Comment by wisty
4 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).
> Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts
It seems more likely that there were only a handful of people who could. There still are a handful of people who can, and they are probably even better than in the olden times [1] (for example because there are simply more people now than back then.)
[1] https://oberlinreview.org/35413/news/35413/ (random first link from Google)
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.
> Just because they're less fit for other environments doesn't make it worse.
It literally does. If your brain shuts down the moment you can't access your LLM overlord then you're objectively worse.
> 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 but skills are cumulative. You can't get good at what you don't practice.
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 are taking information at face value, marking it as correct and not questioning is it afterwards.
The ability to evaluate critically and rationally is what's decaying. Who opens an physical encyclopedia nowadays? That itself requires resources, effort and time. Add in life complexity; that doesn't help us in evaluating and rejecting consumption of false information. 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.
1 reply →
> Homer Simpson
I can't stress this enough, Homer Simpson is a fictional character from a cartoon. I would not use him in an argument about economics any more than I would use the Roadrunner to argue for road safety.
No, it's useful evidence in the same way that contemporaneous fiction is often useful evidence. The first season aired from 1989-1990. The living conditions from the show were plausible. I know because I was alive during that time. My best friend was the son of a vacuum cleaner salesman with a high school education, and they owned a three bedroom house in a nice area, two purebred dogs, and always had new cars. His mom never worked in any capacity. My friend played baseball on a travel team and eventually he went to a private high school.
A 2025 Homer is only plausible if he had some kind of supplemental income (like a military pension or a trust fund), if Marge had a job, if the house was in a depressed region, or he was a higher level supervisor. We can use the Simpsons as limited evidence of contemporary economic conditions in the same way that we could use the depictions of the characters in the Canterbury Tales for the same purpose.
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.