Lots of people on Lemmy really dislike AI’s current implementations and use cases.
I’m trying to understand what people would want to be happening right now.
Destroy gen AI? Implement laws? Hoping all companies use it for altruistic purposes to help all of mankind?
Thanks for the discourse. Please keep it civil, but happy to be your punching bag.
Independent thought? All relevant thought is highly dependent of other people and their thoughts.
That’s exactly why I bring this up. Having systems that teach people to think in a similar way enable us to build complex stuff and have a modern society.
That’s why it’s really weird to hear this ”people should think for themselves” criticism of AI. It’s a similar justification to antivaxxers saying you ”should do your own research”.
Surely there are better reasons to oppose AI?
I agree on the sentiment, it was just a weird turn of phrase.
Social media has done a lot to temper my techno-optimism about free distribution of information, but I’m still not ready to flag the printing press as the decay of free-thinking.
Things are weirder than they seem on the surface.
A math professor collegue of mine calls extremely restrictive use of language ”rigor”, for example.
The point isn’t that it’s restrictive, the point is that words have precise technical meanings that are the same across authors, speakers, and time. It’s rigorous because of that precision and consistency, not just because it’s restrictive. It’s necessary to be rigorous with use of language in scientific fields where clear communication is difficult but important to get right due to the complexity of the ideas at play.
Yeah sure buddy.
Have you tried to shoehorn real life stuff into mathematical notation? It is restrictive. You have pre-defined strict boxes that don’t have blurry lines. Free form thoughts are a lot more flexible than that.
Consistency is restrictive. I don’t know why you take issue with that.
The usage of “independent thought” has never been “independent of all outside influence”, it has simply meant going through the process of reasoning–thinking through a chain of logic–instead of accepting and regurgitating the conclusions of others without any of one’s own reasoning. It’s a similar lay meaning as being an independent adult. We all rely on others in some way, but an independent adult can usually accomplish activities of daily living through their own actions.
Yeah but that’s not what we are expecting people to do.
In our extremely complicated world, most thinking relies on trusting sources. You can’t independently study and derive most things.
Otherwise everybody should do their own research about vaccines. But the reasonable thing is to trust a lot of other, more knowledgeable people.
My comment doesn’t suggest people have to run their own research study or develop their own treatise on every topic. It suggests people have make a conscious choice, preferably with reasonable judgment, about which sources to trust and to develop a lay understanding of the argument or conclusion they’re repeating. Otherwise you end up with people on the left and right reflexively saying “communism bad” or “capitalism bad” because their social media environment repeats it a lot, but they’d be hard pressed to give even a loosly representative definition of either.
This has very little to do with the criticism given by the first commenter. And you can use AI and do this, they are not in any way exclusive.
How do? What would your alternative assertion be on the topic?
If you think your comment and this are the same thing, then I don’t know what to say.