[ExI] ai wants to do ya

[efc at swisscows.email]

Hello Bill,

On Thu, 18 May 2023, BillK via extropy-chat wrote:

> Think of how people have become dependent on a basic device like
> a mobile phone.
...
> Humanity will happily and voluntarily surrender to AI care.
> Human extinction is just an unintended consequence.

Let me add to that the current raging debate in sweden (and perhaps in
other countries as well) that the reliance of young people on smart
phone is starting to show in several ways in school:

* Difficulties concentrating.
* Decreased reading/writing skills. 
* Increased psychological stress and depression.

Only the last year or two was it made legally possible to demand that
students leave their phones outside the class room, but this is not
universally implemented.

So I imagine, just as you say, when the new generation of AI tools come
out, this reliance on our smart phones (and AI by extension) will make
it even worse.

As a teacher, I see this in a way when it comes to Chat GPT and Copilot.
The bad students can no longer reason around their code and they don't
learn the underlying principles of things. That makes them perform
worse.

The best students, I don't know what they do, but you sense they are
fueled by a passion for the subject and voluntarily sit and experiment
on their free time. They massively outperform the bad students.

So based on that I think AI will hurt average to bad performers and only
help good performers in the short run, before we've consciously realized
this on a broad scale and tailored our lives to account for this and to
avoid it.

Best regards, 
Daniel