Comment by SeanDav
2 days ago
One of the potential upsides to this as that people just might start taking time to engage in a bit of critical thinking before reacting. Is this real? How likely is this AI nonsense? What is the source? Is this the full picture? etc.
Perhaps I am too optimistic...
Neil deGrasse Tyson said a quote expressing a concern about the future impact of AI on information credibility.
The exact quote is: "I foresee the day where AI become so good at making a deep fake that the people who believed fake news as true will no longer think their fake news is true because they'll think their fake news was faked by AI."
I wish people who believed that kind of fake news had this piece of critical thinking. I don't think they do though, they'll take whatever confirms their views and reject everything else as faked by AI with no logic or proof whatsoever.
Almost everyone believes they're thinking critically, that's just how it feels to think at all. As an aside, I wonder about the average person who extols critical thinking, and how proficient he actually is himself; in my experience they're often conformist and susceptible to uncritically accepting consensus positions.
The truth is, for those of us with lower IQ, it doesn't matter how critically we think, we lack the knowledge and mental dexterity to reliably arrive at a nuanced and deep understanding of the world.
You have to stop dreaming of a world where everyone can sort everything out for themselves, and instead build a world where people can reliably trust expert opinion. It's about having a high-trust society. That requires people in privileged positions to not abuse their advantage in a short term way, at the cost of alienating, and losing the trust of the unwashed masses.
Because that's what has happened, the experts have been exploited as a social cudgel, by the psychopathic and malignant managerial class, in such an obvious and blunt way, that even those of us who are self-aware of our limitations, figure we're as likely to get it right ourselves, as to get honest and correct information from our social institutions.
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