in fact claimed being either unaware or opposed to what the Nazi regime did. Did the tell the truth? I’m inclined to believe so. Does being unaware/laying low absolve them of any and all crimes committed by the Nazi government? That’s more of an open question.
Actively voting for a government that commits crimes because you don’t care sufficiently about politics does not absolve you of responsibility for those crimes. Once you actively enable a fascist government you are complicit in the crimes it commits.
Apparently showing the tiniest speck of empathy is grandstanding now.
I still remember my childhood home phone number, but I don’t need to memorise any phone number anymore. I still have them archived for everyone I care to know in a cloud synced joplin file. That also includes birthdays. I can barely remember my own let alone other peoples.
GPS I’d be fucked without. Aphantasia and a horrible sense of direction. I’m glad I missed the paper map era. I only know the routes I have driven multiple times, so a large portion of the core city and satellite towns.
I don’t use Facebook at all. Deleted that shit in 2014.
Don’t use AI very often outside of questions where a traditional web search isn’t or is no longer viable due to enshittification and gameified results. Begrudgingly, and I check the sources. No trusting a sanitized corporate sycophant bot. But it’s not like those traditional web searches weren’t buried in misinfo, disinfo, or AI spam articles either. People seem to willfully not acknowledge that.
Edit: I also read paper books and go to my local library.
Who still uses Facebook?
People keeping up with organizations, family and friends who refuse to use stuff like Signal.
The trick is not to follow assholes, switch off news and patch it with Revanced.
We didn’t stop remembering phone numbers because our phones remembers them for us, we stopped remembering numbers because we stopped dialing them, back then there was this joke about not knowing your own number, why should I know my own number? I never call myself, and when I do I always get a busy signal.
We don’t even get to see the numbers, we have to make an extra effort to memorise numbers when we used to just know them after dialing them every day.With GPS is something similar, we have trouble remembering how to get from point A to point B because GPS substituted landmarks. We turn right when the GPS says so, so we stopped looking for the gas station, the bus stop or the road sign. Again, we need to make an extra effort to pay attention to our surroundings to know when to turn right next time we come without a GPS when before that was just how you learned to get to places.
At least for me this is very obvious in video games, every time I deactivate the minimap I don’t know how to get anywhere and I start to notice how rich some of the environments are when I stop having one eye fixed in the corner following the yellow line.So with AI I don’t know, probably won’t be what it does for us but what we stop doing because of that.
If your don’t know your own number, how are you going to give it to someone? Of course people have always known their own number. I still remember mine from 50 years ago.
But why do I remember my own number? Because Igive it to people, I write it down in all sort of forms and every time I register somewhere. I actively use the actual number all the time.
I have a work phone that I only use at work, everyone that needs to have that number already have it and I don’t use it for anything else. I have no idea what it is its number since I never had to call to it or give it to anyone.
You don’t know your own number? The amount of times I have had to input it/write it down, it’s good to memorise
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1446354
The invention of writing will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.
Socrates
This is one thing I tell people about math. Like, yes, we have amazing calculators in our pockets everywhere we go, and in the real world we will likely never need to do more complex math than, like, seventh grade algebra, and even that would be a rarity.
But that brain-crushing, painful learning of the process of math and how to compute is like power-lifting for your brain.
If you can power through that and train your brain to learn something as abstrusely taught as modern mathematics, then that will make all of the other learning things that you have to do in your life 100 times easier.
Another important thing is knowing when to use maths. I’ve been doing some statistical analysis for a personal project lately and it struck me that without those tedious lessons I’d have no idea this was even possible, never mind how to do it.
As someone with a math degree it frustrates me that people always say “but when will I use this in the real world?” Whether or not you need that math in the real world the real value in learning math is learning how to approach problems in an organized, specific, and detail oriented process. The process of learning formal logic and following through to the end is a very important skill for people to have. Instead, it’s all about “how do I get to the answer?” There’s a reason why 75% of your score in higher level math is your work and not your answer. The work is what matters
I’m not gonna argue with Socrates :)
Meh, you probably should.
Most of his students that we know of were vicious oligarchs who abolished democracy in Athens until they killed so many people that there was an uprising against them.
If he was around today, there’s a good chance he’d be part of the trump regime.
Plato’s the one you don’t wanna argue with. Dude was an ex-wrestler.
Friedrich Nietzsche hurts my brain.
I never memorized those. We had a of the most common phone numbers on the wall next to the phone. Birthdays I didn’t need to remember either because the date was in the invitation card.
Navigation is something I’m way worse than my dad for example, I’ll give you that. I’ll rely on GPS even when I know how to get to my destination because I always tend to drive the same routes and sometimes there is a much shorter one that I didn’t even think of.
