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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33044 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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ChatGPT is only going to make this worse: you need to know even less python to actually get your code to do what you want it to, which seems good on the surface, but increasingly it means that you are offloading more and more of your thinking onto the machine and thus becoming further and further divorced from what you are actually supposed to be an expert in. Taken to the extreme, in a future where no one knows how to code or do electrical engineering, asking GPT how to do these things is going to be more akin to asking the Oracle to grant your ships a favorable wind than to talking to a very smart human about how to solve a problem.

We have been offloading thinking to tools forever, I highly doubt we will reach some breaking point now. We absolutely do lose knowledge when we gain this, but we trade it for more efficiency. Is it bad that we have calculators everywhere?

I'm not sure I really like what I see to be honest. AI has the potential to be mildly to very useful, but the way I see it being used now is primarily to reduce the agency of the user.

I agree with this on the advertising portion. I'm becoming increasingly concerned that targeted advertising could lead to terrifying outcomes, like a small group controlling public opinion. (actually that already exists, but still)

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