I don't think AI is the cause, it's merely the mechanism that is speeding up what has already been happening.
Social media was already isolating people. It is being sped up by the use of AI bots (see dead internet theory). These bots are being used to create chaos in society for political purposes, but overall it's increasingly radicalizing people and as a result further isolating everyone.
AI isn't eroding college institutions, they were already becoming a money grab and a glorified jobs program. Interpersonal relationships (i.e. connections) are still present, I don't see how AI changes that in this scenario.
I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.
The article does highlight one thing that I do attribute to AI and that is the lack of critical thinking. People are thinking less with the use of AI. Instead of spending time evaluating, exploring and trying to think creatively. We are collectively offloading that to AI.
To risk an analogy, if I throw petrol onto an already smouldering pile of leaves, I may mot have ‘caused’ the forest fire, but I have accelerated it so rapidly that the situation becomes unrecognisable.
There may already have been cracks in the edifice, but they were fixable. AI takes a wrecking ball to the whole structure
> I don't think AI is the cause, it's merely the mechanism that is speeding up what has already been happening.
I think the technical term is "throwing gas on the fire." It's usually considered a really bad thing to do.
> I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.
If someone throws gas on a fire, you can totally blame them for the fire getting out of control. After all, they made it much worse! Like: "we used to have smouldering brush fire that we could put out, but since you dumped all that gas on it, now we will die because we have a forest fire raging all around us."
I don't think this argument makes much sense. If you are running down hill towards a cliff then saying that adding a cart to speed up the process doesn't give the cart moral blameworthiness is an unhelpful observation. You can still chose to stop running down the hill or to not get on the cart.
Capitalism is destroying institutions. Any new technology must be employed in service of "number go up". In this system externalities have to be priced in with taxes, but it's cheaper to buy off legislators than to actually consider the externalities.
This is how we get food that has fewer nutrients but ships better, free next-day delivery of plastic trash from across the world that doesn't work, schools that exist to extract money rather than teach, social media that exists primarily to shove ads in your face and trick you into spending more time on it.
In the next 4 years we will see the end of the American experiment, as shareholder capitalism completely consumes itself and produces an economy that can only extort and exploit but not make anything of value.
If bots are being used to create chaos in society, it really isn't possible that the platforms themselves are just innocent bystanders here. It is technically possible and quite easy for the platforms to block bots if they really wanted to, in fact it's actually in their best interest to have human only organic activity as it increases the platform's credibility and reduces network cost. If they're still letting bots operate and actually post content on their platforms, they're likely in cahoots with the politicians.
>I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.
I'll use a rather extreme example here, but this sounds a bit like "Heroin addiction is just speeding up aspects that society already does. It's so easy to get addicted to smoking cigarettes".
Sometimes the catalyst is the problem, even if it's not the only problem. In this case I think placing some guardrail on both social media and AI is worthwhile.
100% correct in the first part, though I'd like to think there's a bimodal effect with AI users and usage.
Hard working expert users, leveraging AI as an exoskeleton and who carefully review the outputs, are getting way more done and are stronger humans. This is true with code, writing, and media.
People using AI as an easy button are becoming weaker. They're becoming less involved, less attentive, weaker critical thinkers.
I have to think that over some time span this is going to matter immensely. Expert AI users are going to displace non-AI users, and poor AI users are going to be filtered at the bottom. So long as these systems require humans, anyway.
Personally speaking:
My output in code has easily doubled. I carefully review everything and still write most stuff by hand. I'm a serious engineer who built and maintained billion dollar transaction volume systems. Distributed systems, active active, five+ nines SLA. I'm finding these tools immensely valuable.
My output in design is 100% net new. I wasn't able to do this before. Now I can spin up websites and marketing graphics. That's insane.
I made films and media the old fashioned way as a hobby. Now I'm making lots of it and constantly. It's 30x'd my output.
