When I was young and starting out with computers, programming, BBS’ and later the early internet, technology was something that expanded my mind, helped me to research, learn new skills, and meet people and have interesting conversations. Something decentralized that put power into the hands of the little guy who could start his own business venture with his PC or expand his skillset.

Where we are now with AI, the opposite seems to be happening. We are asking AI to do things for us rather than learning how to do things ourselves. We are losing our research skills. Many people are talking to AI’s about their problems instead of other people. And they will take away our jobs and centralize all power into a handful of billionaire sociopaths with robot armies to carry out whatever nefarious deeds they want to do.

I hope we somehow make it through this part of history with some semblance of freedom and autonomy intact, but I’m having a hard time seeing how.

      • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        4·
        2 days ago

        I overall like AI, but it’s not great for making this type of argument because it doesn’t offer anyone anything they can really use to update their beliefs about what’s true. Any of the factual claims there could be hallucinated, and most are only tangentially relevant to the question of how strong the parallels between the attitude towards computers 50 years ago are to attitudes towards AI now. If someone wants to seriously consider the question, it isn’t useful.

        A better way to do it is to use it like a search engine to find relevant citeable information and then make your own case for its relevance. Or maybe in this case just some personal anecdotes would work pretty well, you’re claiming personal experience as your main source here and I kind of wanted to hear more about it, having not been there.