> advancing humanity
Perhaps but I'd say it's more of a mixed bag. Cell phones and social media have done harm and good at very large scales. As Dan Carlin once said, it feels like we're babies crawling toward hand guns. We don't seem like we're as wise as we are technically proficient.
Oppenheimer "advanced humanity" by giving us nuclear power. Cool. I love cheap energy. Unfortunately, there were some uh... "unfortunate side-effects" which continue to plague us.
You mention that OPs conclusion Doesn't align with the stats, but then you only provide a single data point. Are there other stats that you were referring to?
For anyone wanting to re-experience the beta-like nature of the original Minecraft, I suggest minetest. There are quite a few game modes, but the one that I tend to like the most is called MineClonia, since it fairly closely follows the general shape of Minecraft gameplay (as one might expect). The devs are very responsive and it's very easy to hack on and mod (as it uses Lua).
If you're putting in all of the effort to make the material make sense to you, what is the role of the educator? If the way to learn things is to read a book a bunch of times, what value does my tuition money get me? A syllabus? The ability to ask questions of a possibly poor communicater?
Self-driving cars would be really cool but it seems like a long way to reach when you could invest that money in public transport and rail. Its not as convenient or sexy but I bet you'd get actual results: people able to... go places without having to drive. Maybe not directly from their door but thats kind of already a solved problem, too. At the risk of perhaps sounding like the "why Dropbox when we have FTP" guy, are SDCs necessary enough to throw this much money at?
Seems bad... Though I don't think I'm informed enough to know exactly why. The NSA is just coded in my brain as Generally Not Trustworthy. The addition of Larry Summers has me feeling a similar way. My general feeling is that these are not people who particularly care about humanity writ large.
I have a really hard time understanding the use case for something like this. Stuff that I want to remember I just write down or reference something like my browser history or recently opened files. It's very low tech for sure but it works, is waaay more energy efficient, way easier to understand and audit, and doesnt have the same security concerns. I get that using "AI" has a Wow Factor that existing systems have but I cannot understand the thinking of folks that are OK with the trade-off. Ita just not even close for me.
I can't understand the "x is bad so y isn't a concern" line of argumentation. Or the "x was already a problem so why are we wasting time worrying about x * z" thing. Can't more than one thing be bad at a time? can't bad things be made worse?
I'm not sure who you're arguing with since I didnt make any claims like the one you're refuting. Unless this is a pithy way of asserting (on a hunch) that there is no harm caused by constant distraction (in which case, you should have just said that).
Doing problem sets seems... more useful to a human brain's development than the mere distraction of social media, no? Schooling can definitely be improved (I personally hated school) but that seems like an orthogonal concern to the harma of constant distraction.
Is it really so bad for human brains to just "be" without needing constant distraction? Is it possible that a constant need for distraction is actually contributing to things like ADHD? It seems generally accepted that less distraction is a good thing. And is a novel anywhere close to as addictive and distracting as a magic rectangle that can show you basically anything you want to see at the tap of a screen?
This gives me a lot of anxiety but my only recourse is to stop paying attention to AI dev. Its not going to stop, downside be damned. The "We're working super hard to make these things safe" routine from tech companies, who have largely been content to make messes and then not be held accountable in any significant way, rings pretty hollow for me. I don't want to be a doomer but I'm not convinced that the upside is good enough to protect us from the downside.
I feel this. I don't think I'm bad at the job but I feel like most jobs I would want to do are being rapidly targeted by AI efforts. It seems like the safest jobs are ones I don't want to do (I.e. manual labor, etc.)
As a config addict, I fully recognize that thr time I spend looking for new tools and tweaking my configs isn't exactly "productive". But its a hobby that synergizes very nicely with my career and generally has the side effect of increasing my enjoyment at work (and thus, the amount of time I want to dedicate to it). There's obviously a balance yo be struck here but I think that config as a hobby can be very rewarding.