this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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They said the same shit about writing, books, radio, and tv.
I think AI so far is detrimental to society.
It made it too easy to flood the world with bullshit.
Also it will make tracking peoples behaviors much easier while keeping plausible deniability on levels that past horrible regimes could only dream about.
It will be used to make replacing workers more easy.
It is being used to deny more healthcare (eg Luigie’s case)
Pro’s
Can be used for good (eg in the medical field) by finding issues sooner and making better cures
Using AI to actually learn though is a great tool.
Other scientific advancements
—
All in all I think it with social media is one of the biggest reasons the US is in the state it is.
So the pros are
You don’t always have to know how it works to rely on it. Most people could not tell you how a computer works but they are able to do better work.
We can verify that it’s better in some tasks than people. E.g give doctors and the AI 1000 MRI scans of potential cancer patients and it can determine it more accurate than doctors. So there they already are a help.
It’s already used in advancing different fields, for example reading texts of ancient burned scrolls without opening the scroll since that would break them.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/05/ai-helps-researchers-read-ancient-scroll-burned-to-a-crisp-in-vesuvius-eruption
But also medicine creation etc.
And with learning, yeah like books, they help you to learn faster but are not a requirement. Same here I can learn much faster now. But I will verify what it tells me.
— But I’m not sure if all of that outweighs the shit. 💩 The genie is already out of the bottle, no putting it back.
I'd really prefer if my doctor knew why they say I have cancer!
That would be nice but as the “proud owner of medical issues” it’s much more often: “You have this, we don’t know why you have it, this is how we can manage it”.
You still want your doctor to be knowledgeable of course, but you also want them to use the best tools at their disposal. Most of them probably couldn’t tell you how an mri machine works exactly either.
About writing?! Surely you have zero evidence for that.
Oh haha cause it wouldn't be recorded
but are they wrong though?
Uh I don't know.
Memorization used to be a huge part of education hundreds of years ago before books were common. It's the origin of oral defence for doctorates. That excluded a huge part of the population who were great at logic and analysis.
Books became a bicycle for the brain. Imo, AI is the same. Skills such as structuring sentences into perfectly grammatically correct forms will atrophy in exchange for the focus to be on the idea.
"In the future all our thoughts will be filtered through phone keyboard next word suggestion, and this is a good thing!"
Without appropriate structure will we be able to effectively communicate ideas?
The AI will make sense of our terrible grammar.
It’ll try at least, lol
i think that being used to properly structure sentences is important for reasoning well.
i agree that the effects of books and writing were probably beneficial to the brain, although they might have atrophied the memory and something else. But im not sure about tv, radio, internet and AI.
Ehhh yes and no. There’s prescriptive grammar (how it ought to be) and descriptive grammar (how it’s actually used within communities). This is where the ideas of code switching and such come in. You can certainly reason well in a Creole, if that’s what your community speaks and how you are taught, e.g. Belizean Creole.
yes, i wasnt advocating you should know any specific grammar. and that distinction is a good point. I meant that learning a prescriptive grammar decently is an important tool for reasoning. im not saying that descriptive grammars are bad, just defending that prescriptive grammars arent as useless as people seem to judge them.
The majority of grammar rules are arbitrary and unrelated to the expression of an idea. For example, does it really matter if you treat an inanimate object like a pencil as feminine or masculine? It's an object. Yet in Spanish/French/etc., there are grammar rules that define every inanimate object as being either feminine or masculine.
However, without a common grammar, it's impossible to communicate accurately. For that use case, AI functions as a language translator.
yes, its very arbitrary, but these are sets of rules that you can use to structure your thoughts. language helps us reason. it doesnt matter that it is arbitrary. definitions in mathematics are very arbitrary, but they are a foundation we can lean on to reason about abstract ideas. Being arbitrary is not a testament of uselessness. Different languages, lead to different foundations for structuring ideas. But dominating at least one of those foundations can be very important cognitively.
Gendering an explicitly non gendered inanimate object helps structure your thoughts?
I'd argue that following those grammar rules damages your thoughts.
what do you mean by "explicitly non gendered"?
Why is a pencil masculine? It's a pencil, not a person.
yeah and it does harm. Any technology amputated a part of us. The point is deciding if it's worth the cost.