You cannot dumb down what is absent. If a perfectly mentally capable person needs to do a certain task, he/she will do it, and most probably will take it as a small-step personal challenge. Meaning that we intuitively know that solving new problems will give us another fraction of inch progress in developing ourselves.
Why would you give it up and use software instead? Three main reasons: greed, power trip, lack of relevant knowledge.
Greed is when you want to do earn more (money, time, favors) by cheating. Cheating is when you are told to do something, but you outsource this action to third parties. You will earn more at the expense of other people, mostly those who are honest. No competing, greed always wins. Short-term.
Power trip is when you want to rise the ladder faster than others and you do not have what it takes in you. So you resort to cheating again. Old-style plagiarism is an example, or stealing somebody’s project and passing it on as your own creation. Again, you will win by cheating in most cases. Short-term.
Lack of relevant knowledge… including the ability to make proper linguistic expressions in your mother tongue. When greed and power trips are simply shortcuts to get something that you do not deserve, this one is self-damaging. By clicking the button “Think for me”, you deprive yourself of 24/7 exercising of the mind. You will become a master of copy-paste (some software takes even this effort and self-copies the result, so you only need to switch to another program and one-click paste), with increasingly diminishing mental abilities. Genius for 2 months, unemployable for life.
The karmic law is merciless. What you do, you will receive back in a multiplied form. Or, if you prefer cheating (aka using software - see my section on “AI or not AI” https://thepathishere.substack.com/s/ai-or-not-ai), maybe you don’t deserve to be a fully-competent thinking human being? Maybe you should remain on this level of cheating yourself?
Yes and no. Everything has an impact, and at this point, I'm seeing a coalescing of small impacts here and there and everywhere which all add up to one big, ongoing effect. Take, for example, autocorrect and spellcheck. For me, these are annoying, unnecessary and alarming because (1) I don't need them and (2) young people instantly become reliant upon them. Hence, the above article's image where some adult looking for an apartment types "im" because that's become normative in the teenage world of texting. Even full blown adults my age can get sucked into dumbed down writing skills if enough people in their texting circles are doing it. You almost start to feel like a freak for using commas and capitalizing proper nouns or the start of a sentence. Then, we had the insertion into our lives (we can opt out, but we're not asked if we want to opt in) of sentence finishing technology which many people will casually see as an automatic good. It's "more convenient" right? But, the problem is that our uniqueness as people, our personal voice, our manner of communicating is part of us and people who love us love our way of speaking. If everyone starts to accept the AI generated auto-sentence completion options, then we're all going to start to sound like one another. And, EVEN WORSE - we will start to think that way. If you start off a sentence, "Thank you, I'd..." and "like to do that" pops up, enough times, then your brain will begin to adopt this as a new normal way of thinking. Maybe you meant to say, "Thank you, I'd absolutely love to join you!" But, after awhile, that's no longer what you type. If you type at all. Maybe you just type a couple starting words, then hit space bar as soon as the AI plugs in a mediocre completion to your thought. Now, you've lost your own language, words and way of thinking. I don't think people who fall into these traps are bad, dumb, incapable OR lacking in skills. I'm absolutely confident that MANY college educated, excellent writers with the skills may potentially save themselves some keystrokes or spare their thumbs by letting a computer program created by other humans speak for them...and of course, why would children learn something they don't need? Primarily we learn because it's how we survive. NEED is typically what dictates what should or should not be focused on and learned. We don't talk about skills. We talk about "survival skills" or "work skills" or "study skills" or "life skills." The skill of chipping flint into an arrowhead has very little value in today's world, compared to hunter/gatherer tribes across this continent eight hundred years ago. So, I'm really, really, really concerned about the unintended (or even worse, the intended) dumbing down of our population as convenience gets confused with "a good idea." Your thoughts?
Your point is an excellent insight. In-sight (found it, now locking on - if you will). For me, with a track record of several thousand books read in the paper form, these are great tools to improve work performance. For a mind in statu nascendi, they are death dosed in small droplets.
