Comment by wisty
2 hours ago
Soapbox time.
They were arguably right. Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts (Homer's work, Australian Aboriginal songlines). Pre Gutenberg, memorising reasonably large texts was common. See, e.g. the book Memory Craft.
We're becoming increasingly like the Wall E people, too lazy and stupid to do anything without our machines doing it for us, as we offload increasing amounts onto them.
And it's not even that machines are always better, they only have to be barely competent. People will risk their life in a horribly janky self driving car if it means they can swipe on social media instead of watching the road - acceptance doesn't mean it's good.
We have about 30 years of the internet being widely adopted, which I think is roughly similar to AI in many ways (both give you access to data very quickly). Economists suggest we are in many ways no more productive now than when Homer Simpson could buy a house and raise a family on a single income - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
Yes, it's too early to be sure, but the internet, Google and Wikipedia arguably haven't made the world any better (overall).
Brains are adaptive. We're not getting dumber, we're just adapting to a new environment. Just because they're less fit for other environments doesn't make it worse.
As for the productivity paradox, this discounts the reality that we wouldn't even be able to scale the institutions we're scaling without the tech. Whether that scaling is a good thing is debatable.
> Brains are adaptive.
They are, but you go on to assume that they will adapt in a good way.
Bodies are adaptive too. That didn't work out well for a lot of people when their environment changed to be sedentary.
Brains are adaptive and as we adapt we are turning more cognitive unbalanced. We're absorbing potentially bias information at a faster rate. GPT can give you information of X in seconds. Have you thought about it? Is that information correct? Information can easily be adapted to sound real while masking the real as false.
Launching a search engine and searching may spew incorrectness but it made you make judgement, think. You could have two different opinions one underneath each other, you saw both sides of the coin.
We are no longer critical thinking, we taking information at face value, marking it as correct and not questioning is it afterwards.
The ability to evaluate what's been given to us rationally is what's decaying. Who opens an physical encyclopedia nowadays? That itself requires resources, effort and time and with life now very complex it's easier to take the first piece information given to us and mark it as true. The Wall-E view isn't wrong.
I see a lot of people grinding and hustling in a way that would have crushed people 75 years ago. I don't think our lack of desire to crack an encyclopedia for a fact rather than rely on AI to serve up a probably right answer is down to laziness, we just have bigger fish to fry.
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Instead of memorizing vasts amount of text modern people memorize the plots of vast amounts of books, moves, TV shows, and video games and pop culture.
Computers are much better at remembering text.