I'm also making 3D characters and rigging them for previz and as stand-ins. I could never do that before either.
I'm still not using LLMs to help my writing, but eventually I might. I do use it as a thesaurus occasionally or to look up better idioms on rare occasion.
While I agree with a lot of what you said, your comment implies catalysts and accelerants don't matter.
The roots of the problem are very real and very complex but forcing them to be addressed quickly throws people into panic mode and frankly that leads to sloppy solutions that are going to cause the cycle to repeat (though will temporarily solve some problems, and this is far better than nothing).
> We are collectively offloading that to AI.
Frankly, this is happening because so many are already in that panicked stressed mode (due to many factors, not just social media). It's well know people can't think critically under high stress. AI isn't the cause of that stress but it sure is amplifying many of them
Honestly, I know I'm going to sound off my rocker but thinking of e.g. Mass Effect or The Matrix, are we watching ourselves getting evolved/replaced in real time?
All of existence has been a to-and-fro of larger organisms emerging by connecting and subsuming smaller ones. Organelles, cells, organisms... Are we creating the instruments of our own ascension (fancy calculators) or are we doomed to watch AI and the internet manipulate and supersede us?
Yes of course AI is just a symptom. The cause is the fiat monetary system. In all history, no fiat monetary system has ever lasted. There have been hundreds. They always fail eventually and lead to the collapse of nations and empires.
> Civic institutions - the rule of law, universities, and a free press - are the
backbone of democratic life
It probably was in 1850-1950s, but not in the world I live today.
Press is not free - full of propaganda. I don't know any journalist today I can trust, I need to check their affiliations before reading the content, because they might be pushing the narrative of press owners or lobbies
Rule of law? don't make me laugh, this sounds so funny, look what happened in Venezuela, US couldn't take its oil, so it was heavily sanctioned for so many years, then it still couldn't resist the urge to steal it, and just took the head of the state.
Universities - do not want to say anything bad about universities, but recently they are also not good guys we can trust, remember Varsity Blues scandal? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal - is this the backbone of democratic life?
It's not AI. Human institutions rely on humans acting in good faith. Almost every institution is held together by some kind of priesthood, where everyone assumes the priests know what they are doing, and the priests create a kind of seriousness around the topic to signal legitimacy, and enforce norms on the other priests.
This is true of Government, Law, Science, Finance, Medicine, etc.
But most of these institutions predate the existence of game theory, and it didn't occur to anyone how much they could be manipulated since they were not rigorously designed to be resistant to manipulation. Slowly, people stopped treating them like a child's tower of blocks that they didn't want to knock over. They started treating them like a load bearing structure, and they are crumbling.
Just as an example, the recent ICE deportation campaign is a direct reaction to a political party Sybil[0] attacking the US democracy. No one who worked on the constitution was thinking about that as a possibility, but most software engineers in 2026 have at least heard the term.
I am skeptical of hypotheses like this when the deterioration has begun before its supposed cause. This is how I look at social media or tinder being blamed for loneliness or low fertility. While they may have exacerbated the issues, trends have been unfavorable for decades if not centuries before.
Similarly, it seems to me like the rule of law (and the separation of powers), prestige press, and universities are social technologies that have been showing more and more vulnerabilities which are actively exploited in the wild with increasing frequency.
For example, it used to be that rulings like Wickard v. Filburn were rare. Nowadays, various parties, not just in the US, seem to be running all out assaults in their favoured direction through the court system.
"The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise"
So, some expertise will be gone, that is true. At the same time I am not
sure this is solely AIs fault. If a lawyer wants 500€ per half hour of advice,
whereas some AI tool is almost zero-cost, even if the advice may only be up to
80% of the quality of a good lawyer, then there is no contest here. AI wins,
even if it may arguably be worse.