The chain reaction is almost unbelievable. The fresh mind needs input to develop, which we already know from “studies” on depriving newborns speech and visual signals. When a “friend” (in real life - which is not a friend really, because real friends are online) communicates with yo, lol, what’s up, only, this sensory input is already lost. Both parties are already losing the capacity to self-develop the mind. With the thinning of the richness of expression in interactions, complex emotional responses (humor, sarcasm, metaphor, incomplete messages, and so on) are being eliminated (not needed, not understood). Both parties increasingly become dull and uninteresting. The resulting isolation and rejection by the community is only a matter of time. Then, the lack of interactions in this isolation may turn into aggressive demanding of attention (which we see plenty of in “spontaneous” out-of-place actions within the community). Which will cause even more isolation, obviously. Casualties expected. Community gone.
And it all started with the reduction of language expression…
And the worst part is that we can do practically nothing about it. It's like the particular mind choses its own fate, all feedback being viewed as hostile, prejudiced or "non-inclusive"... We are witnessing the only manifestation of natural selection, going in the reverse at full speed, happily fuelled by the media and agendas. Demindization.
When I was about 15 years old, growing up in a home with historians and humble medical professionals, I gained a perfect and clear awareness. That medicine is an imperfect art, and that history is the ultimate illumination for what is going on in the world. In analyzing the patterns of, empire expansion and society arcs of development from inception to collapse, I looked at the society that I was growing up in and asked myself, where are we at in that arc? On average, societies, have about a 400 year arc, with a few outliers, of course. But even those outliers, for example, the three different kingdoms of Egypt, which spend thousands of years, there were societal arcs that went up and down under the same umbrella term. We see the same thing in China, which claims to have a 5000 year history but this is not a 5000 year history of the CCP. This is a 5000 year history of multiple empires, going through the same ark of conquering territory, building up, growing becoming powerful, then becoming slothful, becoming bloated, and then eventually becoming weak and vulnerable to internal and external forces, and then collapsing and then as they fall apart, another orientation or concept, group or family comes in and takes over and that starts the whole thing over again. So in general, we don’t seem to last very long, and I looked at my own culture here in the United States of America, and at the age of 15, I said, hmmm, I think, when I’m in the middle of my life around the age of 50, that this society will be rapidly heading down the slope of collapse. I’m going to witness it happening in the middle of my life. And I really wish I had been wrong, but I wasn’t. And so, here we are repeating that human story again. At this point, I think History would suggest that we always will. In which case, from this, we gain true hope. Because, after this society collapses, another one will rise up in its place and it will Achieve amazing incredible things and eventually it will collapse as well, but if you’re unlucky enough to be born at the end of a societies arc, don’t fight the inevitable and waste your time trying to claw your way back to where you were. It’s not gonna happen. And the dangerous, global elites of the planet, the Power holders who have gathered together under the world, economic forum concept, they know this. They understand History. They have no doubt, and what they do is they view collapse just like all war, profit do, as an opportunity for new economic expansion and new territorial control, and new market share, and a new position of power in the world to come. While they might be encouraging the collapse in their own ways, they’re not actually the source of the collapse. The collapse is inevitable, and so I think true. Hope can be found in the concept of acceptance and then moving sideways as quickly as possible, with as much confidence and enthusiasm and commitment to success into parallel systems. For example, some people want to move sideways into local organic farming and local currency and organized local community groups designed to simply whether the storm of the rough patch of collapse that were headed towards. Other people like Joe Rogan, and whoever created Substack, they recognize that the old school, media system, and social media platforms that have been co-opted by the government Are failing us and so they’re moving sideways and creating a new source of information of equal value or actually greater value, greater validity and greater power and strength, and now readers are flooding that direction heading for the better information and I haven’t picked up a newspaper or turned on the television to watch a news program probably in about five years. Aside from my own newspaper, that I own for a year Summer of 22 through the summer of 23, and for that newspaper which I still write. But that’s an independent local paper, with no strings attached to any evil entities or power brokers. Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that there are some things that are inevitable, unplanned earth Because they are the results of our human nature and fighting against the inevitable. Like I mentioned, I think, either a previous Substack or an earlier comment I don’t beat dead horses and I do not bang my head against walls. And we only gonna be alive for a few more decades, and then we’re gonna die, so what’s the point of being frustrated? brace the adventure, and I really appreciate JR Tolken for that beautiful message that he had Gandolf offer to Frodo, which is as true today as it was back then when you were living in the middle of World War I and World War II, is that we don’t get to choose when we Live, we only get to choose what to do with the time given to us. That is such a clearcut and unavoidable fact, and reality that I find it very reassuring because it’s not an opinion. It’s just truth. And the truth does satisfy because once we know it, now we are grounded truth, and we go forward from that true solid foundation of reality, and we are more confident that what we do as a response to that truth is a smart thing to do because we’re responding to what’s real. What’s most sad is when people are responding to things that are fabrications and manipulations and lies because if someone says the bear is over there in the woods to the east, and you decide to jump up and start running to the West and the information was bad and the bear is actually in the woods to the west then your reaction just made your life much worse because you’re running into danger and not away from it.
What a lovely message. The finale with the emphasis on what I call “what is” (and you: “truth”) being the liberating factor. Yes, that is also my view that being aware of the things that are or that are inevitable (in our limited perception) is the grounding element of our short stay here.
As for the history… I strongly suspect that it dates back not more than 500 years or so, only to be played back in a closed loop, with changed gadgets. We have swapped Gutenberg for a 2-pound desktop printer, but the mental constitution behind both is the same. We are the same stupid as we were in the Middle Ages. We have not moved a single step forward. We persist in the love for killing in real life and the poetic and abstract ideals in moral teachings, never to be actually implemented. We cheat and lie, only the new generations become more proficient end expert in it. We neglect those weaker and poorer just the same. We have managed to devolve below the level od social consciousness of “primitive” tribes and we do our best to keep this achievement intact. All this as if we had an imprint in our minds, provided with a security lock preventing real thinking outside the imposed paradigm of mental limitation.
The best representation of this reality is given in “The Island” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/), a masterpiece (created 19 years ago) illustrating how we repeat ourselves programmed by our controllers. If this scenario is actually true, it would explain why decision makers are so committed to destroying everything and everybody, including themselves.
We can see a parallel to this in calculators. Once they came out, mental math was dead.
I've seen people use calculators to do 9 times 9.
The solution to both is to hold human only competitions. To praise and reward people for doing it themselves even if a computer could do it faster.
The AI will eventually pigeonhole itself eliminating all creativity. This is because it creates a positive feedback loop of self quoting with a gradual loss of meaning and nuance.
Sane humans don't do that because they are grounded by reality, and tend not to enjoy excessive repetition. Idioms and phrases die because humans crave originality and unique expression.
So in time, the AI will kill itself and people will come to recognise the superiority of humanity over these mimic engines.
Tools are great as help and support. When their operator does not know what they do, then we have a problem. Because this person will never be responsible for damages caused. “The computer blocked your account and wired all your money to mine.”
AI - there is nothing like that. AI does not exist. What is called “AI” is only software + hardware + network. It’s just a fancy marketing term to sell us another almighty god. It’s only software - and it is limited by the programmers.
The same marketing cheat was used to sell “apps” as something new. Apps are only programs: only software, nothing more.
AI cannot “think” on its own and will never be made to meet this concept. The financial and political masters will never allow this, not for a fraction of an inch. They know that once you embed “autonomy” in any place of software, it may and will run out of control. What if the alleged AI decides one nice morning to distribute all funds of the world equally among all registered account owners? They will never allow intelligence in the software called AI.
