Comment by tarkin2

1 day ago

> I also have near zero concerns about that, but I worry that we will wipe ourselves out by social and economic chaos caused by AI.

Since people exercise their skills and brains less, deferring to AI, AI will only reduce our IQ.

Since people will spend more time talking to their AI bot than fostering social skills, AI will only reduce our social intelligence.

A dumber, less social world, is far less likely to be a successful world, even if the tools available are unprecedented.

> A dumber, less social world, is far less likely to be a successful world, even if the tools available are unprecedented.

En masse such worlds had successes in the past - renaissance, industrial revolution.

It's something else what I can't describe but it's the zeitgeist that was different when world recorded new successes. Look at CS revolution that led to PC and web of nineties and noughties, they didn't think about the result product , or how to steer thousand engineers to build something - amazing things were born in a very small teams, many times authored by a single person, who was deeply invested into the field and knew what he was doing.

  • In no era has the dominant technology encouraging the youth outsource their thinking to a magical box.

    Our intelligence has been decrease since the 1970s via the reverse flynn affect. This is only going to exacerbate that decline.

> Since people exercise their skills and brains less, deferring to AI, AI will only reduce our IQ.

IQ is almost entirely hereditary so "using your brain" has no impact on it unless you're using it for mating.

  • > IQ is almost entirely hereditary

    Do you have a credible source? Average IQ being much lower in poor countries (85-90 in many African countries) is usually explained away as an education problem, rather than being "inferior genes". Of course I understand that this explanation might be more for social/political reasons than scientific ones, because the alternative is racism, but I was still under the impression that nobody knew how much genes vs the environment contribute to IQ. Yet your statement seems quite definitive.

    • There's no such thing as "average IQ by country" as a statistic accessible to researchers. The work to create it has never been done; the resources that claim to provide it are essentially fraudulent.

  • Counterpoint: no it isn't. The high percentage heritability estimates, which are all quite old at this point, haven't survived modern methodological improvements that deconfound population stratification, assortative mating, and family environments. Modern estimates range from as low as the teens into the upper 30s.