Dialed In

After MIT published the draft of Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task, there was a lot of talk about the findings. Although for some people, the conclusion was simple:

Who needs nuance when you can go for fear, instead?

The idea that our tools shape us is old, I pointed out as much in my post from earlier this week. And the idea that our tools shape us for the worse is likely even older, with people throughout history lamenting changes in how things were done.

But this new broadside strikes me as being part of the bigger conflict over just what generative automation is going to do to our society. While there are techno-optimists who are apparently convinced that it will usher in a post-scarcity society, many of the loudest voices in that camp are people for whom scarcity is already a thing of the past, and haven't show much inclination to elevate the public in the past. And in a lot of ways, I think that this isn't as much a discussion of the technology as it is the people who are seen to control that technology.

While a lot of public opinion concerning the major names in the technology space maps to political ideology and/or partisanship, this isn't likely to be the case forever, and things will go back to being more about the people themselves and what (or whom) they appear to support or not. And there are people on both the political Left and Right who are manifestly mistrustful of wealthy businesspeople, especially the billionaire CEO class. Their mistrust of technology, and their willingness to boil complex science down into simplistic "be afraid" messages, will only increase as their belief that the leadership of technology companies cannot be trusted grows.

In the meantime, however, I expect to see more messages touting generative automation as the new television. Because everyone needs tech to complain about.