Worth Reading – AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge
This is worth thinking about across society and the workplace:
Justin, a cohost of the podcast librarypunk, told me that the project of offloading cognitive capacity to AI continues apace: “Part of a fascist project to offload the work of thinking, especially the reflective kind of thinking that reading, study, and community engagement provide,” Justin said. “That kind of thinking cultivates empathy and challenges your assumptions. It’s also something you have to practice. If we can offload that cognitive work, it’s far too easy to become reflexive and hateful, while having a robot cheerleader telling you that you were right about everything all along.”
https://www.404media.co/ai-is-supercharging-the-war-on-libraries-education-and-human-knowledge/
It helps explain the tight connection between right-wing politics and AI companies. What better way to get people to stop trusting experts than having the magic chatbot contradict them with the full backing of the most successful people in the world? It is also happening in the workplace. The focus on AI-driven efficiency improvements is also about eliminating the need for experts. How many ads for AI tools do you see that promise that you can use AI to run your own business part-time, with no need for sales, marketing, accounting, design, etc? Just have AI do that work. You don’t need people to do that. The machine is more intelligent than all of them, anyway, and, as Justin says, it won’t ever argue with you.
It will never tell you that your idea is horrible, unworkable, and destined for failure.
Who’s going to be there for you when it fails anyway? You got rid of the experts who might have helped you avoid that, let alone recover from it.
I think we might need a variation of the Dunning-Kruger effect to describe the people who weren’t smart enough to realize the AI was wrong when it told them their ideas were brilliant.
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