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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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I understand. My point is, every generation has always had this complaint about the one following it.

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.

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.

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.