[51Cards]

I'm going to re-post something that I commented in another thread awhile ago:

I tend to think it will. Tools replaced our ancestor's ability to make things by hand. Transportation / elevators reduced the average fitness level to walk long distances or climb stairs. Pocket calculators made the general population less able to do complex math. Spelling/grammar checks have reduced knowing how to spell or form complete proper sentences. Keyboards and email are making handwriting a passing skill. Video is reducing our need / desire to read or absorb long form content.

The highest percentage of humans will take the easiest path provided. And while most of the above we just consider improvements to daily life, efficiencies, it has also fundamentally changed on average what we are capable of and what skills we learn (especially during formative years). If I dropped most of us here into a pre-technology wilderness we'd be dead in short order.

However, most of the above, it can be argued, are just tools that don't impact our actual thought processes; thinking remained our skill. Now the tools are starting to "think", or at least appear like they do on a level indistinguishable to the average person. If the box in my hand can tell me what 4367 x 2231 is and the capital of Guam, why then wouldn't I rely on it when it starts writing up full content for me? Because the average human adapts to the lowest required skill set I do worry that providing a device in our hands that "thinks" is going to reduce our learned ability to rationally process and check what it puts out, just like I've lost the ability to check if my calculator is lying to me. And not to get all dystopian here... but what if then, what that tool is telling me is true, is, for whatever reason, not.

(and yes, I ran this through a spell checker because I'm a part of the problem above... and it found words I thought I could still spell, and I'm 55)

[api]

But does this, at least for those who choose to use it as leverage, free up more brain power for other newer or different things?

> If I dropped most of us here into a pre-technology wilderness we'd be dead in short order.

I hear this all the time and I'm not convinced. People are incredibly resourceful under pressure. When your amygdala calmly informs your neocortex "learn, work hard, or die" the effect can be pretty profound.

People would quickly form tribes and communities and those with relevant skills would teach others. Some people would absolutely fail to adapt, but I'm not convinced it would be as many as we think.

The greatest danger in a collapse scenario would be other humans, since one path some would choose is "rob and kill other people." But that's a different sort of problem.

[arjunaaqa]

Every time we see this argument “this frees humanity to focus on higher things”

and then we see what actually humans are spending more time on,

- not books - not people - but mobile - senseless entertainment (2-3 hours daily on mobile ) - social media

If we stop using a part of brain, and that function (say memory or calculation) donwe actually use it ever again ?

Or we are becoming more and more zombies ?

So much so that most people are incapable of reading a book,

Or even watching a 3 hour movie.

Say what you may, but this extra time is not being used for meaningfup stuff.

Devices are becoming smart and our brains & bodies are becoming dumber.

Simple way to know if a high school student can stand against high school student of 90s ?

Or even researchers or programmers ?

In depth of thinking and agency.

I want this to happen but real world evidence is not saying this.

[vbezhenar]

Human brains were peak size few thousands years ago or something like that. Since then, average human brain started to shrink. I can't help, but think that's because of civilization freed our brains from the necessity to think as much, so evolution decided that spending so much energy on brain is wasteful and started to make it smaller.

I'm not really sure evolution works this direction today, we are not living in a food scarce world right now... But just food for thought.

[api]

Human brains are not the largest in the animal kingdom. Are elephants and whales smarter than us? We don't think they are, but we don't really know. It could be that they're much smarter but in different ways, maybe somatosensory or social or other ways we don't understand. It could also be that their brains are less efficient due to less selection pressure for efficiency.

In humans there is only a weak correlation between brain size/mass and IQ or other metrics of intelligence.

Then there's utterly wild stuff like this that reminds us of how little we really understand about brains and intelligence:

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-man-who-lives-without-90-of-h...

The fact that someone can function like this is incredible and indicates that the brain must contain a lot of redundancy, or something even weirder is going on.

Stuff like that is enough to make you wonder if we know anything at all.

Another similar data point is the spooky intelligence of many birds, like crows, who have tiny brains. Flying animals are under extreme selection pressure for efficiency because they need to be small and light, so their brains have gotten very efficient.

[vbezhenar]

You can't compare humans with elephants or birds. We are extremely different species with different evolution paths. It is very possible, that bird brains is much more optimized, but that tells nothing about our brains.

We can compare humans with our ancestors and trend is clear: our skull was getting bigger, despite the fact that it's not good for evolution, until some point after which it started to shrink.

Whether it translates to cognition increase or decline - we probably will never find out, we don't have time machine. But that's the most obvious assumption. Big skull is bad for birth, so evolution pressure on making skull smaller is enormous. Big brain is bad for energy efficiency, because brain consumes a lot of energy and food is scarce in the wild, so that's another evolution pressure. The fact that our ancestors kept growing head despite that evolution pressure meant that advantage was bigger. And intelligence is the only factor that comes to mind which can offset the negatives.

