Mastodawn

How many studies do researchers need to do before the threat of LLMs is taken seriously? This technology *might* have some useful niche applications, but widespread deployment will be a disaster for humanity.

This shit is an existential hazard, and not in the way the AI companies love to talk about. It's not going to take over the world like Skynet, it's a cognitohazard that turns anyone that interacts with it into an idiot.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-children-never-build-them

Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them.

Discussions of cognitive offloading often miss a critical distinction: What AI does to a 45-year-old's brain is categorically different from what it does to a 14-year-old's.

Psychology Today

Show thread

St. Chris 1d ago

@malcircuit It’s a social and professional ladder pull, and it suppresses critical thinking. It’s exactly what the beneficiaries of a stratified society want.

Show thread

Mallory's Musings & Mischief 1d ago

@FormerlyStC Yeah, it's what they *think* they want, but they've also drank their own kool aid. They think it's a ladder pull, but it's more like sawing off the tree limb you're standing on. They think everything will keep ticking along like it has been, but it won't.

Show thread

St. Chris 1d ago

@malcircuit Sure, it’s the ladder they’re *standing on,* but anyone who’s watched Road Runner cartoons knows that you keep standing in the air after you take away the platform.

This connects directly to the current administration being filled with people who love gangster movies because they never bothered to watch them all the way to the end. (And every other story, or history, that they try to cite in their favor.)

Show thread

Anthony

@[email protected] @[email protected] The economy, politics, and tech is centering around how to keep the deca- and hectobillionaires fully insulated from the problems they directly cause. As far as I can see they are not sawing off their own ladders or anything like that. They are consolidating their position at the tippy top. Their position there does not depend on the masses being educated, literate, or particularly skilled anymore. Instead, it requires the masses to be docile. I will start believing that this situation is changing when the masses are no longer docile, but there's not much evidence of that, at least not in the US as far as I can see.

It's possible the wealthy and powerful have miscalculated and current automation is not enough to allow them to retain an acceptable lifestyle while being fully decoupled from the masses. However, I don't see this as a foregone conclusion, even as I personally believe it is probably true.