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Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

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Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#421

Post by Aerbil313 »

personjerry wrote: post #365
legendofbrando wrote: post #326

Counter point: sure they are. Humans are highly adaptable and like other changes to information availability in the past they will adapt. This is what societal norms and cultural memes are for. “Don’t believe everything you hear” “Don’t believe what you see on TV” “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” These are all ways that the human species uses memes and cultural norms to teach ourselves how not to f…

50 years ago humans weren't prepared for a smartphone, internet "post-connected" world and here we are. We adapt and grow.

We CAN’T adapt. There are no biological mechanisms inside your head to adapt to Tiktok. There are plenty of mechanisms which make you an addict to it, though.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#422

Post by WorldMaker »

throwuwu wrote: post #328
WorldMaker wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phone robot is collecting the various patterns for eventual automation. You are doing free labor for it every time by giving it any information at all and not just immediately yelling for an operator or human. Support solidarity for human kind by refusing to talk these data gathering machines. (I realize this sounds like satire as I write it, that I'm rather serious about this, and that it says a lot about the we…

No. Automate the shit out of this. Call centre jobs should not exist. If you have humanity’s best interests in mind then you should be all in on automation instead of trying to institutionalize miserable and meaningless jobs.

That's mostly a fair assessment.

Though I think it useful to add:

If the solution could be entirely automated it should be a self-service website somewhere. I'm all for automating away call centers as much as possible, but I think we also need to stop thinking of call centers themselves as bottom of the barrel "miserable and/or meaningless jobs". It should be the case in 2023 that if I'm resorting to calling a call center I need expertise or creative problem solving that I can't get from a self-service website. Depending on how you define Expertise some of it is sort of automatable, but Creative Problem Solving is unlikely to ever be easily/cheaply automatable, there will likely "always" be a need for call centers with real humans for these reasons, and shouldn't be considered minimum wage skills and maybe should be treated as something far better than "miserable jobs".

I don't expect today's owners of call centers to realize how much expertise and creative problem solving is invested in their labor and to adequately reflect that in their pay statements and other ways that account for how miserable or meaningless that they make those jobs feel. But it should be something to appreciate: if there's still a human doing the job, there's probably a good reason, and it would be great if we respected those people for what they are actually doing (including very human skills such as expertise and creative problem solving).

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#423

Post by generic92034 »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #398
jackjeff wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I had no idea that was a thing. I thought that’s just something they do in movies. But I don’t have a mind’s eye either (aphantasia). So I guess that’s on brand for me. That doesn’t mean I can’t “talk to myself” in a way or think about stuff. I just have no auditory sensation whatsoever. It’s just abstract/immaterial reasoning. I’d wager if I did an FMRI the audio part would not light up but the speech part woul…

You don’t have visual dreams? If I say “pink elephant,” you don’t one? Or better yet, if i say “Dumbo,” you don’t see the ears? You don’t hear songs in your head? If I write “I’ll be back” you don’t hear it now in a thick German accent? Inconceivable! (As they say)

> If I write “I’ll be back” you don’t hear it now in a thick German accent?

Now you have made me curious. Where would the thick German accent be, when pronouncing those words? I can imagine other sentences (anything with "th", for example) where you would hear a German accent. But with "I'll be back"?

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#424

Post by machina_ex_deus »

bcrl wrote: post #418
machina_ex_deus wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you assume your fellow humans are stupid and will fall for this crap, and must be protected at all costs including the cost of regulation preventing speech? By the way, how's that scammer SBF doing? I heard he managed to scam even more money than that funny YouTube ad, and I think he was advertising on mainstream media too. Even got to lobby in Congress. This is still far from the leading mainstream narrative that…

I have no expectation that everyone will fall for it, but I've seen my own elderly father get confused and drawn into scam ads. My irritation is that what little accountability in advertising that existed in the past is now gone, and that "platforms" are failing the general public by allowing these things to propagate. Put a button in the corner of the ad that says "report this", and get a human to check if the ad pa…

So now it's the elderly. I've seen them fall for phone scams much more commonly, they usually don't have the technical ability to use the internet.

You're deflecting from the disinformation narrative into elderly scam. Which I agree is a problem, just a completely different one than the disinformation narrative presents.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#425

Post by Filligree »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #398
jackjeff wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I had no idea that was a thing. I thought that’s just something they do in movies. But I don’t have a mind’s eye either (aphantasia). So I guess that’s on brand for me. That doesn’t mean I can’t “talk to myself” in a way or think about stuff. I just have no auditory sensation whatsoever. It’s just abstract/immaterial reasoning. I’d wager if I did an FMRI the audio part would not light up but the speech part woul…

You don’t have visual dreams? If I say “pink elephant,” you don’t one? Or better yet, if i say “Dumbo,” you don’t see the ears? You don’t hear songs in your head? If I write “I’ll be back” you don’t hear it now in a thick German accent? Inconceivable! (As they say)

Not OP, but I'm in the same position, so let me answer.

- I do get visual dreams. That's the only time I have a visual imagination; that, or if I'm on the verge of sleeping.

- If you say "pink elephant", I've got the concepts of elephant, pink and so on in my head. I can 'see' the geometry in a way, but it's totally abstract. Think of it like a pink elephant in a game where the renderer is off, and you won't go far wrong; all the information is there, and I can use it, I just don't see anything. Not as a hallucination, and not 'off to the side' either.

