Step into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, US, and the future feels a little closer. Glass cabinets display prototypes of weird and wonderful creations, from tiny desktop robots to a surrealist sculpture created by an AI model prompted to design a tea set made from body parts. In the lobby, an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. Five floors up, research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna has been working on wearable brain-computer interfaces she hopes will one day enable people who cannot speak, due to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to communicate using their minds.
Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people's brain states. Another project she is working on is a wearable device – one prototype looks like a pair of glasses – that can tell when someone is getting confused or losing focus. Around two years ago, she began receiving out-of-the blue emails from strangers who reported that they had started using large language models such as ChatGPT and felt their brain had changed as a result. Their memories didn't seem as good – was that even possible, they asked her? Kosmyna herself had been struck by how quickly people had already begun to rely on generative AI. She noticed colleagues using ChatGPT at work, and the applications she received from researchers hoping to join her team started to look different. Their emails were longer and more formal and, sometimes, when she interviewed candidates on Zoom, she noticed they kept pausing before responding and looking off to the side – were they getting AI to help them, she wondered, shocked. And if they were using AI, how much did they even understand of the answers they were giving?
[...] AI companies are determined to push their products on to the public before we fully understand the psychological and cognitive costs
[...] Digital multitasking gives you a false sense of being on top of things without ever getting to the bottom of anything
[...] Are schools equipped to produce creative thinkers – or is the education system going to churn out mindless, AI-essay writing drones?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 21, @07:34PM (2 children)
Seeing that a bunch of ex Qanon toadies put Trump in office, gold is not color I would pick for this age.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 22, @11:20AM (1 child)
It's not a bad choice: It's the color of "they're pissing on you and telling you it's you getting rich".
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by cereal_burpist on Wednesday October 29, @03:55AM
Reminds me of something from Monty Python:
You, sir, are like a stream of bat's piss.
What?!
I merely meant, your Majesty, that you shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Freeman on Tuesday October 21, @08:06PM (2 children)
With the advent of current versions of AI and technology. There's been no better tools in history for stupid people to band together and create giant cesspools of misinformation. The bigger problem isn't necessarily the stupid people. The bigger problem is that you have "smart people" that create giant cesspools of misinformation to forward their own agenda / their countries' agenda / etc.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fen on Wednesday October 22, @05:43AM (1 child)
A bible verse doesn't indicate being smart. Try quoting "The Elephant in the Brain" or "Siddhartha".
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday October 22, @01:34PM
That is a matter of opinion and one can agree to disagree.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Informative) by Deep Blue on Tuesday October 21, @08:18PM (4 children)
indeed
(Score: 3, Insightful) by chucky on Tuesday October 21, @08:47PM
Agree mod is missing. No further comments needed.
(Score: 3, Touché) by looorg on Tuesday October 21, @09:03PM (2 children)
TLDR; Yes?
(Score: 2) by Deep Blue on Wednesday October 22, @05:50PM (1 child)
I just read the topic and responded to that. Still have not read the article. It's not too long, but i'm happy with that.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday October 23, @09:06AM
It's more then what I did. It was supposed to be funny, it wasn't. Poor joke. Not meant to be taken serious.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by istartedi on Tuesday October 21, @09:57PM (2 children)
Say what you will about illiterate people, but they tended to have a vast store of remembered lore and even facts. The griot [wikipedia.org] is a less reliable way to pass knowledge down, so when cultures learned to read and write they generally discarded such traditions; but not entirely. Raise your hand if you had to remember state capitals, the mind numbing details of Civil War battles, or (if you went to religious school) portions of the Bible and/or the order in which the books were written. Poetry. Students still recite poems, right?
Anyway, you could say that reading and writing made us stupid in some ways if you define intelligence as the ability to remember a lot of things. Written language is like a prosthetic for our memory, and it's a compelling idea to think that perhaps it might even contribute to dementia as the brain atrophies from not having to remember things like the entire town genealogy. Literacy is relatively new. Has evolution had time to catch up? Will it? Maybe AI ends up following a similar trajectory--or maybe it happens too fast and truly does result in a massive dumbing down with dreadful social implications.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday October 21, @11:04PM
Asking if evolution has "caught up" with literally any invention of mankind, it's safe to say the answer is no.
