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A lot of truth in there but also some conspiracy theories which have little evidence to support them.
For instance:
"I truly believe that the advent of things such as social media and AI are part of a wider effort by governments to create a society of ever increasingly compliant, non-thinking and non-threatening 1984-esque drones."
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. This is nothing to do with governments, in fact it's just the opposite in that social media and AI have grown and developed so fast they have totally wrong-footed governments and they are now always playing catch-up.
Private individuals could certainly have agendas but I don't think they are aligned to governments or to creating a drone population.
"Social media is also reinforcing the consumption of ever dumbed down content by providing a constant source of dopaminergic stimulation in our brains. The content makes people feel good, thus triggering dopamine in almost constant, short and sharp bursts. So the action (watching 20 TikTok videos in a row) gets reinforced, and people repeat the action over and over again. It is highly addictive, and if people can get all the satisfaction that their brains and bodies crave without the need for any real effort on their part, then why would people be motivated to pursue any meaningful academic, professional or social activities which require time, thought or effort?"
Surely this is mostly the fault of the individual? Nobody is forced to watch TikTok videos or endlessly scroll through Instagram or FB - it's a personal choice they make. The rest of the world is still out there, hobbies are still viable. Taking all the blame away from the individual is also a problem - people have personal responsibility. Close your FB account and suddenly they have no power over you.
SB
Re your first point, perhaps the 'evidence' suggests that it is nothing to do with governments, but there's no way for us to truly know. I know some of my points may have seemed a bit conspirical but nothing would be a surprise.
Re your second point, I suppose it's a chicken or egg argument. Is it the fault of the social media companies for creating the platforms, or the fault of the users for choosing to sign up for them? Both. But if the platform didn't exist in the first place then there'd be nothing for the users to be drawn to.
But also people have to take personal responsibility too, like you say. For me TikTok is a line too far which I will never cross. It looks like pure garbage of the highest order. I know plenty of apparently more intelligent and objectively well-educated people who've now jumped on habitually looking at TikTok as well and I can't see at all what they get out of it. Why can't more people recognise it for what it is and say 'this isn't for me' and completely swerve it? It just suggests weak-mindedness and being easily influenced again.
Anyway I need to do some work.
[Post edited 9 Feb 2023 10:09]
@veterans_project on Instagram. Please follow the page.
So now we have machines which do most manual tasks and we have AI which can answer most questions…
I really look forward to this benefitting the whole of humanity and definitely not all going to the people at the top while 90% of the population earn even less with even worse working conditions.
Re your first point, perhaps the 'evidence' suggests that it is nothing to do with governments, but there's no way for us to truly know. I know some of my points may have seemed a bit conspirical but nothing would be a surprise.
Re your second point, I suppose it's a chicken or egg argument. Is it the fault of the social media companies for creating the platforms, or the fault of the users for choosing to sign up for them? Both. But if the platform didn't exist in the first place then there'd be nothing for the users to be drawn to.
But also people have to take personal responsibility too, like you say. For me TikTok is a line too far which I will never cross. It looks like pure garbage of the highest order. I know plenty of apparently more intelligent and objectively well-educated people who've now jumped on habitually looking at TikTok as well and I can't see at all what they get out of it. Why can't more people recognise it for what it is and say 'this isn't for me' and completely swerve it? It just suggests weak-mindedness and being easily influenced again.
Re your first point, perhaps the 'evidence' suggests that it is nothing to do with governments, but there's no way for us to truly know. I know some of my points may have seemed a bit conspirical but nothing would be a surprise.
Re your second point, I suppose it's a chicken or egg argument. Is it the fault of the social media companies for creating the platforms, or the fault of the users for choosing to sign up for them? Both. But if the platform didn't exist in the first place then there'd be nothing for the users to be drawn to.
But also people have to take personal responsibility too, like you say. For me TikTok is a line too far which I will never cross. It looks like pure garbage of the highest order. I know plenty of apparently more intelligent and objectively well-educated people who've now jumped on habitually looking at TikTok as well and I can't see at all what they get out of it. Why can't more people recognise it for what it is and say 'this isn't for me' and completely swerve it? It just suggests weak-mindedness and being easily influenced again.
Anyway I need to do some work.
[Post edited 9 Feb 2023 10:09]
"but there's no way for us to truly know."
