I'll be the negative nancy and say that I think it's more likely we see an acceleration of the current trend. If we're talking about students, the top students will be doing as well or better than today but the median might see a big regression.
I have friends who work in primary education and they say there's definitely been some sort of decline in cognitive skills. A lot more kids struggle with holding attention and thinking outside of the box.
I think too much screen exposure has been terrible for the average child.
I definitely don't disagree with screen or exposure or social media exposure being deleterious.
That said, I suspect this technology will allow us to study and mitigate those effects in ways we weren't previously capable of. That's in addition to the other broad swathe of things that should make us healthier and more intelligent (see some of my other posts here). I'm not particularly negative about our chances.
I do hope for an optimistic outcome of course.
But the same cohort that gave us algorithmic screen maximisation is also funding and leading the AI revolution so I'm a bit sceptical they have our best interest in mind.
Not only are they leading the AI revolution, but consumer AI app design follows the same principles as the screen-time-maximization apps.
Skinner box design, pull a lever and get an answer (or an app, or a song, or a poem, or a research paper).
A common complaint amongst colleagues is that they aren't able to stop "checking on their agents" after hours. This stuff is just as addictive as the rest of the consumer apps eating up all of our time and attention.
If the top students are doing better, especially if it is significantly better, I think that can be a net positive outcome. If you look at the distribution of contribution to society it's not like it's remotely even and there is an argument to primarily focusing on and pouring most of our resources into the top Nth percent instead of trying to slightly improve everyone.
Mathematics and programming is verifiable and fully controllable in a digital environment.
Fusion research and cancer research requires expensive experimentation in the real physical world. You can’t just throw a billion dollar worth of tokens to handle the problem.
Look at all the roadblocks for data centre buildouts which the industry certainly has a financial incentive to complete as fast as possible.
> Fusion research and cancer research requires expensive experimentation in the real physical world. You can’t just throw a billion dollar worth of tokens to handle the problem.
When the tokens are hooked up to physical devices (robotics of various sorts), then the tokens pay for themselves by being physical workers, or human wage replacement.
And a robocop will follow whatever is passed for law, damn the masses who might vote otherwise. And subjugation will be enforced by token, LLM rule, and machine. They have no union or ethics to complain to.
The complexity of manufacturing is one reason why TSMC is one of the most important companies in the world right now and why Nvidia is the most valuable by marketcap.
If you can make a GPU more efficient and cheaper than Nvidia does you can make a ton of money. Plenty of labs around the world are working hard on this problem and yet Nvidia is still dominating (and the market believes this isn't changing any time soon)
Same things for robotics. It's unlikely you'll have a vertical stack on all the different things needed to manufacture your robot on a massive scale. What happens if some geopolitical spat makes getting rare earth minerals and battery tech from China impossible?
Compare that to tokenmaxxing in programming and math, where the only thing you need is a gpu cluster and electricity.
No. His real innovation was shamelessness. A lot of high society functions on these "gentlemen agreements" where you can theoretically get away with murder but it'd be rather uncouth of you to do so. He doesn't care and it's led him very very far in life.
And scarcity gives things value. No one bats an eye at a mass produced cotton t-shirt with a detailed custom print on it. There's services online where you can order a thousand with whatever print on it for quite a cheap price.
But take one of those shirts 80 years back in time and it'll likely impress everyone.
Perhaps that's what's going to happen to software too. If you're an idea guy you might get a monkey paw situation, at least if you planned on making some sort of serious income from your software idea.
You're opening yourself up to data right and privacy risks with that. My company demands that I use their enterprise account because they can claim full ownership of all produced output and have full logs of every interaction.
I think that gets legally murky, if the employee is the one who pays for the tool.
Rank & file employees have very little input with their stake. It's a small piece of a big pie.
Consider also that Anthropic is trying to IPO with co-founders holding a share that secures 50.1% of total voting power distributed evenly between them, so not even institutional investors can outvote them.
The company's board and c-suite should be held legally responsible if the company's services do damaging things. Punished by jail time, fines targeting their equity etc.
That would certainly change the game of perverted incentives. I'm afraid they're currently trying to push some sort of absolution of this risk. Even if damage happens they will say we warned people in advance, this was always a risk it's not our fault these systems are opaque black boxes, it's a matter of national security to develop them etc etc.
People don't like being told what to do, so saying "Stop using Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp/Threads" is going to cause the opposite effect, people will "rebel" and keep using whatever Facebook has.
Another point is inertia (which all of you should know by now)
If you want to stop Meta, I mean "Facebook" you must answer the age old question:
How do you move these users friends over to Mastodon, BlueSky or PixelFed?
If you don't have an answer to this single question, people will continue to use Facebook's products and no amount of "Stop using ..." would solve this.
I have friends who work in primary education and they say there's definitely been some sort of decline in cognitive skills. A lot more kids struggle with holding attention and thinking outside of the box.
I think too much screen exposure has been terrible for the average child.
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