A society that can't think, outpaced by machines that don't take sick days and can work 24/7. And this population, easily swayed by rhetoric, will champion these machines as saviors.
Thank you for writing and for giving readers something to think about. VR (Virtual Reality) was supposed to replace actual reality until it didn’t. Who needs a decent place to live when you can pretend to live somewhere fantastic? But, oops, a person does actually need to keep her body from freezing, roasting, or starving, and no amount of VR helps with that, and AI actually needs to keep its bodies from freezing, roasting, or starving, too, and no amount of hype makes that happen without material and humans to put it in place and continue feeding it with more material—not to say there isn’t danger in the disappearing of institutions that support critical thinking, but we should not concede defeat just yet.
We are regressing. I believe this, along with our propensity for destruction, especially our raping of the very planet we live on, point to the conclusion that we are a failed evolutionary species. The planet will be better off. We really had it all.
Thanks, I guess. I hadn't thought through these ramifications so thoroughly and it's depressing. It reminds me of my own experience with GPS. When I'm in an area I don't know and use GPS, I'm reliant on the GPS and forget? to pay attention to where I am and never learn my way around. Without GPS I build a nice mental map that orients me and allows me to really see and experience where I am.
John Rockefeller was the big pusher to gubmint run education. He once boomed, "I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers." I'm sure at the time that sounded good. Actually, without any thinkers, John was able to move freely with his oligarch buddies without anyone knowing.
Best I know regarding public education was by John Gatto, former NYC teacher of year. His book was "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education."
I think you will like (and weep) at this paper that analyzed a large corpus and concluded that "the use of words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades,"
Although it does not analyze the data politically, I suspect that this is supporting evidence for my observation that a certain political party has lost touch with reality.
Think about it. You “learn” a language as an infant just from being exposed to it. Children of the deaf start “speaking” in ASL the same way other children acquire language and start speaking. Language comes naturally to us in infanthood so that we can communicate.
We have to send kids to school to learn to read. Teaching them how to do it isn’t easy.
Even after 14 years of instruction, repetition and forced practice. A lot of them will still only be able to read with difficulty. Reading will always be work for them, not something they do for pleasure.
While we associate facility with reading and intelligence, the two are only loosely correlated. Recent studies have found that reading has more to do with how your brain is wired than with how smart you are.
Lots of smart people have difficulty reading. Their brains just aren’t wired for it.
It has a lot to do with how your brain processes symbols. It turns out, that just like other abilities, the ability to read has a performance spectrum in the population. For some kids, reading will come naturally and easily, just like catching a ball in flight comes easily to a natural athlete.
At great expense, and with great effort, we attempt to teach every child how to read. Reading has become fundamental in our society and civilization. But it’s not “natural”.
Learning to read is a major developmental milestone for a child. It signals that they have become capable of “third order abstraction”.
The first order of abstraction is the image.
We don’t think about this because we take it for granted. We are born into a world of “things”. People, animals, and objects. A vast universe of stuff. In our beginning, none of it has name.
Because we are a visual species, the first thing we learn is that images represent physical things. Play food is a toy, an object. It is also an image because it represents real food.
Before a child has words, they begin to abstract the world with images. In the painting there is an image of a pipe. This image is a symbol, it is not a pipe. Functionally it is a pictogram or an emoji.
The second order of abstraction is “the word”.
Because spoken language comes easily to us, we often don’t see the artificiality of it. Words are “sound symbols”. Completely arbitrary snippets of vocalization that we collectively assign meaning.
You learn to speak without an alphabet, using only your ears. An act of memorization and endless repetition of the collective set of sound symbols that is your native “birth tongue”.
This is the second level of abstraction from reality that Magritte alludes to in his painting. When you say the word “pipe”, you are using a sound symbol.
The word “pipe” is not the same thing as an actual pipe. It is an abstraction of it. A sound symbol that represents the image of a physical pipe in our minds.
First you learn that the picture of a thing, can represent a thing. Then you learn that the sound symbol “apple” names and represents the physical object and the image of it.
When you say the word “ apple” you are using a sound symbol to describe a visual image that is a representation of an actual apple. Spoken language is a second layer of abstraction from reality.
The third order of abstraction is written language.
Reading requires the assignment of abstract/arbitrary visual symbols to represent the sound symbols that we have learned to describe reality. It is a third order abstraction.
You start with a real pipe in your hand, reality.
You learn that images can represent real objects.
Then you learn that these images can be represented by sound symbols. The sound symbol:
“PIPE”
names both the actual object and the image of the object.
The final stage in learning to read is the conceptual leap that a visual symbol can represent a sound symbol that describes an image of a physical object. That the visual symbol of letters that spells:
PIPE
Is a visual representation of a sound symbol that names the image in our mind of an actual real pipe.
Three levels of abstraction built on the reality of a pipe in your hand. That’s a big jump, not everyone is good at it.
I taught myself how to read at age four by watching Concentration. That's a "gift" that few people have. Being a "reader" doesn't make me "better" or "smarter" than non-readers. But, it does make us different.
Along with 6th grade literacy, about half of adults have 6th grade numeracy skills, a crsuhingly expensive inferiority to go through life with, as one is punshed hard again and again in everyday life for not being “good” at math.
I also think we will see a general decline in thinking ability as we outsource more and more to automation. Scarier than that are the culture wars that will happen when half the population believes, religiously, that their AI is sentient.
As if people’s stupidity wasn’t already maddening enough..
All good points.
As a writer, I too value the practice for how it helps me think and figure things out. Outsourcing to AI totally misses the point.
