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I understand. My point is, every generation has always had this complaint about the one following it. Everyone's parochial about the technological level with which they're familiar, and suspicious about every one following. We can even acknowledge that some of the doomsaying predictions made about this or that new technology were right on the money, and yet that the technology in question was still a boon to the human species on net.
"Now that they're written down, no one's able to recite long passages of text from memory anymore!"
"Now that we have guns, no one knows how to hunt animals with a compound bow anymore!"
"Now that we have player pianos, our vocal cords will atrophy from disuse!"
"Now that we have internal combustion engines, everyone will become fat, slovenly and sedentary!"
"Now that we have cheap and reliable medicine, there's no incentive for people to live secularly healthful lives!"
"Now that we have
slide rulescalculators, no one can perform complex arithmetic calculations in their head anymore!""Now that Word automatically spellchecks your writing, no one can spell anymore!"
"Now that Google Maps navigates for you, no one can read an OS map or perform basic orienteering anymore!"
That's not to say that I'm not at all concerned about the impact of ChatGPT on literacy and logical thought, particularly on developing brains - if I had children, I wouldn't be giving them smartphones until they were of age.
But at the same time, I don't feel like I've lost out that much because I don't know how to hunt game, or that I can travel a few hundred kilometres in three hours rather than several days, or that I've outsourced the task of navigation to Google Maps. When it comes to ChatGPT, it's important to bear in mind that this technology is very new. We may soon find that having it at our disposal affords us the ability to perform intellectual tasks we couldn't do otherwise, or frees up our time which would otherwise be wasted on time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks. Or maybe it'll turn all our brains to mush. At this point I think it's too soon to say, and I'm not yet at the point of wanting to wage Butlerian jihad.
And to return to my previous point: the advent of weaponry did result in us becoming physically weaker than chimpanzees. But I kind of - don't care? Doesn't seem like that big a deal in the scheme of things.
And my point is that it's not true. It's a thought terminating cliche deployed every time someone points out things are going in a direction that implies that capital "P" Progress is bad. Off the top of my head, one member my family was a big fan of steam trains, and while he did lament the knowledge of how to maintain them is going extinct, it was more about liking to look at the things go "choo choo", he was perfectly aware that diesel and electric trains are taking over, and offer something better. There's also a long line of electrician (and -adjecent) professionals in my family, and while the progress from vacuum tubes to integrated circuits, to transistors, to microprocessors, caused some "I don't know if I can keep up with this" angst, it again did not result in any claims about following generations losing essential skills of maintaining vacuum tubes.
I'll grant that I can imagine a way to use the technology in a way that's compatible with the growth of humanity. What I'm saying though is that looking at every thing we've done recently developed technologies, this is not the direction we're moving in. We are moving, in a way that is hard for me not to see as deliberate, in a direction of dumbing down, centralization of control, and mass manipulation of society. The point of all these complaints is to stop and think about what the hell we're doing, and averting this.
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