If it were up to me, AI would be gone, but to insinuate that it is solely AI's
fault that "institutions" are gone, makes no real sense. It depends a lot on
context and the people involved; as well as opportunity cost of services. The
above was an example of lawyers but you can find this for many other professions
too. If 3D printing plastic parts does not cost much, would anyone want to
overpay a shop that has these plastic parts but it may take you a long time to
search for, or you may pay more, compared to just 3D print it? Some technology
simply changes society. I don't like AI but AI definitely does change society,
and not all ways are necessarily bad. Which institution has been destroyed by
AI? Has that institution been healthy prior to AI?
I think part of the negative attitude towards the effects of AI stems from the fact that it demolishes a lot of structure. The traditional institutes maintain well-structured, low-entropy societies in terms of knowledge: one goes to a lawyer for legal advice or to a doctor for medical advice, one goes/send one's children to a university for higher education, etc. One knows what to do and whom to ask. With the advent of internet, this started to change, and now the old system is almost useless: as you note, it may be more efficient to go to AI for legal advice, and AI is definitely more knowledgeable about most things than most university teachers, if used correctly. In the limit, the society as it existed before is not simply transformed but is completely gone: everybody is a fully autonomous agent with a $AI_PROVIDER subscription. Ditto for professional groups and other types of association that were needed to organise and disseminate knowledge (what is a lawyer these days? a person with a $LEGAL_AI_PROVIDER subscription, if this is even a thing? what is a SWE?). Now we live in a maximum-entropy situation. How do values evolve and disseminate in this scenario? Everybody has an AI-supported opinion about what is right. How do we agree? How do we decided on the next steps? AI doesn't give us a structure for that.
> If a lawyer wants 500€ per half hour of advice, whereas some AI tool is almost zero-cost, even if the advice may only be up to 80% of the quality of a good lawyer, then there is no contest here. AI wins, even if it may arguably be worse
Interesting example, because when I look at it I think of course I'm going to pay for the advice I can trust, when it really matters that I get advice I can trust. 20% confidently wrong legal advice is worse than no advice at all. Where it gets difficult is when that lawyer is offloading their work to an AI...
> The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise
I have actually seen this be a tremendously good thing. Historically, "expertise" and state of the art was reserved solely for those people with higher education and extensive industry experience. Now anyone can write a python script to do a task that maybe they would have had to pay an "expert" to do in the past. Not everyone can learn python or be a computer scientist engineer. Some people are meant to go to beauty school. But I feel like everything has become so much more accessible to those people that previously had no access.
I liken it to the search engine revolution, or even free open source software. The software developed as open source over the last decades are not toys. They are state of the art. And you can read the code and learn from them even if you would never have had the opportunity for schooling or industry to write and use such software yourself.
> Historically, "expertise" and state of the art was reserved solely for those people with higher education and extensive industry experience ... I feel like everything has become so much more accessible to those people that previously had no access.
Might you ever ride in a car, need brain surgery, or live within the blast radius of a nuclear power station?
I struggle with the thesis that our institutions haven't already been fatally wounded. Social media and endless content for passive consumption have already errored the free press, short-circuited decision-making, and isolated people from each other.
Why isn't there a major lack of institutional trust of dentists? Between 1990 to today fillings have gone from being torture to something that takes 30 minutes while I listen to a podcast. I've not met anyone who distrusts big dental. But fluoridated water is still a hot topic.
The best that the experts the paper talks about can do today is say that if we follow their advice our lives will get worse slower. Not better. Just as bad as if we don't listen to them, but more slowly.
In the post war period people trusted institutions because life was getting better. Anyone could think back to 1920 and remember how they didn't have running water and how much a bucket weighed when walking up hill.
If big institutions want trust they should make peoples lives better again instead of working for special interests, be they ideological or monetary.
>Why isn't there a major lack of institutional trust of dentists? Between 1990 to today fillings have gone from being torture to something that takes 30 minutes
This one is personally hilarious to me. My dentist said there were "soft spots", that like a fool I let him drill. On the sides of my teeth. Those fillings lasted about 6 weeks before they fell out. He refilled them once, telling me to "chew more softly". Basically, he was setting me up to get caps... but he hadn't checked that my insurance basically covered 0% of such.
