Comment by okanat
6 days ago
I still think smartphones are a huge negative to humanity. They improve a narrow case: having access to ephemeral knowledge. Nobody writes articles or does deep knowledge work with smartphones.
My position with the AI is almost the same. It is overall a net negative for cognitive abilities of people. Moreover I do think all AI companies need to pay fair licensing cost to all authors and train their models to accurately cite the sources. If they want more data for free, they need to propose copyright changes retroactively invalidating everything older than 50 years and also do the legwork for limiting software IP to 5 to 10 years.
Agreed. Smartphones are portable, mobile computers that suck at every single aspect of being, and working as, a computer, except for mobility. They are not powerful, they are not general purpose, they are not ergonimic, they do not respect user freedom or privacy. Use such a mobile device only when you can't avoid it (i.e., when you are on the road -- when mobility is the single most important priority), and at no other time.
"Nobody writes articles or does deep knowledge work with smartphones."
I don't think that's true.
I do most of my reading on a smart phone - including wading through academic papers, or reading full books in the kindle app and jotting down notes in the digital margins.
A sizable number of my short form blog entries are written on my phone, and my long form writing almost always starts out in Apple Notes on my phone before transferring to a laptop.
Predictive text and voice dictation has got good enough now that I suspect there have been entire books written on mobile devices.
Whether you want to consider it "deep knowledge work" or not is up to you, but apparently a lot of Fifty Shades of Grey was written on a BlackBerry! https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/fifty-shades-of-gr...
> It is overall a net negative for cognitive abilities of people.
I agree. A bunch of us here might use it to scaffold applications we already understand, use it as a rubber duck to help understand and solve new problems, research more effectively, or otherwise magnify skills and knowledge we already have in a manner that's directed towards improving and growing.
That's cool. That's also not what most people will do with it. A bunch of us are total nerds, but most of the world really isn't like that. They want more entertainment, they want problems solved for them, they want ease. AI could allow a lot of people to use their brains less and lose function far more. For the minority among us who use it to do more and learn more, great. That group is a tiny minority from what I can tell.
Take for example that a huge use case for generative AI is just... More sophisticated meme images. I see so much of that, and I'm really not looking for it. It's such an insane waste of cycles. But it's what the average person wants.
Just smartphones? I'd start at agriculture. Before agriculture, human society had little hierarchy. We were free the way we were meant to be.