[namaria]

"The brains of modern humans are around 13% smaller than those of Homo sapiens who lived 100,000 years ago.Exactly why is still puzzling researchers."

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240517-the-human-brain-...

Civilization cannot explain this trend.

[latexr]

> So much so that most people are incapable of reading a book,

> Or even watching a 3 hour movie.

I agree with your thesis in general, but I don’t think these two in particular are comparable the way you’re phrasing them.

I have read books in a single five or six hour sitting but those were “by accident” in the sense that I wasn’t expecting to finish the book the day that I started them, I went into them with the expectation there would be pauses. Books work well with this type of interruption and have well-defined chapters.

A three hour movie, on the other hand, I see as a commitment I must try to not interrupt because it is designed as a single experience. Breaking it up detracts from the artist’s goal. Before starting it I must immediately look at clock and do some math: can I even begin to watch this movie, considering that in two hours I should <be preparing dinner | sleeping | picking someone up | something else>?

A similar phenomenon is when we don’t feel like watching a two-hour movie “because it’s too long” but then happily binge watch fours hours of some TV show instead. Even if we ignore TV shows are often designed to be more addictive, the fact that you have clearly delineated stop points—chapters, if you will—makes them a more manageable commitment.

[api]

A lot of people may use this free time/energy to immerse themselves in crap. Many will not.

I personally expect a major societal/cultural revolt against brain rot scrolling. It's kind of already brewing.

[_heimdall]

To me the middle ground is where its really interesting, jumping from one extreme to the other has so many unknowns.

Surely we free up brain power for other, newer things bit that comes at a cost. We lose a lot of potentially useful details of how and why we got here, and that context would be really helpful as we march towards the next technology.

For example, most people (I'll stick to the US here) stopped producing most of their own food decades ago. Today most people don't really know where there food comes from or what it takes to grow/raise it. Its no wonder that we now have a food system full of heavily processed foods and unpronounceable ingredients that may very well be doing harm to our overall health.

[idopmstuff]

> Its no wonder that we now have a food system full of heavily processed foods and unpronounceable ingredients that may very well be doing harm to our overall health.

Sure, but in the old system people just starved to death when there were problems with their crops (Irish potato famine, dust bowl, etc.). The current system isn't perfect, obviously, but this example seems to pretty clearly demonstrate a case where it's better that we've outsourced this knowledge to others.

Also, it's worth bearing in mind that we're now at a point where basically all of the information that people have "lost" is now once again available on the internet. Most people don't use it, because there simply aren't enough hours in the day, but people who care can find out more than any farmer 100 years ago about food and source theirs accordingly.

[_heimdall]

> Sure, but in the old system people just starved to death when there were problems with their crops (Irish potato famine, dust bowl, etc.).

Sure, but then we're trading smaller, more frequent disruptions at the cost of risking less frequent, but much larger disruptions. More to my original point though (I may have rambled there and not been clear), the risk I'm raising is that we now make decisions based on only today's situation and are unaware of the context that got us here. That is fine most of the time, but incremental change isn't fool proof and sometimes the context of how you got here is extremely important in making the next decision.

> people who care can find out more than any farmer 100 years ago about food and source theirs accordingly.

There are a few risks there though, maybe they're worth it but still risks.

You don't know what you don't know, and in that case its hard or impossible to find it online. Plenty of historical knowledge also doesn't live online at all, its still hard to find research papers more than a few decades old - at best they're online as a PDF and likely not indexed or searchable.

We also can't expect those in charge to know much of anything when the scale of lost, unknown context grows too far and too fast. At best they outsource that knowledge to others, but those are likely experts only in one small piece of the puzzle. To me that seems like a very delicate balance that can work for a time bit would inevitably fail in ways we couldn't predict.

All that said, I'm also not trying to make the argument that we must know all the context and history of anything we deal with. Just the importance of at least recognizing what we don't know and where the risks are.

[filoleg]

> But does this, at least for those who choose to use it as leverage, free up more brain power for other newer or different things?

My personal belief is that the answer to this is “absolutely.” That’s how it proliferates on the level of society in fundamental ways, otherwise it wouldn’t.

Just think of the analogy the grandparent comment makes. Yeah, if we transported a bunch of modern specialists many thousands years in the past, they will struggle with just surviving. But also, in a modern environment, they are able to make crucial congributions to producing things that make the rest of the humanity much more advanced, better to live in, and push humanity as species forward. Which is something absolutely nobody in the thousands-years-ago times is able to do (talking about the specific things, like computers, not the ability to push humanity forward in general; after all, we got to the current point exactly from those thousands-years-ago times).