My own trust in dentists is nil at this point, though I desperately need dental work.
Dentists make their money by rushing as many patients through in a business day as they can. Boats to pay for, yadda yadda. There might be dentists out there that take their time, who pay attention to the patients needs, and are reluctant to perform irreversible and potentially damaging work... but those dentists are for rich people and I am not rich. Trusting dentists (in general) is one of the most foolish things a person can do.
> Why isn't there a major lack of institutional trust of dentists?
FWIW, I know a lot of people who refuse to go to the dentist unless it's an issue because they're one of the medical professions that seem to do the most upselling.
I go every six months for a cleaning and trust my dentist, but I can definitely see how these huge chain dentists become untrustworthy.
I’m going to play devils advocate and cough recite a common argument from the pro gun Americans.
“It’s not guns that kill people, it’s people that kill people”.
It’s not “AI bad”, it’s about the people who train and deploy AI.
My agents always look for research material first - won’t make stuff up. I’d rather it say “I can’t determine” than make stuff up.
AI companies don’t care about institutions or civil law. They scraped the internet, copyright be damned. They indexed art and music and pay no royalties. If anything, the failure of protecting ourselves from ourselves is our fault.
> universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life...
The self-importance and arrogance of some people in universities never ceases to amaze me.
I'm not saying they don't have value; doctors, nurses, lawyers, wouldn't exist without a university.
But calling it the "backbone of democratic life" is about as pretentious as it comes.
The reality is that someone bagging groceries with no degree offers more value to "democratic life" in a week than some college professors do in their entire career.
I understand that everyone is disillusioned with current institutions. But I don't understand the prevailing sentiment here that it's therefore okay for them to fail. For one, there will never be perfect institutions. One would think we would create technology to complement and improve them. Instead, recent technological trends seem to have done the opposite.
At the very least, this should make us reconsider what we are building and the incentives behind it.
I wonder if the concern about "civic institutions" as some unique and special thing within society is a generational thing; as a millennial I've almost always viewed "universities, and a free press" ("rule of law" is much more nebulous) as simply "institutions", or rather "the establishment", the key distinction being "the establishment" also includes corporations, banks, big capital, etc.
The "institution" of the AI industry is actually a perfect example of this; the so-called "free press" uncritically repeats its hype at every turn, corporations (unsurprisingly) impose AI usage mandates, and even schools and universities ("civic institutions") are getting in on implicitly or explicitly encouraging its use.
Of course this is a simplification, but it certainly makes much more sense to view AI as another way "the establishment" is degrading "society" in general, rather than in terms of some imagined conflict between "civic institutions" and "the private sector", as if there was ever any real distinction between those two.
AI might be accelerating the trend, but there's been a populist revolt against institutions for over a decade. It's been happening long before ChatGPT, and this isn't just in Europe and the US. The erosion of trust in governments and institutions has been documented globally.
The obvious culprits being smartphones and social networking, though it's really hard to prove causality.
> The obvious culprits being smartphones and social networking, though it's really hard to prove causality.
Totally get hating on social media, but social media didn’t make politicians corrupt or billionaires hoard wealth while everyone else got crumbs. It just made it impossible to keep hiding it. Corruption, captured institutions, and elite greed have been torching public trust for years. Social media just handed everyone a front-row seat (and a megaphone).
[+] [-] 6DM|1 month ago|reply
Social media was already isolating people. It is being sped up by the use of AI bots (see dead internet theory). These bots are being used to create chaos in society for political purposes, but overall it's increasingly radicalizing people and as a result further isolating everyone.
AI isn't eroding college institutions, they were already becoming a money grab and a glorified jobs program. Interpersonal relationships (i.e. connections) are still present, I don't see how AI changes that in this scenario.