At least for AI, we very much know where that has come from, the possibility of doing the sort of AI we see today has been known about for decades, it's just that the computational power required to run them was not feasible even if we understood the mathematics of it. We know the researchers involved and who they are funded by for the most part. This does include Government researchers but lots of engineers and scientists are Government funded.
With the increasing power of GPUs that can run these it's now possible for these to be run feasibly on commercial computers.
As for social media, again it seems a stretch to say the Government was involved in this. What seems far more obvious is that very large corporations used vast amounts of data to work out how to keep people on their platform for longer. As these got more advanced we see that these companies cared little about the health of people using their platforms and only about engagement statistics.
Quite frankly, governments barely keep up or understand computing as it is. For example, see continued attempts to ban encryption.
"It just suggests weak-mindedness and being easily influenced again."
This is somewhat unfair on people, as I put above, these systems are essentially designed to get people engaged and addicted.
The real fault for this is just that companies design "algorithms" to keep people as engaged as possible which usually means feeding them ever more extreme content. As human beings our brains were just not "designed" for this level of information.
At least for AI, we very much know where that has come from, the possibility of doing the sort of AI we see today has been known about for decades, it's just that the computational power required to run them was not feasible even if we understood the mathematics of it. We know the researchers involved and who they are funded by for the most part. This does include Government researchers but lots of engineers and scientists are Government funded.
With the increasing power of GPUs that can run these it's now possible for these to be run feasibly on commercial computers.
As for social media, again it seems a stretch to say the Government was involved in this. What seems far more obvious is that very large corporations used vast amounts of data to work out how to keep people on their platform for longer. As these got more advanced we see that these companies cared little about the health of people using their platforms and only about engagement statistics.
Quite frankly, governments barely keep up or understand computing as it is. For example, see continued attempts to ban encryption.
"It just suggests weak-mindedness and being easily influenced again."
This is somewhat unfair on people, as I put above, these systems are essentially designed to get people engaged and addicted.
The real fault for this is just that companies design "algorithms" to keep people as engaged as possible which usually means feeding them ever more extreme content. As human beings our brains were just not "designed" for this level of information.
I often think of us as 'the ape that is no longer intelligent enough to handle the new tools that it is clever enough to make'.
The use of the present tense is arguably transient.
# WE ARE STEALING THE FUTURE FROM OUR CHILDREN --- WE MUST CHANGE COURSE #
This is exactly what is happening, and anyone who is relatively intelligent should be extremely worried about where all these new services and platforms are taking us. I was thinking about this just yesterday, so I'll share my thoughts in this thread.
I truly believe that the advent of things such as social media and AI are part of a wider effort by governments to create a society of ever increasingly compliant, non-thinking and non-threatening 1984-esque drones.
They don't want a society full of critical, analytical and social individuals. It doesn't serve the greater need of a population who do as they are told, log on and do their time, and don't cause any problems or rock the boat for anyone.
Of course we need some academics and intellectuals, such as scientists, doctors, engineers etc, and society wouldn't be able to function or advance without that.
The progression of social media (which ironically is anything but social as it creates zombies who are addicted to staring at their phones and whose real interaction skills get further and further dumbed down) demonstrates my point.
Look at how it went from MySpace (where people actually had to read content), to Facebook (some reading still required, but more and more image based content), to YouTube (longer length videos), to Instagram (shorter length videos, and more and more images), to YouTube shorts videos, and now to TikTok (videos lasting only a few seconds in length).
It clearly maps how peoples' collective attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, to the point where we can now only focus on a single piece of content for a few seconds at a time. But we also spend ever increasing amounts of time doing it. How often have you said 'I'll just have a look on Facebook for 5 minutes' and then an hour later you've flicked between all your social media platforms dozens of times and have achieved absolutely nothing? I know I have done this myself plenty of times, and nowadays I really try hard to avoid going on social media, or have deleted my accounts/apps altogether.
Social media is also reinforcing the consumption of ever dumbed down content by providing a constant source of dopaminergic stimulation in our brains. The content makes people feel good, thus triggering dopamine in almost constant, short and sharp bursts. So the action (watching 20 TikTok videos in a row) gets reinforced, and people repeat the action over and over again. It is highly addictive, and if people can get all the satisfaction that their brains and bodies crave without the need for any real effort on their part, then why would people be motivated to pursue any meaningful academic, professional or social activities which require time, thought or effort?