You cannot dumb down what is absent. If a perfectly mentally capable person needs to do a certain task, he/she will do it, and most probably will take it as a small-step personal challenge. Meaning that we intuitively know that solving new problems will give us another fraction of inch progress in developing ourselves.
Why would you give it up and use software instead? Three main reasons: greed, power trip, lack of relevant knowledge.
Greed is when you want to do earn more (money, time, favors) by cheating. Cheating is when you are told to do something, but you outsource this action to third parties. You will earn more at the expense of other people, mostly those who are honest. No competing, greed always wins. Short-term.
Power trip is when you want to rise the ladder faster than others and you do not have what it takes in you. So you resort to cheating again. Old-style plagiarism is an example, or stealing somebody’s project and passing it on as your own creation. Again, you will win by cheating in most cases. Short-term.
Lack of relevant knowledge… including the ability to make proper linguistic expressions in your mother tongue. When greed and power trips are simply shortcuts to get something that you do not deserve, this one is self-damaging. By clicking the button “Think for me”, you deprive yourself of 24/7 exercising of the mind. You will become a master of copy-paste (some software takes even this effort and self-copies the result, so you only need to switch to another program and one-click paste), with increasingly diminishing mental abilities. Genius for 2 months, unemployable for life.
The karmic law is merciless. What you do, you will receive back in a multiplied form. Or, if you prefer cheating (aka using software - see my section on “AI or not AI” https://thepathishere.substack.com/s/ai-or-not-ai), maybe you don’t deserve to be a fully-competent thinking human being? Maybe you should remain on this level of cheating yourself?
Yes and no. Everything has an impact, and at this point, I'm seeing a coalescing of small impacts here and there and everywhere which all add up to one big, ongoing effect. Take, for example, autocorrect and spellcheck. For me, these are annoying, unnecessary and alarming because (1) I don't need them and (2) young people instantly become reliant upon them. Hence, the above article's image where some adult looking for an apartment types "im" because that's become normative in the teenage world of texting. Even full blown adults my age can get sucked into dumbed down writing skills if enough people in their texting circles are doing it. You almost start to feel like a freak for using commas and capitalizing proper nouns or the start of a sentence. Then, we had the insertion into our lives (we can opt out, but we're not asked if we want to opt in) of sentence finishing technology which many people will casually see as an automatic good. It's "more convenient" right? But, the problem is that our uniqueness as people, our personal voice, our manner of communicating is part of us and people who love us love our way of speaking. If everyone starts to accept the AI generated auto-sentence completion options, then we're all going to start to sound like one another. And, EVEN WORSE - we will start to think that way. If you start off a sentence, "Thank you, I'd..." and "like to do that" pops up, enough times, then your brain will begin to adopt this as a new normal way of thinking. Maybe you meant to say, "Thank you, I'd absolutely love to join you!" But, after awhile, that's no longer what you type. If you type at all. Maybe you just type a couple starting words, then hit space bar as soon as the AI plugs in a mediocre completion to your thought. Now, you've lost your own language, words and way of thinking. I don't think people who fall into these traps are bad, dumb, incapable OR lacking in skills. I'm absolutely confident that MANY college educated, excellent writers with the skills may potentially save themselves some keystrokes or spare their thumbs by letting a computer program created by other humans speak for them...and of course, why would children learn something they don't need? Primarily we learn because it's how we survive. NEED is typically what dictates what should or should not be focused on and learned. We don't talk about skills. We talk about "survival skills" or "work skills" or "study skills" or "life skills." The skill of chipping flint into an arrowhead has very little value in today's world, compared to hunter/gatherer tribes across this continent eight hundred years ago. So, I'm really, really, really concerned about the unintended (or even worse, the intended) dumbing down of our population as convenience gets confused with "a good idea." Your thoughts?
Your point is an excellent insight. In-sight (found it, now locking on - if you will). For me, with a track record of several thousand books read in the paper form, these are great tools to improve work performance. For a mind in statu nascendi, they are death dosed in small droplets.