I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.
The article does highlight one thing that I do attribute to AI and that is the lack of critical thinking. People are thinking less with the use of AI. Instead of spending time evaluating, exploring and trying to think creatively. We are collectively offloading that to AI.
[+] [-] Angostura|1 month ago|reply
To risk an analogy, if I throw petrol onto an already smouldering pile of leaves, I may mot have ‘caused’ the forest fire, but I have accelerated it so rapidly that the situation becomes unrecognisable.
There may already have been cracks in the edifice, but they were fixable. AI takes a wrecking ball to the whole structure
[+] [-] palmotea|1 month ago|reply
I think the technical term is "throwing gas on the fire." It's usually considered a really bad thing to do.
> I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.
If someone throws gas on a fire, you can totally blame them for the fire getting out of control. After all, they made it much worse! Like: "we used to have smouldering brush fire that we could put out, but since you dumped all that gas on it, now we will die because we have a forest fire raging all around us."
[+] [-] nautilus12|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] greenavocado|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] jrjeksjd8d|1 month ago|reply
This is how we get food that has fewer nutrients but ships better, free next-day delivery of plastic trash from across the world that doesn't work, schools that exist to extract money rather than teach, social media that exists primarily to shove ads in your face and trick you into spending more time on it.
In the next 4 years we will see the end of the American experiment, as shareholder capitalism completely consumes itself and produces an economy that can only extort and exploit but not make anything of value.
[+] [-] pyeri|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|1 month ago|reply
I'll use a rather extreme example here, but this sounds a bit like "Heroin addiction is just speeding up aspects that society already does. It's so easy to get addicted to smoking cigarettes".
Sometimes the catalyst is the problem, even if it's not the only problem. In this case I think placing some guardrail on both social media and AI is worthwhile.
[+] [-] echelon|1 month ago|reply
Hard working expert users, leveraging AI as an exoskeleton and who carefully review the outputs, are getting way more done and are stronger humans. This is true with code, writing, and media.
People using AI as an easy button are becoming weaker. They're becoming less involved, less attentive, weaker critical thinkers.
I have to think that over some time span this is going to matter immensely. Expert AI users are going to displace non-AI users, and poor AI users are going to be filtered at the bottom. So long as these systems require humans, anyway.
Personally speaking:
My output in code has easily doubled. I carefully review everything and still write most stuff by hand. I'm a serious engineer who built and maintained billion dollar transaction volume systems. Distributed systems, active active, five+ nines SLA. I'm finding these tools immensely valuable.
My output in design is 100% net new. I wasn't able to do this before. Now I can spin up websites and marketing graphics. That's insane.
I made films and media the old fashioned way as a hobby. Now I'm making lots of it and constantly. It's 30x'd my output.
I'm also making 3D characters and rigging them for previz and as stand-ins. I could never do that before either.
I'm still not using LLMs to help my writing, but eventually I might. I do use it as a thesaurus occasionally or to look up better idioms on rare occasion.
[+] [-] unknown|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] godelski|1 month ago|reply
The roots of the problem are very real and very complex but forcing them to be addressed quickly throws people into panic mode and frankly that leads to sloppy solutions that are going to cause the cycle to repeat (though will temporarily solve some problems, and this is far better than nothing).
Frankly, this is happening because so many are already in that panicked stressed mode (due to many factors, not just social media). It's well know people can't think critically under high stress. AI isn't the cause of that stress but it sure is amplifying many of them[+] [-] anonymars|1 month ago|reply
All of existence has been a to-and-fro of larger organisms emerging by connecting and subsuming smaller ones. Organelles, cells, organisms... Are we creating the instruments of our own ascension (fancy calculators) or are we doomed to watch AI and the internet manipulate and supersede us?
[+] [-] breppp|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jongjong|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaw12|1 month ago|reply
It probably was in 1850-1950s, but not in the world I live today.
