The Eliza Effect 2: Electric Idiocracy Zombie Apocalypse Boogaloo
Most people have heard the adage, “If you don’t use it, you lose it.”
What happens when people start outsourcing their brain’s ability to synthesize information and think critically (or even just think period) with a middle man that doesn’t even think at all? What happens when entire generations of young people don’t hone any of those skills on their own before just handing over their brains to AI… before they even learn to learn, let alone how to think?
Human thought is being disincentivized while people are pushed deeper and deeper into personal relationships with technology they’re being trained not to question while they aren’t even really being told how it works. Meanwhile, “offloading cognitive tasks” is just a fancy way of saying “letting something else think for you”. It’s putting an AI middle man directly into people’s heads.
That’s a godlike amount of power and control, and the people who are trusting their minds to this tech are putting a hell of a lot of faith into this new god without much thought (pun intended).
Have you ever seen the 1957 Ingmar Bergman film, “The Seventh Seal” where a knight comes back from the crusades plays chess with Death in medieval Sweden?
Death apathetically tells him, “I am unknowing.”
Well so is AI.