I just don’t see a human civilization sending a human to the moon or getting to the point of accessible air travel without heavy specialization across people. And heavy specialization is imo unachievable, if your entire survival depends on being just a survival generalist as a full-time thing.

[financetechbro]

Look at how well people have “adapted” to social media and short form content and then decide whether your point still stands…

I think your point is valid, but I see it more as something that will happen with a small percentage of the population. The reality is that people don’t like to think, it’s hard and inconvenient, and often involves learning new things about yourself and the world which are uncomfortable because it goes against inherited world views. I don’t think AI will help improve this at all. To me, poor use of tech is just the same thing as binging junk food and It’s difficult to stop binging junk food

[intended]

Everyone is now a cyborg; you are either more or less dependent on your tooling side or your biological side.

[alganet]

> When your amygdala calmly informs your neocortex "learn, work hard, or die" the effect can be pretty profound.

There are cases and cases, of course.

Let me give you counter example:

An AI that can invest better than VCs could put them in a precarious condition. Why we would need them if an AI can do it?

Of course that is a very improbable scenario. AIs can't form networks, inherit family money or form lobbies, so it is unlikely for such tech to compete in that realm. It would be very nice if it could! Can you imagine that?

To keep an open mind for different and wild scenarios is always a good thing we humans do.

[bluefirebrand]

> AIs can't form networks, inherit family money or form lobbies, so it is unlikely for such tech to compete in that realm. It would be very nice if it could! Can you imagine that?

I think if we ever create a society where AI is forming lobbies and inheriting fortunes, I will feel morally obligated to attempt to destroy every computer system on the planet

I cannot believe you would type the words "it would be very nice if it could" after describing such a nightmare

[alganet]

So, software developers and writers can be replaced by a machine but venture capitalists can't?

It doesn't make sense. AI should be even better at replacing those. Why does an AI need money for? It would spend it more responsibly than a human VC would.

Think of it as a guide. As the VC in charge lends his money and network to the AI, it is training a tool that can help usher a new revolutionary era of investment full of a brand new generation of investors.

If you are a VC, just try it. You might be surprised by the results and end up liking it. Who knows? AI is a friend!

[alganet]

You know what? Convincing these stubborn VCs would take a long time. We should just take their money, train the thing and show them how good AI can be.

[bluefirebrand]

> software developers and writers can be replaced by a machine but venture capitalists can't

Human Venture capitalists can in theory be held accountable for their actions, even if it does seem like they rarely actually are

AI venture capitalists cannot be held accountable, so they should not be allowed to exist

Accountability is important across all of human society

AI's utter lack of accountability is not an accident, it is an appealing feature for immoral people who love the idea of laundering their own responsibility through a machine

> If you are a VC, just try it. You might be surprised by the results and end up liking it. Who knows? AI is a friend

I am not a VC, and AI is not a friend

[alganet]

Ah, the chicken and the pig story. The writers and developers only lays eggs, the venture capitalist puts its skin at the table. I heard that before.

Again, think of it as a guide. AI has been used to detect fraud, it is already trusted in financial systems. It could be used as a tool to keep VCs in check. With this automated moral guide, it could help train VCs that are accountable not only in theory, but in practice too!

I find offensive that you are claiming AI could lead to a lack of accountability. Can you show me an example of some VC that used it to unfairly explore the system?

AI is a friend. It is already everywhere, why not concede to it? Concede to AI.

[tgv]

> free up more brain power for other newer or different things?

That's wildly speculative. So speculative, it cannot be taken serious as an argument. The brain is flexible, but not unlimited. Quite a few functions seem to prefer a specific part of the brain. In fact, I don't know of any that is free floating, but that might be because it's hard to find.

But what the brain above all requires is training. Without it, all that power is laid to waste. You can't learn a new language without actually learning it, nor can you do something new without actual training. You can't be intelligent without training your intelligence, and put real effort into it. Relying on a computer for the answers keeps you dumb. Use it, or lose it, as they say.

And what is that new thing that our brains are going to do? You don't know. And since you don't know, why throw it around like it will offset the harm that can come from using AI? Are you already that dependent on it?

[consumer451]

I recently learned that human brain size has been decreasing for the last 10,000 years.[0]

The thinking is that prior to us building societies, we all had to be generalists and know "everything." Once we are in a group, we can offload some knowledge to others in the society.

My point being, this all seems to have started long ago and doesn't even necessarily require technology to explain the beginnings of the trend.

[0] https://www.dwarkesh.com/i/158922207/why-is-human-brain-size...