What's the result of all of this? Huge swathes of the population who have constantly decreasing attention spans, decreasing thinking skills, and decreasing motivation to go out and actually do something.
How can someone whose attention span only lasts 10 seconds at a time pose a threat to the system? And as a wider group how can people join together to collaborate and achieve any change/revolution etc when not only do they all have weak attention spans and cognitive powers, but they also are becoming more and more used to living in isolation from others in the real world?
And now we have ChatGPT, which from the little I understand about it, is a platform for use when presented with a task or problem which actually requires some level of independent thought. Now we can just jump online, and boom!, there's my answer readily provided for me by a robot. No thought at all required on my part.
Edited to add - It's also not hard to see as a result how people can be so easily led, manipulated and gaslit by those in power when it comes to the actual important issues of the day. Things like important referendums, for example.
It's not good.
[Post edited 9 Feb 2023 8:55]
I love the irony of you posting all this on an online forum.
But largely, I agree.
Also, fixed this line for you; TWTD is also reinforcing the consumption of ever dumbed down content by Frimmers, and providing a constant source of dopaminergic stimulation in our brains.
This is exactly what is happening, and anyone who is relatively intelligent should be extremely worried about where all these new services and platforms are taking us. I was thinking about this just yesterday, so I'll share my thoughts in this thread.
I truly believe that the advent of things such as social media and AI are part of a wider effort by governments to create a society of ever increasingly compliant, non-thinking and non-threatening 1984-esque drones.
They don't want a society full of critical, analytical and social individuals. It doesn't serve the greater need of a population who do as they are told, log on and do their time, and don't cause any problems or rock the boat for anyone.
Of course we need some academics and intellectuals, such as scientists, doctors, engineers etc, and society wouldn't be able to function or advance without that.
The progression of social media (which ironically is anything but social as it creates zombies who are addicted to staring at their phones and whose real interaction skills get further and further dumbed down) demonstrates my point.
Look at how it went from MySpace (where people actually had to read content), to Facebook (some reading still required, but more and more image based content), to YouTube (longer length videos), to Instagram (shorter length videos, and more and more images), to YouTube shorts videos, and now to TikTok (videos lasting only a few seconds in length).
It clearly maps how peoples' collective attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, to the point where we can now only focus on a single piece of content for a few seconds at a time. But we also spend ever increasing amounts of time doing it. How often have you said 'I'll just have a look on Facebook for 5 minutes' and then an hour later you've flicked between all your social media platforms dozens of times and have achieved absolutely nothing? I know I have done this myself plenty of times, and nowadays I really try hard to avoid going on social media, or have deleted my accounts/apps altogether.
Social media is also reinforcing the consumption of ever dumbed down content by providing a constant source of dopaminergic stimulation in our brains. The content makes people feel good, thus triggering dopamine in almost constant, short and sharp bursts. So the action (watching 20 TikTok videos in a row) gets reinforced, and people repeat the action over and over again. It is highly addictive, and if people can get all the satisfaction that their brains and bodies crave without the need for any real effort on their part, then why would people be motivated to pursue any meaningful academic, professional or social activities which require time, thought or effort?
What's the result of all of this? Huge swathes of the population who have constantly decreasing attention spans, decreasing thinking skills, and decreasing motivation to go out and actually do something.
How can someone whose attention span only lasts 10 seconds at a time pose a threat to the system? And as a wider group how can people join together to collaborate and achieve any change/revolution etc when not only do they all have weak attention spans and cognitive powers, but they also are becoming more and more used to living in isolation from others in the real world?
And now we have ChatGPT, which from the little I understand about it, is a platform for use when presented with a task or problem which actually requires some level of independent thought. Now we can just jump online, and boom!, there's my answer readily provided for me by a robot. No thought at all required on my part.
Edited to add - It's also not hard to see as a result how people can be so easily led, manipulated and gaslit by those in power when it comes to the actual important issues of the day. Things like important referendums, for example.
It's not good.
[Post edited 9 Feb 2023 8:55]
Don't have the attention span to read this, can't help but feel I would've done a few years ago.
A statistical model that stops us having to think!
[Post edited 27 Feb 2023 23:33]
I've used it extensively since it was released/became mainstream.