Thank you for writing and for giving readers something to think about. VR (Virtual Reality) was supposed to replace actual reality until it didn’t. Who needs a decent place to live when you can pretend to live somewhere fantastic? But, oops, a person does actually need to keep her body from freezing, roasting, or starving, and no amount of VR helps with that, and AI actually needs to keep its bodies from freezing, roasting, or starving, too, and no amount of hype makes that happen without material and humans to put it in place and continue feeding it with more material—not to say there isn’t danger in the disappearing of institutions that support critical thinking, but we should not concede defeat just yet.
We are regressing. I believe this, along with our propensity for destruction, especially our raping of the very planet we live on, point to the conclusion that we are a failed evolutionary species. The planet will be better off. We really had it all.
Thanks, I guess. I hadn't thought through these ramifications so thoroughly and it's depressing. It reminds me of my own experience with GPS. When I'm in an area I don't know and use GPS, I'm reliant on the GPS and forget? to pay attention to where I am and never learn my way around. Without GPS I build a nice mental map that orients me and allows me to really see and experience where I am.
John Rockefeller was the big pusher to gubmint run education. He once boomed, "I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers." I'm sure at the time that sounded good. Actually, without any thinkers, John was able to move freely with his oligarch buddies without anyone knowing.
Best I know regarding public education was by John Gatto, former NYC teacher of year. His book was "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education."
I think you will like (and weep) at this paper that analyzed a large corpus and concluded that "the use of words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades,"
Although it does not analyze the data politically, I suspect that this is supporting evidence for my observation that a certain political party has lost touch with reality.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107848118
Reading may be “fundamental” but it is not natural.
(from: https://medium.com/artfullyautistic/my-autistic-life-02-521ee7477d4c)
Think about it. You “learn” a language as an infant just from being exposed to it. Children of the deaf start “speaking” in ASL the same way other children acquire language and start speaking. Language comes naturally to us in infanthood so that we can communicate.
We have to send kids to school to learn to read. Teaching them how to do it isn’t easy.
Even after 14 years of instruction, repetition and forced practice. A lot of them will still only be able to read with difficulty. Reading will always be work for them, not something they do for pleasure.
While we associate facility with reading and intelligence, the two are only loosely correlated. Recent studies have found that reading has more to do with how your brain is wired than with how smart you are.
Lots of smart people have difficulty reading. Their brains just aren’t wired for it.
It has a lot to do with how your brain processes symbols. It turns out, that just like other abilities, the ability to read has a performance spectrum in the population. For some kids, reading will come naturally and easily, just like catching a ball in flight comes easily to a natural athlete.
At great expense, and with great effort, we attempt to teach every child how to read. Reading has become fundamental in our society and civilization. But it’s not “natural”.
Learning to read is a major developmental milestone for a child. It signals that they have become capable of “third order abstraction”.
The first order of abstraction is the image.
We don’t think about this because we take it for granted. We are born into a world of “things”. People, animals, and objects. A vast universe of stuff. In our beginning, none of it has name.
Because we are a visual species, the first thing we learn is that images represent physical things. Play food is a toy, an object. It is also an image because it represents real food.
Before a child has words, they begin to abstract the world with images. In the painting there is an image of a pipe. This image is a symbol, it is not a pipe. Functionally it is a pictogram or an emoji.
The second order of abstraction is “the word”.
Because spoken language comes easily to us, we often don’t see the artificiality of it. Words are “sound symbols”. Completely arbitrary snippets of vocalization that we collectively assign meaning.
You learn to speak without an alphabet, using only your ears. An act of memorization and endless repetition of the collective set of sound symbols that is your native “birth tongue”.
This is the second level of abstraction from reality that Magritte alludes to in his painting. When you say the word “pipe”, you are using a sound symbol.
The word “pipe” is not the same thing as an actual pipe. It is an abstraction of it. A sound symbol that represents the image of a physical pipe in our minds.
First you learn that the picture of a thing, can represent a thing. Then you learn that the sound symbol “apple” names and represents the physical object and the image of it.
When you say the word “ apple” you are using a sound symbol to describe a visual image that is a representation of an actual apple. Spoken language is a second layer of abstraction from reality.
The third order of abstraction is written language.
Reading requires the assignment of abstract/arbitrary visual symbols to represent the sound symbols that we have learned to describe reality. It is a third order abstraction.
You start with a real pipe in your hand, reality.
You learn that images can represent real objects.
Then you learn that these images can be represented by sound symbols. The sound symbol:
“PIPE”
names both the actual object and the image of the object.
The final stage in learning to read is the conceptual leap that a visual symbol can represent a sound symbol that describes an image of a physical object. That the visual symbol of letters that spells:
PIPE
Is a visual representation of a sound symbol that names the image in our mind of an actual real pipe.
Three levels of abstraction built on the reality of a pipe in your hand. That’s a big jump, not everyone is good at it.
I taught myself how to read at age four by watching Concentration. That's a "gift" that few people have. Being a "reader" doesn't make me "better" or "smarter" than non-readers. But, it does make us different.
Along with 6th grade literacy, about half of adults have 6th grade numeracy skills, a crsuhingly expensive inferiority to go through life with, as one is punshed hard again and again in everyday life for not being “good” at math.
I also think we will see a general decline in thinking ability as we outsource more and more to automation. Scarier than that are the culture wars that will happen when half the population believes, religiously, that their AI is sentient.
As if people’s stupidity wasn’t already maddening enough..
Thanks again, Sarah Connor, for spreading the truth once more!