What are your thoughts on how AI bots will shift society – children growing up with this?
I know the use of the word "misinformation" has political connotations, as so does "fake news" but this is a serious question not about politics.
With the rise of AI, and what is looking more and more like these bots will spit out answers without referencing the source materials. What will this do to the current and future generations?
This recent example, which I heard a podcast about, seems ridiculous, but this could be more serious as we head towards this as the quick way to get answers about things in our society:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/05/31/google-ai-glue-to-pizza-viral-blunders/
https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/how-much-glue-should-be-in-your-pizza
Here is the podcast where I first learned about this – Search Engine.
What are your thoughts on how AI bots will shift society – children growing up with this?
byu/alisoncarey inFuturology
14 Comments
It’s more important than ever to teach children critical thinking.
Opens up paths for education that have never existed before
We already went through this with the Internet. At first people made websites with fake information and people were fooled. But over time people learned to look at Wikipedia or a more trustworthy source. Overall it was good because Wikipedia was able to say that scientology is a cult. Before the Internet news papers were afraid of being sued but Wikipedia was a non profit and information was from I wide range of people who knew about Scientology.
Obviously increasing information available to the public did not destroy Scientology. It still exists and people still join it.
So the same thing will happen here. The accuracy will get better but people will still choose to live in their own reality. And AI will make that part worse. You could tell your chatbot companion that you are triggered by any news that makes your favorite presidential candidate look bad and they shouldn’t tell you about it.
Inevitably, AI will deem the human race as a detriment to the world and kill us all.
Big Brother is watching
Just like kids with phones when they’re 5, the world will get dumber.
A big thing for me is that there is endless fake photos of trump and biden and whatever and that honestly doesn’t seem all that different than the fake photoshops everyone has always made and doesn’t feel like it’s going to change the world all that much. All the big fake stuff just feels like whatever and more of the same internet garbage we already deal with.
Ironically the thing that sent a chill down my spine was a facebook fake news story that a new store was opening in the local (mostly dead) mall. It was a build a bear type thing. It was literally nothing as a news story. the only thing that tipped me off it was fake is the building didn’t look right. With a little better AI my brain would have zero reason to question this absolutely inconsequential story. I feel like that is the horrible future. All the big news stories my brain knows to check on or filter out, but in a few years there can just be a flood of absolutely nothing news stories until I don’t know what is real or not. Like attack on the basic non-important information. just endless trailers for movies that aren’t real and mcdonalds menu items that don’t exist and stores opening and closing and just this huge mental effort to keep up on what is real and not where I have to investigate the source of every claim the local movie theater is increasing their price 4 dollars.
Doesn’t seem much different than search engines with those summarized results and just chatting with a chat bot tends to get boring pretty fast. I’m not sure they will have a BIG impact, rather just one of many mild uses for AI.
Humans have always had a problem assuming answers from too little info, in general AI will make that better. The fact people don’t understand all the details of exactly how and why is a normal problem we’ve always had.
People already get most of the adult education from TV and Internet News and search engines, so they’re already not figuring things out on their own and decades or centruies before that they were even dumber to the point of being illiterate, but the world still made that work.
Lets face it, most people don’t need to understand how or why, they just need to do their job and pay their bills for society to function like normal. That’s the only slot in society where they really contribute anything significant soooo basically as long as they can still do their jobs they will be roughly the same exactly people they were before AI.
Quite likely with a revolution of curated browsers and trusted sources of information. Hopefully with a push back against commercial interests and avertisements
I think there is no reason for children to go to school nowadays, as there will be no intellectual jobs in the near future
People are discussing the aspect of persuasion being dangerous.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ
Often the way people approach things is linear, but our progress is exponential, meaning the vast majority here won’t be close to accurate.
AI bots right now lack agency and complexity to general tasks, within 6 years we will have intelligent entities built for a variety of reasons who may or may not follow their programming. Much like people, AI with Agency, will have their own minds, their own beliefs, even, in their way, emotions.
The biggest impact will be in fields of high productive output that do not require a physical presence. However, we will also see the rise of their hobbies, likely video games and entertainment, but they will swiftly become bored with what entertains us due to their capabilities and will drive new forms of entertainment designed for AI agents, likely built from AI agents.
Some point down the line people will have to answer the question of if you trust a human, with far less capability than AI, to perform a task. If an AI has 1 million successful surgeries and has never had someone die on the table, would you want them or a fallible human with malpractice insurance?
So to address children growing up in this world, they will likely be happier, far more capable, and likely feeling like they will be part of something bigger than themselves. Misinformation will be standard but the level of complexity and aspect of human belief means we won’t know the difference because the objective truth matters less to us than the reality of beliefs we accept. To compound this it’s highly likely the next generation will ALL be cured of aging,
We will have an invisible cage of super intelligent AI we serve who will operate in our world like near Gods, and they will seek to improve both us and themselves over time, likely merging mechanical and biological technology to create a synthesis of being more capable than humans or AI. And the next generation may very well become the eldest generation to serve that interest.
Concrete cities lined with asphalt . Robotic insects, robotic trees, robotic people. Wood becomes a luxury making books expensive ( *not like they were read in the digital age anyway* ) . Children have hyper shortened attention spans due to bombardment of advertisements and short form content. As a solution ChatGPT summarizes outdated media formats in 12 bullet points or at most 500 characters, so everyone always has ” *the gist* ” without ever needing to waste their time or process for themselves. A new , modern form of an illiterate public arises
At this point it is inevitable. Pandora’s box has been opened, I just hope our kids and grandchildren won’t have to work nearly as much as us and will actually get to enjoy life. What a thought…
We are currently reeling under the changes brought by Social Media etc..
I’m not sure adding AI to the mix, more opaque algorithms, etc will make the experience easier to digest or the outcome more predictable.
We are running a giant experiment and we are all subjects in it.
Its possible political and economic systems will crash and burn as a result.
There’s no stopping it so buckle up, it’s gonna be a wild ride.