Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
Forgeties79 | on: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
> I'd argue that this is an adjustment period that society has to go through.

I used to think like this until social media proved there are some tech innovations we just can’t adjust to. 10 years ago you would’ve never caught me supporting any sort of age based social media ban. Now? I don’t think it goes far enough. Fake news (actual fake news) and misinformation has only gotten worse with it as well. It’s so destructive.

mylastattempt | parent
The human is designed to interact with small groups, to understand several smaller groups, and perhaps to imagine a big group of smaller groups. In a literal sense, let's say 100 people per group. At that level the human can actually know and interact with them still. In a city of 100.000 it's still managable to feel you are related and involved to this group-of-groups. In a city of a million, you'll revert to only your own small group and have lost the connection to the collective.

The same goes for speed and quantity of input, as to what the human is designed for (not literally designed). Be it social media with it's infinite scrolling, cars racing by as opposed to looking out the window a few times per hour because you see someone/something, constant sound input if you live anywhere remotely busy or work in a busy office.

The point I'm trying to make is that the world used to be comprehensible for the human. Some understood a little complexer things, some only the simpler things. Now there is an overload of everything. So, most humans are in survival mode wether they know it or not. Hence the many seekin mindfullness etc

No matter, it's an observation, not a judgement or opinion on it. The world will just keep rushing forward. Some have a slight hand in the direction it goes for better (never) or for worse, but spiral it will.

Forgeties79 | root | parent
I think there’s a major part of this conversation being omitted, though I am not saying you did it intentionally: “the attention economy.” We have gone from advertising to a system of creating addicts for profit
mylastattempt | root | parent
Definately agree, that was included in the "or for worse" in this sentence I wrote. As for creating the addicts, nobody had a masterplan. It's all the pieces spiraling together,

>> The world will just keep rushing forward. Some have a slight hand in the direction it goes for better (never) or for worse, but spiral it will.

The systems are too large and self-propulsing for anyone to really control. Consider the rainforest. How many millions of variables interact, nobody is in charge, everything influences everything in a billion different ways. You might say, well we can cut it down, so kind we can control it. Allright, let's continue to spiral. You might build a city there after a few years. Still in charge right. But it get's too hot because there's no vegitation, so you have to change again. And then we find that people keep getting strangely sick, and scientists find some special mushroom that survived and apparantly thrives on the mix of cut trees and diesel fumes and their spores in the air are poisonous. I made that up, but you get the idea hopefully.