[wisty]

Soapbox time.

They were arguably right. Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts (Homer's work, Australian Aboriginal songlines). Pre Gutenberg, memorising reasonably large texts was common. See, e.g. the book Memory Craft.

We're becoming increasingly like the Wall E people, too lazy and stupid to do anything without our machines doing it for us, as we offload increasing amounts onto them.

And it's not even that machines are always better, they only have to be barely competent. People will risk their life in a horribly janky self driving car if it means they can swipe on social media instead of watching the road - acceptance doesn't mean it's good.

We have about 30 years of the internet being widely adopted, which I think is roughly similar to AI in many ways (both give you access to data very quickly). Economists suggest we are in many ways no more productive now than when Homer Simpson could buy a house and raise a family on a single income - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

Yes, it's too early to be sure, but the internet, Google and Wikipedia arguably haven't made the world any better (overall).

[smokel]

> Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts

It seems more likely that there were only a handful of people who could. There still are a handful of people who can, and they are probably even better than in the olden times [1] (for example because there are simply more people now than back then.)

[1] https://oberlinreview.org/35413/news/35413/ (random first link from Google)

[giraffe_lady]

Yes, there is some actual technique to learn and then with moderate practice it's possible to accurately memorize surprisingly long passages, especially if they have any consistent structure. Reasonable enough to guess that this is a normally distributed skill, talent, domain of expertise.

[woah]

Used to be, Tony Soprano could afford a mansion in New Jersey, buy furs for his wife, and eat out at the strip club for lunch every day, all on a single income as a waste management specialist.

[CuriouslyC]

Brains are adaptive. We're not getting dumber, we're just adapting to a new environment. Just because they're less fit for other environments doesn't make it worse.

As for the productivity paradox, this discounts the reality that we wouldn't even be able to scale the institutions we're scaling without the tech. Whether that scaling is a good thing is debatable.

[discreteevent]

> Brains are adaptive.

They are, but you go on to assume that they will adapt in a good way.

Bodies are adaptive too. That didn't work out well for a lot of people when their environment changed to be sedentary.

[doublerabbit]

Brains are adaptive and as we adapt we are turning more cognitive unbalanced. We're absorbing potentially bias information at a faster rate. GPT can give you information of X in seconds. Have you thought about it? Is that information correct? Information can easily be adapted to sound real while masking the real as false.

Launching a search engine and searching may spew incorrectness but it made you make judgement, think. You could have two different opinions one underneath each other; you saw both sides of the coin.

We are no longer critical thinking. We are taking information at face value, marking it as correct and not questioning is it afterwards.

The ability to evaluate critically and rationally is what's decaying. Who opens an physical encyclopedia nowadays? That itself requires resources, effort and time. Add in life complexity; that doesn't help us in evaluating and rejecting consumption of false information. The Wall-E view isn't wrong.

[TaupeRanger]

> Just because they're less fit for other environments doesn't make it worse.

You think it's likely that we offload cognitive difficulty and complexity to machines, and our brains don't get worse at difficult, complex problems?

[titzer]

Brains are adaptive but skills are cumulative. You can't get good at what you don't practice.

[wiseowise]

> Just because they're less fit for other environments doesn't make it worse.

It literally does. If your brain shuts down the moment you can't access your LLM overlord then you're objectively worse.

[nindalf]

> Homer Simpson

I can't stress this enough, Homer Simpson is a fictional character from a cartoon. I would not use him in an argument about economics any more than I would use the Roadrunner to argue for road safety.

[mountainb]

No, it's useful evidence in the same way that contemporaneous fiction is often useful evidence. The first season aired from 1989-1990. The living conditions from the show were plausible. I know because I was alive during that time. My best friend was the son of a vacuum cleaner salesman with a high school education, and they owned a three bedroom house in a nice area, two purebred dogs, and always had new cars. His mom never worked in any capacity. My friend played baseball on a travel team and eventually he went to a private high school.

A 2025 Homer is only plausible if he had some kind of supplemental income (like a military pension or a trust fund), if Marge had a job, if the house was in a depressed region, or he was a higher level supervisor. We can use the Simpsons as limited evidence of contemporary economic conditions in the same way that we could use the depictions of the characters in the Canterbury Tales for the same purpose.

[wisty]

I also cited more serious analysis.