- I absolutely do hear songs in my head. Aphantasia usually only refers to visual imagination.

- If I want to hear it in a German accent, I do. By default, while I read something there's no auditory element at all. If I'm reading a book, I'll usually narrate the spoken sentences to myself and not do so for the other text; it's a matter of choice. Narrating it slows down my reading a lot, to the speed of fast speech.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#426

Post by Aerbil313 »

dv_dt wrote: post #399
highwaylights wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels weird that you can state something so obvious so far down a thread and it’s literally the only mention of it. We haven’t adapted successfully, we aren’t adapting successfully and we won’t adapt successfully. We were way better off before smartphones. Looking back on it now, we may have been even better off before the Internet. By any conceivable perspective you would care to measure we’re failing abysmally a…

It's difficult to separate the effects of smartphones and wildly increasing wealth inequality.

It’s the easiest thing ever. Just look around to people, or use a smartphone yourself. It’s hard to see if you are too addicted to the amusement matrix to see it though. In that case just read the recent research of Jonathan Haidt.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#427

Post by prng2021 »

I’m skeptical about these fears. We already have a disinformation problem. If AI can be used to exacerbate the problem, why can’t that be counterbalanced by using AI to fight against disinformation as well?

Just like any other sector, there will be a small handful of leaders in AI and that’s what most users will interact with. Couldn’t Bing/Google modify their models to underweight the content from websites regularly flagged to have disinformation and vice versa?

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#428

Post by moonchrome »

personjerry wrote: post #365
legendofbrando wrote: post #326

Counter point: sure they are. Humans are highly adaptable and like other changes to information availability in the past they will adapt. This is what societal norms and cultural memes are for. “Don’t believe everything you hear” “Don’t believe what you see on TV” “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” These are all ways that the human species uses memes and cultural norms to teach ourselves how not to f…

50 years ago humans weren't prepared for a smartphone, internet "post-connected" world and here we are. We adapt and grow.

> We adapt and grow.

Population is shrinking in the "post-connected" world

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#429

Post by dv_dt »

Aerbil313 wrote: post #426
dv_dt wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to separate the effects of smartphones and wildly increasing wealth inequality.

It’s the easiest thing ever. Just look around to people, or use a smartphone yourself. It’s hard to see if you are too addicted to the amusement matrix to see it though. In that case just read the recent research of Jonathan Haidt.

Quite frankly, he looks like everything I would expect from a pop psychologist attached to a business school. The Hetrodox Academy he founded has this criticism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodox_Academy

"According to Vox's Zack Beauchamp, Heterodox Academy advances conservative viewpoints on college campuses by playing into or presenting the argument that such views are suppressed by left-wing bias or political correctness. Commenators such as Beauchamp and Chris Quintana, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, have disputed Heterodox Academy's contention that college campuses are facing a "free-speech crisis," noting the lack of data to support it and arguing that advocacy groups such as Heterodox Academy functionally do more to narrow the scope of academic debates than any of the biases they allege."

Seems like someone whose success is supported, and views are amplified because they conveniently align to people with money.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#430

Post by synetic »

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #420
synetic wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a great many people are actually stupid and easily lead astray. There are large numbers of people who won’t vaccinate their children (not talking about Covid vaccine). Such a person is either stupid or a victim of misinformation. Humans are easily persuadable. This is particularly true with a group of people echoing who feel slighted or are angry about some perceived injustice. The mob mentality is real and i…

And my general experience with anti vaxers is that they generally look into more resources and research and put much more thoughts into their decisions than a regular person. Which I generally view as a positive quality. I put much more value on the process by which a person reached his decisions than whether they were correct in one particular instance. Whether I agree with their final conclusion is irrelevant, I ca…

And my general experience with anti vaxers is that they generally look into more resources and research and put much more thoughts into their decisions than a regular person. Which I generally view as a positive quality. I put much more value on the process by which a person reached his decisions than whether they were correct in one particular instance.

Ah. The, “they did their research” and “read lots of words” retort. It’s ok that almost all of it is wrong. What matters is that they read a lot. They thought a lot about it! The thoughts were completely wrong but quantity over quality, right?

Consider this. What does it say about you that you think people with no knowledge of or training in virology can legitimately said to have conducted research into the efficacy of vaccines?

I have not successfully been fooled into thinking that people are dumb. All of us are dumb in certain areas. All of us can be manipulated. All of us are susceptible to false information. (Read up on the Gell-Mann amnesia effect as an example of this.)

It is absolutely an intelligent trait to rely on the expert knowledge of others. Hence, flat earthers are incredibly dumb. The knowledge that the Earth is spheroidal has been known for many hundreds of years. Another example. Almost everyone knows that 1+1=2 despite the fact that very few people can actually prove it. It is not intelligence to question this fact. It is intelligence to ask how to prove it and even more intelligence to understand the proof.

An intelligent person doesn’t question the efficacy of vaccines. The evidence of their efficacy is plain to see by the fact that polio is virtually nonexistent. An intelligent person asks why are vaccines effective. How do they work? Etc.

Any fool can ask questions. Asking the right questions requires some perspicacity.

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