Press is not free - full of propaganda. I don't know any journalist today I can trust, I need to check their affiliations before reading the content, because they might be pushing the narrative of press owners or lobbies
Rule of law? don't make me laugh, this sounds so funny, look what happened in Venezuela, US couldn't take its oil, so it was heavily sanctioned for so many years, then it still couldn't resist the urge to steal it, and just took the head of the state.
Universities - do not want to say anything bad about universities, but recently they are also not good guys we can trust, remember Varsity Blues scandal? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal - is this the backbone of democratic life?
[+] [-] alwayseasy|1 month ago|reply
The link to download the paper is here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5870623
[+] [-] alphazard|1 month ago|reply
But most of these institutions predate the existence of game theory, and it didn't occur to anyone how much they could be manipulated since they were not rigorously designed to be resistant to manipulation. Slowly, people stopped treating them like a child's tower of blocks that they didn't want to knock over. They started treating them like a load bearing structure, and they are crumbling.
Just as an example, the recent ICE deportation campaign is a direct reaction to a political party Sybil[0] attacking the US democracy. No one who worked on the constitution was thinking about that as a possibility, but most software engineers in 2026 have at least heard the term.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
[+] [-] chrisjj|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] blfr|1 month ago|reply
Similarly, it seems to me like the rule of law (and the separation of powers), prestige press, and universities are social technologies that have been showing more and more vulnerabilities which are actively exploited in the wild with increasing frequency.
For example, it used to be that rulings like Wickard v. Filburn were rare. Nowadays, various parties, not just in the US, seem to be running all out assaults in their favoured direction through the court system.
[+] [-] shevy-java|1 month ago|reply
For instance:
"The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise"
So, some expertise will be gone, that is true. At the same time I am not sure this is solely AIs fault. If a lawyer wants 500€ per half hour of advice, whereas some AI tool is almost zero-cost, even if the advice may only be up to 80% of the quality of a good lawyer, then there is no contest here. AI wins, even if it may arguably be worse.
If it were up to me, AI would be gone, but to insinuate that it is solely AI's fault that "institutions" are gone, makes no real sense. It depends a lot on context and the people involved; as well as opportunity cost of services. The above was an example of lawyers but you can find this for many other professions too. If 3D printing plastic parts does not cost much, would anyone want to overpay a shop that has these plastic parts but it may take you a long time to search for, or you may pay more, compared to just 3D print it? Some technology simply changes society. I don't like AI but AI definitely does change society, and not all ways are necessarily bad. Which institution has been destroyed by AI? Has that institution been healthy prior to AI?
[+] [-] macleginn|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] mrwh|1 month ago|reply
Interesting example, because when I look at it I think of course I'm going to pay for the advice I can trust, when it really matters that I get advice I can trust. 20% confidently wrong legal advice is worse than no advice at all. Where it gets difficult is when that lawyer is offloading their work to an AI...
[+] [-] chrisjj|1 month ago|reply
The overlooks the effect on quality of the penalty for failure. The lawyer giving bad advice can get the sued. The "AI" is totaaly immune.
[+] [-] reedf1|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] petcat|1 month ago|reply
I have actually seen this be a tremendously good thing. Historically, "expertise" and state of the art was reserved solely for those people with higher education and extensive industry experience. Now anyone can write a python script to do a task that maybe they would have had to pay an "expert" to do in the past. Not everyone can learn python or be a computer scientist engineer. Some people are meant to go to beauty school. But I feel like everything has become so much more accessible to those people that previously had no access.
I liken it to the search engine revolution, or even free open source software. The software developed as open source over the last decades are not toys. They are state of the art. And you can read the code and learn from them even if you would never have had the opportunity for schooling or industry to write and use such software yourself.
[+] [-] chrisjj|1 month ago|reply
Might you ever ride in a car, need brain surgery, or live within the blast radius of a nuclear power station?