Yeah, Homer Simpson is fictional, a unionised blue-collar worker with specialised skills, and he lives in a small town.

[BurningFrog]

> They were arguably right

I think they were right that something was lost in each transition.

But something much bigger was also gained, and I think each of those inventions were easily worth the cost.

But I'm also aware that one cost of the printing press was a century of very bloody wars across Europe.

[MagicMoonlight]

There are still people that memorise the entire Quran word for word.

But it’s a complete waste of time. What is the point spending years memorising a book?

You seem like the kind of person that would still be eating rotten carcasses on the plains while the rest of us are sitting around a fire.

[throwup238]

> They were arguably right. Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts (Homer's work, Australian Aboriginal songlines). Pre Gutenberg, memorising reasonably large texts was common. See, e.g. the book Memory Craft.

> We're becoming increasingly like the Wall E people, too lazy and stupid to do anything without our machines doing it for us, as we offload increasing amounts onto them.

You're right about the first part, wrong about the second part.

Pre-Gutenberg people could memorize huge texts because they didn't have that many texts to begin with. Obtaining a single copy cost as much as supporting a single well-educated human for weeks or months while they copied the text by hand. That doesn't include the cost of all the vellum and paper which also translated to man-weeks of labor. Rereading the same thing over and over again or listening to the same bard tell the same old story was still more interesting than watching wheat grow or spinning fabric, so that's what they did.

We're offloading our brains onto technology because it has always allowed us to function better than before, despite an increasing amount of knowledge and information.

> Yes, it's too early to be sure, but the internet, Google and Wikipedia arguably haven't made the world any better (overall).

I find that to be a crazy opinion. Relative to thirty years ago, quality of life has risen significantly thanks to all three of those technologies (although I'd have a harder time arguing for Wikipedia versus the internet and Google) in quantifiable ways from the lowliest subsistence farmers now receiving real time weather and market updates to all the developed world people with their noses perpetually stuck in their phones.

You'd need some weapons grade rose tinted glasses and nostalgia to not see that.

[wisty]

Economists suggest we are in many ways no more productive now than when Homer Simpson could buy a house and raise a family on a single income - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

[GuB-42]

I certainly can't memorize Homer's work, and why would I? In exchange I can do so much more. I can find an answer to just about any question on any subject better than the most knowledgeable ancient Greek specialist, because I can search the internet. I can travel faster and further than their best explorers, because I can drive and buy tickets. I have no fighting experience, but give me a gun and a few hours of training and I could defeat their best champions. I traded the ability to memorize the equivalent of entire books to a set of skills that combined with modern technological infrastructure gives me what would be godlike powers at the time of the ancient Greeks.

In addition to these base skills, I also have specialized skills adapted to the modern world, that is my job. Combined with the internet and modern technology I can get to a level of proficiency that no one could get to in the ancient times. And the best part: I am not some kind of genius, just a regular guy with a job.

And I still have time to swipe on social media. I don't know what kind of brainless activities the ancient Greeks did, but they certainly had the equivalent of swiping on social media.

The general idea is that the more we offload to machines, the more we can allocate our time to other tasks, to me, that's progress, that some of these tasks are not the most enlightening doesn't mean we did better before.

And I don't know what economist mean by "productivity", but we can certainly can buy more stuff than before, it means that productivity must have increased somewhere (with some ups and downs). It may not appear in GDP calculations, but to me, it is the result that counts.

I don't count home ownership, because you don't produce land. In fact, that land is so expensive is a sign of high global productivity. Since land is one of the few things that we need and can't produce, the more we can produce the other things we need, the higher the value of land is, proportionally.

[piyh]

> Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts

Pre literate peole HAD TO memorise vast texts

[UltraSane]

Instead of memorizing vasts amount of text modern people memorize the plots of vast amounts of books, moves, TV shows, and video games and pop culture.

Computers are much better at remembering text.

[iambateman]

You’re currently using the internet.

[Capricorn2481]

That doesn't contradict anything they wrote.

[jama211]

That’s a lot of assumptions.

[ctoth]

> People will risk their life in a horribly janky self driving car if it means they can swipe on social media instead of watching the road - acceptance doesn't mean it's good.

People will risk their and others' lives in a horribly janky car if it means they can swipe on social media instead of watching the road - acceptance doesn't mean it's good.

FTFY