Comment by jfengel
Social media has given me a rather dim view of the quality of people's thinking, long before AI. Outsourcing it could well be an improvement.
Social media has given me a rather dim view of the quality of people's thinking, long before AI. Outsourcing it could well be an improvement.
The converse need not hold. Cognition implies existence; it is sufficient but not necessary. Plenty of things exist without thinking.
(And that's not what the Cogito means in the first place. It's a statement about knowledge: I think therefore it is a fact that I am. Descartes is using it as the basis of epistemology; he has demonstrated from first principles that at least one thing exists.)
I know the trivialities. I didn't intend to make a general or formal statement, we're talking about people. In a competitive world, those who've been reduced to idiocracy won't survive, AI not only isn't going to help them, it will be used against them.
> Plenty of things exist without thinking.
Existence in an animal farm isn't human existence.
> Social media has given me a rather dim view of the quality of people's thinking, long before AI. Outsourcing it could well be an improvement.
Cogito, ergo sum
The corollary is: absence of thinking equals non-existence. I don't see how that can be an improvement. Improvement can happen only when it's applied to the quality of people's thinking.