New newsletter: THE END OF THINKING Doomsday predictions about AI taking our jobs in the future shift focus away from where it belongs: in present reality, the age of screened tech has coincided with declines in literacy, reading, and writing. We are deskilling ourselves.
@DKThomp Does this apply to China? Japan? South Korea? I suspect sacrificing our manufacturing base and gorging on Dollar Hegemony might have something to do with our deskilling. That's a typical product of sloth and gluttony after all.
@DKThomp google maps also destroyed our navigation skills yet no one is pearl clutching about that its human nature to outsource compute to other things whether they're machines or other humans (e.g. wives/husbands)
@DKThomp We have all of the world's libraries at our fingertips, if you have THAT and you become an illiterate retard - you deserve what you get.
@DKThomp Seriously how do you keep putting out bangers like this
@DKThomp AI is transforming education in less developed countries by offering personalized learning, adaptive assessments, and virtual teacher support. AI can expand access and strengthen learning outcomes.
@DKThomp When no one else does the thinking anymore, thinking becomes even more valuable
@DKThomp tech must lift human potential
@DKThomp Tech age traded literacy for scrolling
@DKThomp I do think a lot of folks really have had their short term reward circuits hacked in a way that makes them perform worse at a lot of cognitive work
@DKThomp carl sagan was big on this point. we have a chance not to do this
@DKThomp Screens can massively boost learning & offer the only proven path to a scalable leap forward DARPA Digital Tutor program delivered 3-8 sigma, outpacing Bloom’s 2 sigma 1-1 human tutoring Quality of screen experience matters; a rectifying solution is emerging for K-12 math
@DKThomp This is why schools with minimal dependence on screens are going to be so important.
@DKThomp It’s so easy to say that AI should be a tool to augment thought, not replace it. That’s been my overwhelming experience in my personal life. But I am coming to terms with the reality that it is not that way for most people and it’s deeply troubling.
@DKThomp A pandemic and a lockdown will do that to you.
@DKThomp Thoughts?
@DKThomp Just a transition period as the tech is getting build but isn’t simple enough for people to use yet / not ready for corporate adoption. Def a thinking / skills issue either way but that happens with every new tech paradigm shift.
@DKThomp this was really good. I wrote about this in the form of AI monoculture in government. Might find interesting. https://x.com/prue_0/status/19...
@DKThomp As planned. We will see who survives this and build with those that do.
@DKThomp "high schools have chunkified books to prepare students for the reading-comprehension sections of standardized exams." hasn't the problem, forever, been standardised testing and forcing kids to learn how to pass tests and not actually understand information?
@DKThomp Wrote about this here: https://www.whitenoise.email/p... “The hidden machinery now powers the visible human. In other words, we used to hide the humans inside the machine. Now we hide the machine behind the humans. This strange new world resembles Theseus's famous paradox: the ship
@DKThomp Agreed
@DKThomp AI has really only been a part of our lives for about two years, but according to the data this trend really started around 2014-15. Seems the issue is more with just how we consume information (bite sized, multi-screen, videos over words) rather than AI.
@DKThomp The charts show the decline started long before AI was relevant, so how can that be the cause? I'd posit that the conservative war on public and higher education is the cause. They've been defunding public schools in favor of private for a decade and it's starting to show.
@DKThomp AI is dangerous because it allows the FEW IN CHARGE of AI to think for the masses. Garbage in, Garbage out. Who controls the Garbage in and who receives the garbage out? Society is going backwards and it will accelerate, then it will slow & reverse. History! All this takes time.
@DKThomp The end of thinking started long before AI. When humans went to socialism and no longer need to "think" to survive is when it started. Then humans decided that teaching people political ideas in schools instead of teaching them to "Think" has compounded the problem.
@DKThomp We get 8-12 interns per summer, high school and college students, and they're super curious, independent-minded, and think critically about hard subjects. But just small sample size here I guess 🤷♂️
@DKThomp De-skilling can also be read as desk-(k)illing. Too many people sitting at desks
@DKThomp We're retiring old skills & delegating them to technologies that can do it better than us. Our skill sets will evolve when technologies evolve. Technology rises the floor enabling us all to reach for higher ceilings.
@DKThomp Gyms exist because our sedentary lives replaced the movement we evolved for. With AI taking over daily reasoning, will we one day need ‘cognitive gyms’ to keep our minds in shape?
@DKThomp Both issues are really important. And of course the bigger issue of AI risk that @ESYudkowsky has just published a book on. We’ve got to juggle all three.
@DKThomp Derek, you're wonderful I love your stuff. But several of those graphs cut off at 2022, when chatGPT emerged. There is another glaring cause that isn't AI. We need much better research on causality of AI on learning.
@DKThomp It's an interesting dynamic where workers can have FOMO (in terms of using gen AI tools so they don't fall behind over time), but also leaning heavily on the tools is problematic (as you detail).
@DKThomp ‼️