gemini://midnight.pub/posts/1395

AI. Beautiful. I see examples of people having conversations with ChatGPT - some love the software, some hate it, some have already folded it's responses into the fabric of their day-to-day lives.

I haven't. I have nothing against AI, but I will not be delving into it with reckless abandon (or at all) like I did w/ the WWW in the mid-90s. A lot of headache (for me, my life) could have been head off if I had not gone down The Rabbithole.

The Web is great. It's also so elementary in "concept" (or was, now it's a reality) that it's hard to imagine civilization became so enamored with it.

A server talks to another server. The messages can be, and are, fast. Fairly quicker than the postal service, and back and forth continuously should one choose.

Cool. What about the rest? What do we need (most of) it for? A blog, a social media account, a Tumblr site paying tribute to parmesan cheese - why?

I'm here to say this, though (and hey, thanx, Web, for the platform to say it! Sacrifice: warranted!) - my late-Father and many of his age range (some older, some younger) saved themselves a lot of headache, ridiculousness by not "going online". I don't mean they weren't active on Facebook, I mean they never as much as sent an e-mail or had a laptop in their hands. They didn't care. Why would they? Granted, people much older than they ("they" would be in their 70s or 80s (or some much younger) now) were and are quite well-versed in Internet jargon, but the Average Person probably could have, and did, and do, get by without the Web and carry on fine without *too* much sacrifice in day-to-day life.

So, if I were to learn a lesson from "The Olds", it would be to not drink the Electric Kool-Aid of AI, or/and the (surely well-meaning) co's behind it. It's a segment of Computer Science that is A) very fascinating, B) full of potential, C) will effect everyone, everywhere - including me. Amd D) totally on auto-hype in terms of civilization and everyone (everywhere) either drawing X amount of joy/amusement from it, or X amount of distress and headache because of it. *I* don't need to chase it like it's the best thing since sliced bread (man, what a turning point that was!) ;)

I just heard a webinar where they sell you AI tools to generate online course materials, course outlines and a structure and get started quickly to your online business product. For such things, AI may be nice at the moment.

But in the end, your knowledge has to come from somewhere first... AI cannot do your own learning effort for you.

And if AI-generated content flows back into the pot of source material resp. training material that the AIs are being trained on, then we have a problem...

To me "AI" refers to "Automaton Intelligence", which to me is the kind most humans exhibit. So I'm hardly surprised an automaton without flesh could exhibit it. It's just the vomiting out of associations-driven information.

"the only way to win, is not to play"

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