I'm not a programmer. I do have (very) basic programming knowledge. I've completed basic programming tasks and I've been able to question and learn what has been programmed along the way.
I often need to deliver information to people that may be upsetting or sensitive. Being able to use a tool to challenge what I write gives me a second set of eyes to deliver more robustly sensitive information. Like when I learnt to swim as a kid, the repetition of practising allows me to improve my initial phrasing.
You saying ChatGPT is stopping me thinking is like someone telling me I don't know maths, because I use a calculator. It is so wide of the mark it is baffling. Yes, you can punch in some numbers into a calculator and say you did maths. But you can also use it to learn or to take on more complex problems. Same with ChatGPT, you can use it to take on more complex tasks and learn along the way.
[Post edited 28 Feb 2023 6:52]
Submit your 1-24 league prediction here -https://www.twtd.co.uk/forum/514096/page:1 - for the opportunity to get a free Ipswich top.
I've used it extensively since it was released/became mainstream.
I'm not a programmer. I do have (very) basic programming knowledge. I've completed basic programming tasks and I've been able to question and learn what has been programmed along the way.
I often need to deliver information to people that may be upsetting or sensitive. Being able to use a tool to challenge what I write gives me a second set of eyes to deliver more robustly sensitive information. Like when I learnt to swim as a kid, the repetition of practising allows me to improve my initial phrasing.
You saying ChatGPT is stopping me thinking is like someone telling me I don't know maths, because I use a calculator. It is so wide of the mark it is baffling. Yes, you can punch in some numbers into a calculator and say you did maths. But you can also use it to learn or to take on more complex problems. Same with ChatGPT, you can use it to take on more complex tasks and learn along the way.
[Post edited 28 Feb 2023 6:52]
OK then how about in 99/100 uses?
"They break our legs and tell us to be grateful when they offer us crutches."
You have to understand what the keys mean that you are pressing on a calculator. Hope you don't crochet!
Hope you don't crochet? Is that really where you want to go with this? You sound like you are grasping on to the last thing you read. Perhaps ChatGPT could help if you are struggling for ideas?
On the one hand you say it is replacing our thinking and on the other you highlight its mistakes. Which is it, a demonic force set replace our thinking? Or a tool that is still imperfect and going through development? Or have you dropped the point that it is replacing our thinking, as nothing you've written there supports your original point.
When I was programming with it, it made mistakes. But I learnt enough to see the mistakes and learnt to ask questions to would give better results. You have have to know the best way to ask questions, to get the best answers, if you are adding complexity.
The first calculators came out in the 1600s. Before that, other counting devices like the abacus. Calculators have been built upon for hundreds of years. Let's see ChatGPT improve across 4 years, before we judge the quality of its output next to a tool that has been refined over 400 years.
Submit your 1-24 league prediction here -https://www.twtd.co.uk/forum/514096/page:1 - for the opportunity to get a free Ipswich top.
Hope you don't crochet? Is that really where you want to go with this? You sound like you are grasping on to the last thing you read. Perhaps ChatGPT could help if you are struggling for ideas?
On the one hand you say it is replacing our thinking and on the other you highlight its mistakes. Which is it, a demonic force set replace our thinking? Or a tool that is still imperfect and going through development? Or have you dropped the point that it is replacing our thinking, as nothing you've written there supports your original point.
When I was programming with it, it made mistakes. But I learnt enough to see the mistakes and learnt to ask questions to would give better results. You have have to know the best way to ask questions, to get the best answers, if you are adding complexity.
The first calculators came out in the 1600s. Before that, other counting devices like the abacus. Calculators have been built upon for hundreds of years. Let's see ChatGPT improve across 4 years, before we judge the quality of its output next to a tool that has been refined over 400 years.
Evidence from my daughter's A level cohort suggests that it is replacing thinking. I am happy it is of assistance to you. On a side note do you see deep fake as a tool with some benefits too? I fear we are losing ourselves in technology rather than being made more complete through it.
"They break our legs and tell us to be grateful when they offer us crutches."
I've used it extensively since it was released/became mainstream.
I'm not a programmer. I do have (very) basic programming knowledge. I've completed basic programming tasks and I've been able to question and learn what has been programmed along the way.
I often need to deliver information to people that may be upsetting or sensitive. Being able to use a tool to challenge what I write gives me a second set of eyes to deliver more robustly sensitive information. Like when I learnt to swim as a kid, the repetition of practising allows me to improve my initial phrasing.
