Knowing less about AI makes people more open to using it

[1] from the source article “we argue that consumers who perceive AI as magical will experience feelings of awe leading to greater AI receptivity”

T-shirts are great until you hear about the conditions of where they're made and how their disposal is managed. Social media is great until you realize how much they know about you and how they use that knowledge. Modern medicine is easy to not like when you look at the animal experiments that made it happen. And again, sausages - I know some vegetarian folks who are vegetarian in protest of how most meat is produced.

I kind of wonder if there is a subset of comfortable modern society where every aspect is easily likable no matter how much you know about it. Bonus points if that society is environmentally sustainable.

I still can't get over how soon people just accepted that you can universally translate all languages, that audio can be accurately transcribed, that you can speak a sentence and get pretty good research on a topic. These things are all actually insane and everyone has just decided to ignore this and focus on the aesthetic grossness of some of the things people are trying to get them to do.

It takes at least a wee bit of sophistication to go from "this is a neat search engine, and it can help me with my writing tasks" to "the stuff that's generated by this thing is going to affect society in unpredictable ways that are not necessarily positive."

A similar spectrum of attitudes may already exist for social media, where the term "algorithm" predated the term "AI."

Why would we avoid educating people, in order to keep them willing to use AI? Why is getting people to use AI seen as a good in itself? Did AI write this article? (Don’t answer that.)

I don't think the human brain is evolved to deal with a machine that promises to have all the answers, always speaks with an authoritative tone, and is trained to be agreeable. As a species we like shortcuts and we don't like to think critically, an easy to get answer is always going to be infinitely more appealing than a correct answer, no matter how wrong it is.

Right now there's a generation of kids growing up who believe that they don't have to learn anything because LLMs have all the answers. World leaders don't seem concerned about this, likely because a dumb population who doesn't know how to think critically is easy to control.

The less you know about any politician, the more you like them!

"The Socratic Method involves a shared dialogue between teacher and students. The teacher leads by posing thought-provoking questions. Students actively engage by asking questions of their own. The discussion goes back and forth."

So AI can be an awesome learning tool, for anyone, at any level. Like many technologies, it is what you make it to be. Even things like Instagram can be educational places.

It's understandable why LLMs pose a major threat to Google. Google search is essentially an information engine where the information is intermingled with junk commercial content.

These days I only use Google for cases where I want to go to a website I already know but I'm too lazy to type in the URL or use a bookmark. The utility it provides now is merely a convenience.

"Give a man a game and he'll have fun for a day. Teach a man to make games and he'll never have fun again"

Why is the latter a goal?

There’s a limit to how much I am willing to learn and there’s a heck of a lot of things I’ll just accept at face value because I believe they make my life better.

So far AI makes my life better so I don’t particularly care to learn about it.