Comment by aprilthird2021 a day ago
The other thing is that the second anyone even perceives an opinion to be "anti-AI" they bombard you with "people thought the printing press lowered intellect too!" Or radio or TV or video games, etc.
No one ever considers that maybe they all did lower our attention spans, prevent us from learning as well as we used to, etc. and now we are at a point we can't afford to keep losing intelligence and attention span
That’s a much harder claim to prove. The value of an attention span is non zero, but if the speed of access to information is close to zero, how do these relate?
If I can solve two problems in a near constant time that is a few hours, what is the value of solving the problem which takes days to reason through?
I suspect that as the problem spaces diverge enough you’ll have two skill sets. Who can solve n problems the fastest and who can determine which k problems require deep thought and narrow direction. Right now we have the same group of people solving both.
> The value of an attention span is non zero, but if the speed of access to information is close to zero, how do these relate?
Gell-Mann Amnesia. Attention span limits the amount information of information we can process and with attention spans decreasing, increases to information flow stop having a positive effect. People simply forget what they started with even if that contradicts previous information.
> If I can solve two problems in a near constant time that is a few hours, what is the value of solving the problem which takes days to reason through?
You don't end up solving the problem in near constant time, you end up applying the last suggested solution. There's a difference.
I think people don't consider that because the usual criticism of television and video games is that people spend too long paying attention to them.
One of the famous Greek philosophers complained that books were hurting people's minds because they no longer memorized information, so this kind of complaint is as old as civilization itself. There is no evidence that we would be on Mars by now already if we had never invented books or television.