🫤

[solarpsychedelic]

I understand why people dislike AI and the backlash against it.

And I wish AI had only been developed and offered as a tool that enhances people’s efforts instead of being offered as a way to generate shoddy replacements.

AI was always going to happen because it’s a part of computing. But it’s too often offered as a shortcut that takes away people’s motivation to think and create from their own mind and their own efforts.

I’m old enough to remember the good old days of having to walk to a library and flip through a card catalog, then pick up the physical book. It took effort to find information and maybe because of that, the end result was more rewarding.

The came the digitized system which I liked because then I could find books at libraries around the country and the world. That was cool, and when I was in grad school, I found this helpful for writing papers and locating German-language books.

I’m also old enough to remember the good old days when I wrote these term papers by hand. (Cue dramatic music.)

My handwriting sucks and the old typewriters were clunky, so I was relieved to move over to computers and then phones.

But tools that are supposed to be helpful too often end up enabling the human tendency to be lazy. Instead of learning, we get convenience and shortcuts. Combine that with a decades-long campaign to dumb down a population and denigrating education and… people no longer value learning and demand quick and easy answers to complex problems.

In the long run, not helpful.