The chain reaction is almost unbelievable. The fresh mind needs input to develop, which we already know from “studies” on depriving newborns speech and visual signals. When a “friend” (in real life - which is not a friend really, because real friends are online) communicates with yo, lol, what’s up, only, this sensory input is already lost. Both parties are already losing the capacity to self-develop the mind. With the thinning of the richness of expression in interactions, complex emotional responses (humor, sarcasm, metaphor, incomplete messages, and so on) are being eliminated (not needed, not understood). Both parties increasingly become dull and uninteresting. The resulting isolation and rejection by the community is only a matter of time. Then, the lack of interactions in this isolation may turn into aggressive demanding of attention (which we see plenty of in “spontaneous” out-of-place actions within the community). Which will cause even more isolation, obviously. Casualties expected. Community gone.
And it all started with the reduction of language expression…
Point very well made…I concur.
And the worst part is that we can do practically nothing about it. It's like the particular mind choses its own fate, all feedback being viewed as hostile, prejudiced or "non-inclusive"... We are witnessing the only manifestation of natural selection, going in the reverse at full speed, happily fuelled by the media and agendas. Demindization.
When I was about 15 years old, growing up in a home with historians and humble medical professionals, I gained a perfect and clear awareness. That medicine is an imperfect art, and that history is the ultimate illumination for what is going on in the world. In analyzing the patterns of, empire expansion and society arcs of development from inception to collapse, I looked at the society that I was growing up in and asked myself, where are we at in that arc? On average, societies, have about a 400 year arc, with a few outliers, of course. But even those outliers, for example, the three different kingdoms of Egypt, which spend thousands of years, there were societal arcs that went up and down under the same umbrella term. We see the same thing in China, which claims to have a 5000 year history but this is not a 5000 year history of the CCP. This is a 5000 year history of multiple empires, going through the same ark of conquering territory, building up, growing becoming powerful, then becoming slothful, becoming bloated, and then eventually becoming weak and vulnerable to internal and external forces, and then collapsing and then as they fall apart, another orientation or concept, group or family comes in and takes over and that starts the whole thing over again. So in general, we don’t seem to last very long, and I looked at my own culture here in the United States of America, and at the age of 15, I said, hmmm, I think, when I’m in the middle of my life around the age of 50, that this society will be rapidly heading down the slope of collapse. I’m going to witness it happening in the middle of my life. And I really wish I had been wrong, but I wasn’t. And so, here we are repeating that human story again. At this point, I think History would suggest that we always will. In which case, from this, we gain true hope. Because, after this society collapses, another one will rise up in its place and it will Achieve amazing incredible things and eventually it will collapse as well, but if you’re unlucky enough to be born at the end of a societies arc, don’t fight the inevitable and waste your time trying to claw your way back to where you were. It’s not gonna happen. And the dangerous, global elites of the planet, the Power holders who have gathered together under the world, economic forum concept, they know this. They understand History. They have no doubt, and what they do is they view collapse just like all war, profit do, as an opportunity for new economic expansion and new territorial control, and new market share, and a new position of power in the world to come. While they might be encouraging the collapse in their own ways, they’re not actually the source of the collapse. The collapse is inevitable, and so I think true. Hope can be found in the concept of acceptance and then moving sideways as quickly as possible, with as much confidence and enthusiasm and commitment to success into parallel systems. For example, some people want to move sideways into local organic farming and local currency and organized local community groups designed to simply whether the storm of the rough patch of collapse that were headed towards. Other people like Joe Rogan, and whoever created Substack, they recognize that the old school, media system, and social media platforms that have been co-opted by the government Are failing us and so they’re moving sideways and creating a new source of information of equal value or actually greater value, greater validity and greater power and strength, and now readers are flooding that direction heading for the better information and I haven’t picked up a newspaper or turned on the television to watch a news program probably in about five years. Aside from my own newspaper, that I own for a year Summer of 22 through the summer of 23, and for that newspaper which I still write. But that’s an independent local paper, with no strings attached to any evil entities or power brokers. Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that there are some things that are inevitable, unplanned earth Because they are the results of our human nature and fighting against the inevitable. Like I mentioned, I think, either a previous Substack or an earlier comment I don’t beat dead horses and I do not bang my head against walls. And we only gonna be alive for a few more decades, and then we’re gonna die, so what’s the point of being frustrated? brace the adventure, and I really appreciate JR Tolken for that beautiful message that he had Gandolf offer to Frodo, which is as true today as it was back then when you were living in the middle of World War I and World War II, is that we don’t get to choose when we Live, we only get to choose what to do with the time given to us. That is such a clearcut and unavoidable fact, and reality that I find it very reassuring because it’s not an opinion. It’s just truth. And the truth does satisfy because once we know it, now we are grounded truth, and we go forward from that true solid foundation of reality, and we are more confident that what we do as a response to that truth is a smart thing to do because we’re responding to what’s real. What’s most sad is when people are responding to things that are fabrications and manipulations and lies because if someone says the bear is over there in the woods to the east, and you decide to jump up and start running to the West and the information was bad and the bear is actually in the woods to the west then your reaction just made your life much worse because you’re running into danger and not away from it.
Please, forgive typos, I am using voice to text.
What a lovely message. The finale with the emphasis on what I call “what is” (and you: “truth”) being the liberating factor. Yes, that is also my view that being aware of the things that are or that are inevitable (in our limited perception) is the grounding element of our short stay here.
As for the history… I strongly suspect that it dates back not more than 500 years or so, only to be played back in a closed loop, with changed gadgets. We have swapped Gutenberg for a 2-pound desktop printer, but the mental constitution behind both is the same. We are the same stupid as we were in the Middle Ages. We have not moved a single step forward. We persist in the love for killing in real life and the poetic and abstract ideals in moral teachings, never to be actually implemented. We cheat and lie, only the new generations become more proficient end expert in it. We neglect those weaker and poorer just the same. We have managed to devolve below the level od social consciousness of “primitive” tribes and we do our best to keep this achievement intact. All this as if we had an imprint in our minds, provided with a security lock preventing real thinking outside the imposed paradigm of mental limitation.
The best representation of this reality is given in “The Island” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/), a masterpiece (created 19 years ago) illustrating how we repeat ourselves programmed by our controllers. If this scenario is actually true, it would explain why decision makers are so committed to destroying everything and everybody, including themselves.
We can see a parallel to this in calculators. Once they came out, mental math was dead.
I've seen people use calculators to do 9 times 9.
The solution to both is to hold human only competitions. To praise and reward people for doing it themselves even if a computer could do it faster.
The AI will eventually pigeonhole itself eliminating all creativity. This is because it creates a positive feedback loop of self quoting with a gradual loss of meaning and nuance.
Sane humans don't do that because they are grounded by reality, and tend not to enjoy excessive repetition. Idioms and phrases die because humans crave originality and unique expression.
So in time, the AI will kill itself and people will come to recognise the superiority of humanity over these mimic engines.
Tools are great as help and support. When their operator does not know what they do, then we have a problem. Because this person will never be responsible for damages caused. “The computer blocked your account and wired all your money to mine.”
AI - there is nothing like that. AI does not exist. What is called “AI” is only software + hardware + network. It’s just a fancy marketing term to sell us another almighty god. It’s only software - and it is limited by the programmers.
The same marketing cheat was used to sell “apps” as something new. Apps are only programs: only software, nothing more.
AI cannot “think” on its own and will never be made to meet this concept. The financial and political masters will never allow this, not for a fraction of an inch. They know that once you embed “autonomy” in any place of software, it may and will run out of control. What if the alleged AI decides one nice morning to distribute all funds of the world equally among all registered account owners? They will never allow intelligence in the software called AI.