Comment by birdsongs
13 hours ago
> But nobody can understand anymore how any of it works. We just ask and then trust the AI to deliver (as it always has).
> Isn't it fun to imagine how life would look like in that scenario?
This is horrifying to me.
Rightfully so.
People succumb to defeatism and acquiesce to regressing to zoo animals, with AI as their caretakers.
They simply cannot help but to apply the economic gauge of short term profits to value the alternatives.
Even though, obviously, here long term human survival and living conditions are at stake, necessitating an entirely different set of considerations.
Some of it has to do with the fact that many people pushed forward training themselves in a way they understood would better themselves for the future. They put in time, and now their sense of value is in question. They're forced to think about things like value (of life, themselves, and hopefully others), and the things they want to remain valuable in the future.
It's interesting to me that you only mentioned the people using 'AI' in the 'short-term' ways, and not the ones that use it to better themselves in the 'long-term' ways. You can spend your own time focusing on either usage, it's really up to you and your concerns. Either group's sense of value is what determines their behavior. Where they spend their time and thinking must be elsewhere, and you disagree with it. Who judges the quality of time spent? You do.
Is it more useful to think about self-improvement, and how to navigate the future in ways that might help you re-establish value of yourself, life, and others? Acquiring knowledge is a struggle, the author mentioned this. There is also Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which highlights some of that struggle, a resistance to change. And we're all limited by time, our genes, our station in life.
The only way to help anyone out of the cave, is to help them believe something different about themselves. To help them believe there is good reason to spend time going deeper into knowledge, or at the very least, allow others with the passion and station for it to do so.
If not for the very least reason that it keeps us 'in the loop' of some central idea behind intelligence (prediction?). Or because we feel it keeps us safer, as a fallback measure because we acknowledge we have to trust other's knowledge to exist.
AI is literally owned by james bond type villains.