Short clip to start the discussion
Something said in that clip hit me sideways. She stated “we’re the generation with ChatGPT, you’re the generation with Experiance” And thats something I have mentioned sideways in some of my discussions about AI: It’s too easy!
Dude mentions being able to show them how to use a library card catalog, microfiche, the Encyclopedias, etc.
Now days; you posit a question to an LLM and get back an answer in nanoseconds. Ask really tough questions and it may take a microsecond longer. Example: I uploaded a PDF of Wings to ChatGPT and asked for a ‘readers assessment’. and got back first impressions in under thirty seconds. I did a deeper dig and that took a full week because ‘we’ broke the book into sections and tore things down. This is a good tool for that purpose, but that is not how the majoity use it.
Most are or will use it for the most mundane of questioning, to recieve intantaneous answers,
and learn nothing. An answer to a simple question of the right now, that will likely be forgotten before breakfast tomorrow. In the words of my GrandPa “they didn’t do the work” They didn’t dig through the stacks for the links, they didn’t follow the trails explain the thing, they didn’t see the years of research that led to the one “that was strange” reaction, that led to a new hypothesis and new discoveries.
Been seeing the same in my own history as well. MATH. I learned more about math learning to use a sliderule than I everlearned while in school and being permitted to use a calculator. It wasn’t that one is better, mor eaccurate or faster (they are. Sliderules being limited to three decimal places based on eyesight accuracyy, and they take longer, and people DO forget the order of process.)
What a sliderule offers that a calculator cannot is SCOPE. You can see the way the numbers interact, right there in your face. You have to do the breakdown of scientific notation to scale the numbers into managable sizes, in both directions, You see much more of the process: you are involved more than “just punching in the numbers”
That applies to the other stuff now too. I can easily get Chat or Claude or Grok to do the hard work of research, even go so far as to put all the footnotes together, write the danged thing even,
But I wouldn’t be involved, I wouldn’t smell the dust of the library, or the heat from the lamp of the microfiche machine while looking through years of newspaper articles. I wouln’t have the EXPERIANCE that she mentions we have. I wouldn’t have that journey along the way to the finished product as reminders. The “oops, I wasn’t looking for that” but damned if ‘that’ wasn’t something I needed in my quiver.
(and no, this isn’t a dig on the Boomers or anything. I still feel the Newb at many things, even though I somehow graduated to the “GreyBeard” Funny how that works,,,)
Fred asked me recently how much I have been using AI. My answer “not much at all now” and its truth. It was a curiosity to me, and I can see much benefit as a writer (having an editor in your back pocket is worth GOLD to a writer) but I also saw the TRAP, the trap that is going to soften the minds of the generation that is slotted to be the caretakers of my generation.(much as I am my Da’s caretaker now.)
And I am not alone in that thinking.
More laters
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(, ‘)