Evolution hasn't even really caught up with being bipedal, in terms of gigantic drawbacks like dying in childbirth
Fully bridging the gap between our biology and our technology seems unimaginable to me. That's a task for our brains to solve, not natural selection
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 21, @11:18PM
"reading and writing made us stupid in some ways if you define intelligence as the ability to remember a lot of things"
If you want to destroy what was learned in the past, burn down the libraries and rely on just "telephone tag"
being force fed to you by Techno-Parrots for what you know.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @12:05AM (6 children)
In Firefox, I loaded the extension No More Gemini. Now, when Google searching, the Gemini "AI" answer often pops up an answer, and then the extension takes it down within a second or so.
Ideally, I'd like an extension that added the appropriate command to every search string so that Gemini didn't even run...but I haven't found that yet. Any thoughts?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rich on Wednesday October 22, @12:17AM (4 children)
At some point in time it seemed to help to append "&udm=14" to the query. You'll find discussions on the web if you look for that and/or "google old school".
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday October 22, @12:22AM (1 child)
Alternatively you can mention 'Trump dementia' and the AI will ignore your search.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈 - Give us ribbiti or make us croak! 🐸
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Wednesday October 22, @12:26AM
Unless, that is, you ask for it with "AI mode"
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Wednesday October 22, @12:31AM (1 child)
The "&udm=14" is what Google search does when you press "Web" search mode (from below the search field) - I guess it will work for as long as that search mode is still supported by Google.
After that, it will be a matter of an extension dropping content from the results page.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by cereal_burpist on Wednesday October 29, @04:24AM
Or, for us tinkerers: https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/ [tedium.co]
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Wednesday October 22, @12:20AM
Maybe ublock origin?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Wednesday October 22, @12:34AM (7 children)
We haven't yet reached peak stupidity (or bottom if you are worried about oxymorons).
Now one wonders - does stupidity admit a maximum value or the only way to stop it is by total humanity extinction?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @12:54AM (5 children)
We have quite some ways to go. However the bifurcation between our "do-ers" and our "useless eaters" is becoming obvious and social-credit-score accounting systems are coming into play. With a granularity down to source of each dollar earned and spent by each individual.
The Beast of Revelation is being born.
I see a house cleaning coming. It's not gonna be pretty. Economics will force us into it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @01:05AM (2 children)
Economics doesn't force anybody to do anything; it measures what they choose to do on one boring axis. But if your vision comes to pass, I'm guessing you're going to gleefully take the job of killing those deemed "useless eaters".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @02:47AM (1 child)
You guessed wrong. This is some stuff I am seeing on extreme political sites. Don't shoot the voltmeter for reporting the bus is hot.
I am retired. I could easily fall into the category of "useless eaters". Although I cannot see me going after anyone else, I could easily see people who need my things simply taking them. I had to work for them, pay for them, and buy durable so I wouldn't have to buy the same thing over and over. I had too many other things I needed to pay for. Credit is terribly expensive.
If my stuff is taken, then my survival may depend on my simply taking , as I, like them, no longer have currency of the realm to pay.
Times have changed. The newer generations may not have the work option, left with only the take option, to meet their survival needs.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday October 22, @04:11AM
What good is (fiat) money for, if those who are meant to buy don't have them?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Touché) by c0lo on Wednesday October 22, @04:06AM
Be very careful what you wish for, an actively-stupid is one of the biggest danger that one can encounter.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 22, @11:30AM
The thing is, I'm not at all convinced that our economic system does a good job of differentiating between our doers and useless eaters. Plenty of rich or powerful people have accomplished nothing or close to nothing in their lives and just inherited their money and/or position, and plenty of poor people are smart and hardworking but couldn't get rich because of limited opportunities. As the Dilbert Principle suggests, Money = Work / Knowledge, so the stupider you are, the easier it is to get rich. Or at Steven Jay Gould argues, odds are very good that someone as smart as Einstein or Newton spent their lives toiling away in a sweatshop or cocoa farm because that was the best option they had to survive, much less thrive. The cream isn't always what rises to the top, and what's on top isn't always cream.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Insightful) by krishnoid on Wednesday October 22, @01:58AM
I do know that I'd like my AI stupidity at the bottom of the Google results rather than at the top, so I can start by looking at what I was searching for.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jb on Wednesday October 22, @06:17AM
I don't see how that is any different from a remote interviewee being prompted by an off-camera accomplice, or even a big pre-written list of answers to potential questions (both of which have been known to happen).
Bottom line is that if an organisation (especially a university!) is so miserly that's they're not even willing to fly their short-listed candidates in for on campus interviews, then they need to expect that a certain proportion of candidates are going to cheat. Cheating facilitated by LLMs is no worse than any other form of cheating (in fact, probably not quite as bad, since LLMs often give answers that are outright wrong or wildly inappropriate, which is much easier to spot that cheating facilitated by a human accomplice).