[+] [-] toddmorey|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] johngalt7|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] noosphr|1 month ago|reply
The best that the experts the paper talks about can do today is say that if we follow their advice our lives will get worse slower. Not better. Just as bad as if we don't listen to them, but more slowly.
In the post war period people trusted institutions because life was getting better. Anyone could think back to 1920 and remember how they didn't have running water and how much a bucket weighed when walking up hill.
If big institutions want trust they should make peoples lives better again instead of working for special interests, be they ideological or monetary.
[+] [-] NoMoreNicksLeft|1 month ago|reply
This one is personally hilarious to me. My dentist said there were "soft spots", that like a fool I let him drill. On the sides of my teeth. Those fillings lasted about 6 weeks before they fell out. He refilled them once, telling me to "chew more softly". Basically, he was setting me up to get caps... but he hadn't checked that my insurance basically covered 0% of such.
My own trust in dentists is nil at this point, though I desperately need dental work.
Dentists make their money by rushing as many patients through in a business day as they can. Boats to pay for, yadda yadda. There might be dentists out there that take their time, who pay attention to the patients needs, and are reluctant to perform irreversible and potentially damaging work... but those dentists are for rich people and I am not rich. Trusting dentists (in general) is one of the most foolish things a person can do.
[+] [-] jjice|1 month ago|reply
FWIW, I know a lot of people who refuse to go to the dentist unless it's an issue because they're one of the medical professions that seem to do the most upselling.
I go every six months for a cleaning and trust my dentist, but I can definitely see how these huge chain dentists become untrustworthy.
[+] [-] FuturisticLover|1 month ago|reply
I can see this happening. Earlier, more people worked in groups because they relied on their expertise.
Now, there is no need for this; people can do it alone. Even though this makes the work done, it comes at the cost of isolation.
I am sure for some people this would look like a win.
[+] [-] embedding-shape|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] reactordev|1 month ago|reply
“It’s not guns that kill people, it’s people that kill people”.
It’s not “AI bad”, it’s about the people who train and deploy AI.
My agents always look for research material first - won’t make stuff up. I’d rather it say “I can’t determine” than make stuff up.
AI companies don’t care about institutions or civil law. They scraped the internet, copyright be damned. They indexed art and music and pay no royalties. If anything, the failure of protecting ourselves from ourselves is our fault.
[+] [-] SunshineTheCat|1 month ago|reply
The self-importance and arrogance of some people in universities never ceases to amaze me.
I'm not saying they don't have value; doctors, nurses, lawyers, wouldn't exist without a university.
But calling it the "backbone of democratic life" is about as pretentious as it comes.
The reality is that someone bagging groceries with no degree offers more value to "democratic life" in a week than some college professors do in their entire career.
[+] [-] srijith259|1 month ago|reply
At the very least, this should make us reconsider what we are building and the incentives behind it.
[+] [-] mikemarsh|1 month ago|reply
The "institution" of the AI industry is actually a perfect example of this; the so-called "free press" uncritically repeats its hype at every turn, corporations (unsurprisingly) impose AI usage mandates, and even schools and universities ("civic institutions") are getting in on implicitly or explicitly encouraging its use.
Of course this is a simplification, but it certainly makes much more sense to view AI as another way "the establishment" is degrading "society" in general, rather than in terms of some imagined conflict between "civic institutions" and "the private sector", as if there was ever any real distinction between those two.
[+] [-] unknown|1 month ago|reply
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[+] [-] loudmax|1 month ago|reply
The obvious culprits being smartphones and social networking, though it's really hard to prove causality.
[+] [-] Flavius|1 month ago|reply
Totally get hating on social media, but social media didn’t make politicians corrupt or billionaires hoard wealth while everyone else got crumbs. It just made it impossible to keep hiding it. Corruption, captured institutions, and elite greed have been torching public trust for years. Social media just handed everyone a front-row seat (and a megaphone).
[+] [-] dooglius|1 month ago|reply