[51Cards]

I'm going to re-post something that I commented in another thread awhile ago:

I tend to think it will. Tools replaced our ancestor's ability to make things by hand. Transportation / elevators reduced the average fitness level to walk long distances or climb stairs. Pocket calculators made the general population less able to do complex math. Spelling/grammar checks have reduced knowing how to spell or form complete proper sentences. Keyboards and email are making handwriting a passing skill. Video is reducing our need / desire to read or absorb long form content.

The highest percentage of humans will take the easiest path provided. And while most of the above we just consider improvements to daily life, efficiencies, it has also fundamentally changed on average what we are capable of and what skills we learn (especially during formative years). If I dropped most of us here into a pre-technology wilderness we'd be dead in short order.

However, most of the above, it can be argued, are just tools that don't impact our actual thought processes; thinking remained our skill. Now the tools are starting to "think", or at least appear like they do on a level indistinguishable to the average person. If the box in my hand can tell me what 4367 x 2231 is and the capital of Guam, why then wouldn't I rely on it when it starts writing up full content for me? Because the average human adapts to the lowest required skill set I do worry that providing a device in our hands that "thinks" is going to reduce our learned ability to rationally process and check what it puts out, just like I've lost the ability to check if my calculator is lying to me. And not to get all dystopian here... but what if then, what that tool is telling me is true, is, for whatever reason, not.

(and yes, I ran this through a spell checker because I'm a part of the problem above... and it found words I thought I could still spell, and I'm 55)

[api]

But does this, at least for those who choose to use it as leverage, free up more brain power for other newer or different things?

> If I dropped most of us here into a pre-technology wilderness we'd be dead in short order.

I hear this all the time and I'm not convinced. People are incredibly resourceful under pressure. When your amygdala calmly informs your neocortex "learn, work hard, or die" the effect can be pretty profound.

People would quickly form tribes and communities and those with relevant skills would teach others. Some people would absolutely fail to adapt, but I'm not convinced it would be as many as we think.

The greatest danger in a collapse scenario would be other humans, since one path some would choose is "rob and kill other people." But that's a different sort of problem.

[arjunaaqa]

Every time we see this argument “this frees humanity to focus on higher things”

and then we see what actually humans are spending more time on,

- not books - not people - but mobile - senseless entertainment (2-3 hours daily on mobile ) - social media

If we stop using a part of brain, and that function (say memory or calculation) donwe actually use it ever again ?

Or we are becoming more and more zombies ?

So much so that most people are incapable of reading a book,

Or even watching a 3 hour movie.

Say what you may, but this extra time is not being used for meaningfup stuff.

Devices are becoming smart and our brains & bodies are becoming dumber.

Simple way to know if a high school student can stand against high school student of 90s ?

Or even researchers or programmers ?

In depth of thinking and agency.

I want this to happen but real world evidence is not saying this.

[_heimdall]

To me the middle ground is where its really interesting, jumping from one extreme to the other has so many unknowns.

Surely we free up brain power for other, newer things bit that comes at a cost. We lose a lot of potentially useful details of how and why we got here, and that context would be really helpful as we march towards the next technology.

For example, most people (I'll stick to the US here) stopped producing most of their own food decades ago. Today most people don't really know where there food comes from or what it takes to grow/raise it. Its no wonder that we now have a food system full of heavily processed foods and unpronounceable ingredients that may very well be doing harm to our overall health.

[filoleg]

> But does this, at least for those who choose to use it as leverage, free up more brain power for other newer or different things?

My personal belief is that the answer to this is “absolutely.” That’s how it proliferates on the level of society in fundamental ways, otherwise it wouldn’t.

Just think of the analogy the grandparent comment makes. Yeah, if we transported a bunch of modern specialists many thousands years in the past, they will struggle with just surviving. But also, in a modern environment, they are able to make crucial congributions to producing things that make the rest of the humanity much more advanced, better to live in, and push humanity as species forward. Which is something absolutely nobody in the thousands-years-ago times is able to do (talking about the specific things, like computers, not the ability to push humanity forward in general; after all, we got to the current point exactly from those thousands-years-ago times).

I just don’t see a human civilization sending a human to the moon or getting to the point of accessible air travel without heavy specialization across people. And heavy specialization is imo unachievable, if your entire survival depends on being just a survival generalist as a full-time thing.

[financetechbro]

Look at how well people have “adapted” to social media and short form content and then decide whether your point still stands…

I think your point is valid, but I see it more as something that will happen with a small percentage of the population. The reality is that people don’t like to think, it’s hard and inconvenient, and often involves learning new things about yourself and the world which are uncomfortable because it goes against inherited world views. I don’t think AI will help improve this at all. To me, poor use of tech is just the same thing as binging junk food and It’s difficult to stop binging junk food

[intended]

Everyone is now a cyborg; you are either more or less dependent on your tooling side or your biological side.

[alganet]

> When your amygdala calmly informs your neocortex "learn, work hard, or die" the effect can be pretty profound.

There are cases and cases, of course.

Let me give you counter example:

An AI that can invest better than VCs could put them in a precarious condition. Why we would need them if an AI can do it?

Of course that is a very improbable scenario. AIs can't form networks, inherit family money or form lobbies, so it is unlikely for such tech to compete in that realm. It would be very nice if it could! Can you imagine that?

To keep an open mind for different and wild scenarios is always a good thing we humans do.

[tgv]

> free up more brain power for other newer or different things?

That's wildly speculative. So speculative, it cannot be taken serious as an argument. The brain is flexible, but not unlimited. Quite a few functions seem to prefer a specific part of the brain. In fact, I don't know of any that is free floating, but that might be because it's hard to find.

But what the brain above all requires is training. Without it, all that power is laid to waste. You can't learn a new language without actually learning it, nor can you do something new without actual training. You can't be intelligent without training your intelligence, and put real effort into it. Relying on a computer for the answers keeps you dumb. Use it, or lose it, as they say.

And what is that new thing that our brains are going to do? You don't know. And since you don't know, why throw it around like it will offset the harm that can come from using AI? Are you already that dependent on it?

[consumer451]

I recently learned that human brain size has been decreasing for the last 10,000 years.[0]

The thinking is that prior to us building societies, we all had to be generalists and know "everything." Once we are in a group, we can offload some knowledge to others in the society.

My point being, this all seems to have started long ago and doesn't even necessarily require technology to explain the beginnings of the trend.

[0] https://www.dwarkesh.com/i/158922207/why-is-human-brain-size...