There is this idea that technology, the pseudo-intelligence we call “AI” being the hot trend, will become so sophisticated and powerful that it will take over and humans won’t understand what is going on. And people are worrying that this is just around the corner, about to happen at any moment!
No. ChatGPT and friends cannot “think”, and are not close to thinking.
But we are still in trouble! Just because they aren’t very clever doesn’t mean they aren’t really impressive in ways that make them thinking doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous.
The problem is these machines are just “smart” enough to let us lean on them, they are just smart enough to let us get stupid.
Starting years ago the anesthetizing power of TV did its part to make us stupid. More recently the algorithms of YouTube and Tik-Tok have continued that tradition while shrinking our world by feeding us narrow, personalized content.
Now, these chatbots are willing to be brown-nosed helpers, further isolating us, but with a new twist of being surprisingly useful.
They are going to make us stupid!
I have played with a few as assistants in computer programming, and I have felt the effect personally. If I let the bot do any real work, my mind becomes separated from it, I can feel myself being more stupid that day than when I don’t do that.
These things can be constructive, however. I am still working on the details, but one case is when I really need to understand some fine point, grilling the chatbot with more and more pointed questions (the kind of thing that drives humans crazy but doesn’t annoy the bot), I can get to the bottom of something. (In one case I wanted to understand “partial equivalency” and “partial ordering”, and I think I got it, with the help of Claude.)
But I fear the distinction between using chatbots in constructive, mentally engaging ways and using them in lazy, brain-rotting ways will mostly be lost on people. A few Luddites will still be able to think, but will also be irrelevant as they mostly avoid the chatbots, for good or ill.
I’m still trying to figure out what all they are good for.
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