You saying ChatGPT is stopping me thinking is like someone telling me I don't know maths, because I use a calculator. It is so wide of the mark it is baffling. Yes, you can punch in some numbers into a calculator and say you did maths. But you can also use it to learn or to take on more complex problems. Same with ChatGPT, you can use it to take on more complex tasks and learn along the way.
[Post edited 28 Feb 2023 6:52]
I’m with you. I think it’s unlikely that chatGPT will do a job for you, but it can certainly help get you 80% of the way and ultimately save time. I asked it to write me a job spec for a role I’m recruiting and it came up with a really good effort. Obviously I had to tailor it and make it a bit more specific but it made a 1 hour job a 15 minute job. Often with these things getting started is the hardest part.
IMO AI won’t take your job, but someone who embraces it might.
I’m with you. I think it’s unlikely that chatGPT will do a job for you, but it can certainly help get you 80% of the way and ultimately save time. I asked it to write me a job spec for a role I’m recruiting and it came up with a really good effort. Obviously I had to tailor it and make it a bit more specific but it made a 1 hour job a 15 minute job. Often with these things getting started is the hardest part.
IMO AI won’t take your job, but someone who embraces it might.
Totally agree. For me it comes down to the old computer adage Garbage In = Garbage Out.
As an electronics engineer who is a bit of a jack of all trades I think it's brilliant. From coding to creating a project plan it's been so helpful over the last 6 weeks since I started using it. I've had it tied in knots with a few things but overall found it very useful.
I accept it raises the bar for the lazy to a degree but if used well can really help you push the boundaries of learning and speed up learning a new skill or info.
So those that can will accelerate their learning whilst others will just learn a bit more.
Evidence from my daughter's A level cohort suggests that it is replacing thinking. I am happy it is of assistance to you. On a side note do you see deep fake as a tool with some benefits too? I fear we are losing ourselves in technology rather than being made more complete through it.
The IB is embracing it for some of their assessments now
It is amazing in all kinds of ways. A mate showed me it last week. Particularly impressed with the creative side e.g. give me 5 ideas for apps that don’t exist for mental health etc. you can then as it to write the code. Mental.
Good bottom line about ai yesterday which is worth a listen
It is amazing in all kinds of ways. A mate showed me it last week. Particularly impressed with the creative side e.g. give me 5 ideas for apps that don’t exist for mental health etc. you can then as it to write the code. Mental.
Good bottom line about ai yesterday which is worth a listen
I am impressed it can produce working code snippets but anything more complicated than that is far beyond its abilities.
Are you a coder? I was wondering who might feel most threatened by it. For example could it be that in the future you will be able to say write code for this and it would? Not my area so I don’t know enough to say how much of that is reliant on ‘human’ skills.
Are you a coder? I was wondering who might feel most threatened by it. For example could it be that in the future you will be able to say write code for this and it would? Not my area so I don’t know enough to say how much of that is reliant on ‘human’ skills.
I am, yes. I'm not at all threatened by it.
It could be used in the future to right essentially what I put above, snippets. I could give it very strict parameters and get it to write a block of code for something that is not all that important like reversing a binary tree. Basically, well-known problems with well-known solutions that you could write for the fifteenth time but are not worth your time. There was actually already something doing this that is similar to ChatGPT called GitHub Co-pilot which is aimed specifically at doing what I mentioned above.
Even without these tools, they are usually only a short Google away.
What these tools can't really do yet is work out any sort of context. Once you move into Senior and above roles as a software engineer the job is much less about writing tonnes of code and much more about architecting systems and understanding the domain (e.g. Banking) in which you're writing and how that translates into reliable and maintainable software.
I've been using it for some time to try and help other teachers and students. Found a few very useful ways it can be applied to the classroom and revision.
This week I generated 2 different answers to an essay question, the AI can structure responses well, but can't evaluate or apply specific examples. Showing this to the kids helps them as they get confidence from adding in specific knowledge, they often don't know how to write well, so seeing the structure helps a lot.
For revision, it's a great tool to generate material students can then appraise and correct to build confidence. It also allows them to do some high order thinking and decide how true the statements are and how to order them.
You seem remarkably blase about giving your job over to a laptop.
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