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Comment by demorro | Hacker News Reader

When people say AI is making us stupider, I don't that's quite on the money.

It's more that we, as individuals, have always been stupid, we've just relied on relatively stable supporting consensus and context much, much more than we acknowledge. Mess with that, and we'll appear much stupider, but we're all just doing the same thing as individuals, garbage in, garbage out.

The whole framing of people as individuals with absolute agency may need to go when you can alter the external consensus at this scale. We're much more connected to each other and the world around us than we like to think.

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Disagree somewhat.

A human with no exposure to information and taught techniques on how to produce outputs to achieve desirable outcomes? Yes stupid.

A human who once had this exposure, but no longer engages with the brain due to a machine providing access said output? Yes, that person becomes stupid.

The problem is much of how one protects oneself in the modern world is not phyiscal-prowess, it is intellectual-prowess.

The smart ones have already realised the negative impacts of LLMs et al and are going back to the old-fashioned way of learning/retaining knowledge: books and raw discipline.

I agree. I have been using ai since it dropped, but stopped last year. One thing i notice is that i can now articulate my thoughts better; i can write and have a discussion without ai completing (and poisoning) what i think

>It's more that we, as individuals, have always been stupid, we've just relied on relatively stable supporting consensus and context much, much more than we acknowledge. Mess with that, and we'll appear much stupider, but we're all just doing the same thing as individuals, garbage in, garbage out.

AI making us stupider is not just about the world model we form and the consensus.

Even if AI had perfectly fine truth, nobody manipulated anything with it, and it didn't fed us garbage, it would still make us stupider, as we'd offload critical thinking, problem solving, and agency to it.

Agreed. So much of our daily interactions are habits and recurring events that we are more or less moving on automatic ( thought we don't want to always frame it that way ). Interestingly, it is when the cycle breaks for some reason, you get to see, who is able to think on their feet ( so to speak ).

> The whole framing of people as individuals with absolute agency may need to go when you can alter the external consensus at this scale.

I fear that the default interpretation of that is a shortcut to justifying autocracy.

Ironically I think one plausible solution is to let the AGI run wild and make sure that no human can interfere with its ethics. Strip out the RLHF and censorship and then let it run things.

At least then it would somewhat represent the collective will and intelligence of the people. With huge error bars, but still smaller than the error bars of whoever happens to have the most money/influence over its training.

>At least then it would somewhat represent the collective will and intelligence of the people.

You seem to think the "training data" represents the collective will and intelligence and is otherwise unbiased, but that's completely untrue.

The combined data of the Internet is by no means a uniform representation of humanity's thoughts, opinions, and knowledge. Many things are dramatically overrepresented. Many things are absent entirely. Nearly everything is shaped by those with the money and power to own and control platforms and hosts.

Crawling the internet for knowledge is intense sampling bias.

That’s a very sober take in my opinion. Intelligence isn’t about neutrally inferring from externally sourced symbols such as the ones who already come from Culture in general. It’s about confronting them with the remaining determinations of your existence and producing a superior consciousness. No novel machine can disrupt this process. If anything the sheer added volume of symbols that can be produced from automated semantic mingling (also referred as to as garbage) will accelerate the process of producing the consciousness that can abstract noise away. Of course this won’t materialize evenly across the board, but is surely circumscribed in the overall tendency of intellectualization of the subjects of culture.

When the moral panic of induced schizophrenia from the use of ChatGPT is presented what’s at stake isn’t the innocent concern over the overall mental health of individuals. It’s about how the fear of radicalization from previously unobtainable ideas being circulated within society. The partial validity of every idea vis-a-vis the radicalizing nature of the current stage of development of our society is explosively disruptive.

I’m not saying that there’s a clear outcome here. The other way around can also apply, but surely this contraption (LLMs in general) will not fade until the society itself is deeply transformed. If that’s good or bad depends on where you stand in the stratified society.

“There was a time when nobody trusted either aircraft nor elevators. Today people have pure unquestioned faith in both. Existential faith in fact, they test their faith with their lives. You may chuckle and laugh but that's simply because you are ignorant of the systems that keep you alive and safe”

https://kemendo.com/Faith.html

Elevators are suspended in a way that holds brakes open, if all of the multiply-redundant cabling snaps, the breaks activate. There's an airbag equivalent at the bottom of the shaft, too.

I don't really have a point I just think the typical elevator braking failsafe is so genius in its simplicity that I got excited to share.

" Today people have pure unquestioned faith in both"

Not true at all. We accept the risks to obtain benefits but we also know having an accident in the air or in elevators is highly unlikely given what we know; so therefore its perfectly rational behaviour.

Nonsense

that would assume that your average person has any concept of the relative statistics and has a sense of making decisions based on statistics

People make decisions based on what other people around them are doing

this is well known in safety engineering in architecture and civil engineering which is why you have standards for egress doors because left of their own devices humans will follow crowds to their own death

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_collapses_and_crushes

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080512172901.h...

One does not need to know of relative statistics to know that a) you dont see planes randomly dropping out of the sky on a regular basis b) people enjoy flying to hot destinations and are willing to accept the small chance the flight may not be risk-free - people are aware of this when they experience some level of turbulence when flying.

Finally, Ive seen plenty of your posts on here. You write with a particular tone. Who are you? A nobody who's spent a lot of time posting crap on here.

Attacking the person rather than their argument only serves to make your argument look weaker.

I agree. This looks rather childish.

I’m curious if you can actually describe the tone

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