wanderingmagus
Christine Lemmer-WebberAdults lose skills to AI; Children never build them. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-children-never-build-them
Hacker 
AI6YR Ben@cwebber Oooh, this quote, exactly!
"...In my view, the most likely explanation for this is not generational preference but biological development. The older group probably offloaded tasks they already knew how to perform. The younger group offloaded task they never learned how to perform. These neural pathways for source evaluation and constructing arguments were never formed. You can’t atrophy a muscle that was never built...."
Koen Hufkens, PhD@ai6yr @cwebber When mentoring students I often get the question - how do you figure things out so quickly.
Then I tell them that I've been messing with hardware and software since I was in my early teens - and I made tons of (innocent) mistakes.
When you get to be an adult you then know how to approach complex systems where you might not have this much margin.
Much of it is heuristics. Offloading heuristics (despite biases) is a VERY BAD IDEA.
Faraiwe@koen_hufkens @ai6yr @cwebber experience: the collection of times when you went "oh, shit..." and filed it under "no, not doing that again, nope" for future reference.
Agnieszka R. Turczyńska@koen_hufkens @ai6yr @cwebber This is the good case scenario. The bad case scenario is https://circumstances.run/@agturcz/114568845841328174
Agnieszka R. Turczyńska (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image @[email protected] Well, I do not know the full context of Mans's situation, but there is this meme, which I, as a Senior Dev, find very accurate 😅 @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
Dave bauer@koen_hufkens @ai6yr @cwebber Everything I ever did for a job was noticing patterns and applying them in new situations.
Allan Chow
Myk@cwebber I was having this discussion with co-workers and came to the conclusion that with people relying on AI, things are gonna stagnate. no "new" knowledge will be pumped into the system so it will just be regurgitated slop once people stop thinking for themselves.
FediThing 
KatLS@cwebber and there it is: our education system has mostly been designed for compliance. It needs a redesign because humans will follow the incentives. We are not complicated that way. 🐒🍌 We need to incentivize critical thinking.
Thankfully, compliance was never one of my parenting goals. Nor should it be anyone’s.
Cooperation is a much better goal.
lizzzzard
ClickyMcTicker
David Nash@ClickyMcTicker @lizzard @KatLS @cwebber My AP English teacher had a unit on logical fallacies and how to detect them. The science teachers (especially at AP level) were pretty consistent at teaching how to approach problems critically and not just plug numbers into an equation. All of this in a bland, middle-class public (USA) high school that spent way too much on football and not enough on teachers. Then again, that was also almost 40 years ago.
@ClickyMcTicker @KatLS @cwebber many teachers try. I'm not so sure about the system as a whole. I'm not even thinking about the US here, I'm not from there. Just as a general class education thing.
ts 🚇
Nicole Parsonshttps://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/03/stephen-miller-public-schools-immigration-plyler/
https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/11/07/make-aristocracy-great-again-lost-roots-of-techno-feudalism/
"Billionaires seek to recreate illiterate peasantry"
Roger Freeman & Reagan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_A._Freeman_(economist)
https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/
https://medium.com/armedwithreason/the-student-debt-crisis-and-republican-fear-politics-a6c6c4acc9c1
Koch Network vs public education
https://jacobin.com/2018/06/public-education-privatization-koch-brothers-teachers
https://www.desmog.com/2025/12/11/the-koch-network-is-pushing-trump-to-accelerate-ai-documents-show/
1/
2/
AI is in service of a neofeudalist world order.
https://protagonist-science.medium.com/the-ai-race-to-reboot-feudalism-92a4878915f5
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/1/2313886/-They-are-the-lords-We-are-the-serfs
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/16/against-the-new-feudalism-of-algorithms-and-oligarchs/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/07/government-privatization-feudalism/682888/
https://thedispatch.com/article/peasants-feudalism-maga-carlson/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/in-2029-the-internet-will-make-us-act-like-peasants.html
https://brewminate.com/bound-to-the-soil-peasants-power-and-the-trap-of-medieval-feudalism/
https://emptywheel.net/2009/12/20/brainstorming-future-american-neo-feudalism-today/
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/no-kings-is-not-enough
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/opinion/how-to-reinvent-the-gop-908266.html
https://hegemon.substack.com/p/how-to-monetize-the-rise-of-medieval
A corrupt religion to read our bibles for us.
A corrupt overlord to extract taxes & labor.
Bound to the land, trapped, with no chance of changing.
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https://itsgoingdown.org/good-night-tech-right-pull-the-plug-on-ai-fascism/
The thought architects of the current corrupt kleptocracy.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-world-view-sources-00168984
Patrick Deneen
Peter Thiel
Curtis Yarvin
René Girard
Sohrab Ahmari
Claremont Institute
Rod Dreher
https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas
The funders of fascist feudalism: the fossil fuel industry
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/05/musk-trump-feud-2024-election-contributions
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/us/politics/koch-network-2024-election-trump.html
https://www.desmog.com/2024/10/23/trump-project-2025-tim-dunn-crownquest-convention-states/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jul/11/tim-dunn-texas-oil-billionaire-trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/04/climate/texas-public-policy-foundation-climate-change.html
Captain SuperlativeAnecdata: Asked a specifying question for my context of a presenter at an event. His answer: “I have set up an LLM to answer questions from these files at this url. Give it a try!”
I did not and I will not.
Nu Modular@cwebber More fodder for the top 1% wealthiest, to squeeze as much out of the masses as they can.
De Oppresso Liber
Mauriziano@cwebber This is the downside of using AI, which gives us everything ready-made, so all mental effort becomes unnecessary, weakening our minds.
@cwebber Dear lord 😞 This is destroying kids and will destroy society if it isn't stopped:
"A child offloading a task they've never learned to perform is not making a choice. They are skipping a developmental step (of critical thinking) that was never developed. The capacity doesn't exist yet. The foreclosure may be permanent—and because they have no independent baseline, they cannot recognize what they're losing."
Gytis Repečkadevelopers who delegated coding to AI produced working code but failed conceptual understanding
I wish tech industry would have that sink in 
Bad News Nobody@gytisrepecka @cwebber "working"
poetaster
inpc
Moss Wizard@cwebber It’s compounded by prior generations of decreasing education in arts and humanities, leading to adults (parents) who themselves did not learn creative thinking, ethics, or different cultures. I remember 20 years ago a comp sci professor complaining that his university was churning out tech grads with terrible communication skills. Those are now the “45 year olds” whose abilities atrophy “but could recover”. Their kids didn’t stand a chance against AI.
lemgandi
xs4me2
tuban_muzuruConsidering that the humans are doing an absolutely terrible job, I figure the AI systems can at least be measured....
leckse
aeva@cwebber i saw that the other day. I found the author's aside about how they use it to summarize "hundreds" of papers a bit alarming.
aceryz@aeva @cwebber yes, he seems way too optimistic about the situation of "adults", himself included, using this technology.
Meanwhile, my university is making LLMs available for students on its platforms with the reasoning, quote:
"The available tools are intended to be used responsibly and treated as support in the process of acquiring knowledge and developing one’s own skills."
... and I want to eat my hat. Students supposed to develop their research skill are sąbotaged by the university.
Eniko Fox
Emi@emi @eniko @cwebber there's also the problem (which iirc the author overlooks) which is what happens when someone repeatedly internalizes noise that statistically resembles information. even if you have the skill to theoretically spot a specific inaccuracy, what happens when you read misinformation restated hundreds of different ways? what happens if you repeatedly scan it without much thought because you're in a hurry?
Duchamp Pérez@cwebber Being forced to use it, it feels different