(Continued from Part 2. This concludes the article.)
AI WRITING
While there are many brain developments, AI will be shortchanging our youngest single-digit aged youth on, they’ll also be robbed of learning many of the skills that are learned later in life as well.
I’ve always enjoyed writing and creating things with pencil and paper since that poem I wrote about the Pilgrims in second grade that my teacher loved so much. It’s something I’ve continued to develop since then and even after all these years, I’m still learning. I don’t know what a dangling participle is and I can basically only tell you what a noun, verb, and adjective is, but the names of the different grammatical pieces aren’t as important as learning how to use them and string them together in meaningful ways regardless of what they’re called.
When I hear that the modern way for kids in school to write a report is by using AI, I can only shake my head. While the younger generations will tell me to get with the times, I reply that our writing skill doesn’t develop well when we merely have to say to a computer, “Write me a 1,000 word report on peanut farming.” When AI is doing all the work, no writing skills are developed on how to put a written sentence together. The way we write and the way we talk are not the same. No creativity skills are developed when we don’t have to figure out which angle to take it from, on what level to write it, or how broad or specific to make it. No organizing skills are developed when AI hands us a well-organized final product ready to hand in to the teacher.
When we have an AI app write a report, or an article, or a story for us, we only superficially understand what was written and it is a guarantee that the material will soon be forgotten. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the students don’t even read their report before handing it in. When we write it the old-fashioned way, we often end up going down the rabbit hole while researching the topic. Some enjoy the rabbit holes, others not, but either way, we learn more when we research and write a report ourselves. We have to seek out the information, read it until we understand it, then write it in a form that other people can understand. When kids are starting out in elementary school using AI to do their research and writing, there’s no question that their brain will lack the full development that’s otherwise possible, and necessary. Our brain-stored database of knowledge and our conversation ability for things more important than the trivial things that most use the Internet for, will also be diminished.
AI AND INTERNET RESEARCh
One of the more disheartening things to see is the very recent development of the “AI Assist” box as one of the first hits on Internet search engines. Those who are ancient enough to recall when Yahoo ruled the universe, remember how search results were not, or only minimally, manipulated to control the flow of information as it is today. Over the years at an exponential rate, search results are now arranged in such a way so that the powers can get the user to think in a certain direction, mostly to the left and toward liberal policies which are almost never in our best interest as a society. These search rankings are effective because very few people will keep scrolling down the search results to get past the propaganda links to get to the different viewpoints. Not long ago, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook openly admitted this occurred during the COVID pandemic, so the government could control the discussion. It wasn’t until later that the general population came to the realization that the “tinfoil hat” people were right all along.
Before AI assist, just scrolling through the various search results could open our minds to new things and take us in other directions we wanted to pursue once we saw them. We saw things we hadn’t thought of which helped broaden our horizons.
With AI, this problem, and I hate to keep using the word “exponential” but it’s true: Things will become much worse at a more rapid pace.
The AI assist button as the very first hit at the top of the list will allow Internet users to be even lazier, and much less likely to scroll down through the hits to get to other versions of the information. While this isn’t so important when wanting to know how much wood a woodchuck can chuck, it’s important when trying to get other viewpoints on such things as the Big Beautiful Budget, things happening in world events, the next pandemic, different schools of economic thought as they pertain to national debts, and whether the Cubs will take the pennant this year. When others are controlling the discussion and we hear the same thing long enough, we almost inevitably accept the doctrines.
The use of AI assistance saves the searcher the trouble of actually scrolling through the responses, heaven forbid. Without this extra work of reading, understanding, thinking about, and choosing, then clicking on a link, backing up and clicking on a different hit, the AI assist now appears to take care of all that work and does it for us.
This is one more form of not only dumbing us down, but narrowing our minds as well as making us more susceptible to the various people and organizations who wish to propagandize us. Before long, we start to accept these views without even realizing it. To tweak Alexander Pope, “First we abhor, then we accept, then we embrace.”
Some propaganda programs need to have immediate results, Monsanto needs us to buy corn-fed beef so they can sell more corn seed even though cows weren’t designed to eat corn. To sell more coffee Folgers needs us to know that “the best part of waking up is Folgers in our cup.” Other propaganda that has far-reaching changes will turn society in a whole new direction, guaranteed for the worst, can take years and decades, but the powers that be have patience. The Internet in general helped speed up many of these programs and AI will serve to reduce the time for results even more quickly. While this may not be so important for us old geezers, for the younger generations, especially for those just old enough to start comprehending things and developing opinions, this will be especially dangerous.
AI is proving to be an even better propaganda tool than television was when it first started becoming a common item in every American home in the 1950s, or the Internet in the mid-1990s. AI is taking everything to a whole new level that was only recently unimaginable.
THE DISADVANTAGE OF INSTANT KNOWLEDGE
I was having a discussion with one of my sons once about how terrible it is to grow old and watch your memory skills diminish. He commented that he thought his memory skills were already worse than mine. I was taken aback, of course, until he explained. He said that since information was instantly available at his fingertips by picking up his phone and asking, “What language do they speak in Uzbekistan” he no longer has a need to remember things when his phone is able to access it more quickly than he can access it from his brain. He was saying it in a lamenting sort of way, not a “Get real, Dad” sort of way.
PREPARING FOR OUR AI-DOMINATED FUTURE
All of these are very important concepts we should be grasping and preparing for. While the AI won’t create an apocalyptic TEOTWAWKI, the slow-motion one it is creating will be just as devastating in many ways.
Two years ago, we only rarely ever heard anything about AI. Today, it is an everyday news topic and we discuss it fairly frequently in our conversations. AI has gone “from zero to 60” in a very short amount of time, much more quickly than anything we’ve experienced so far in human history, and with more devastating consequences. We can’t sit idly by without doing what we can to protect ourselves and our families from certain aspects of it. It’s going to do its thing no matter what, and most of it we can’t avoid.
What we can do, however, is to be aware of the ill consequences that will be affecting us on a personal level and then do what we can to minimize them. This especially applies to all the young people we have in our lives. While we might not be able to stop the Terminator from using a flame thrower on our house someday, we can certainly help ourselves and children to avoid becoming victims of the dumbing down AI is causing to happen to the general population.
We can teach our children that government only rarely does anything good for us and that we should be wary of it and do everything we can to preserve our privacy. We can teach them that we can’t get stuck in normalcy bias, we have to understand that AI is giving governments more and more tools to keep us in line.
We can show them how to be less lazy in our Internet searches and to do the work it takes to find any opposite viewpoints so we can make better decisions on what to believe and how to use it to improve our lives. We can teach them about the dangers of propaganda. We can show them how easily propaganda invades our minds by singing them the dozens of jingles from the television commercials we all heard when we were growing up decades ago. Interestingly, in many Latin-based languages such as Spanish, television commercials are called “las propagandas.”
We can teach our children the benefits of reading hard copies of books, of writing term papers using only information we find ourselves without the use of AI. We can explain to them the benefits of writing this way and the skills they can learn that we don’t learn when AI does our writing and thinking for us.
We can stop being lazy, trusting parents who let the public schools have too much influence over what and how our kids learn things. We can teach them many things at home even if we’re not homeschoolers. We can’t discover too late that a career our child has been planning on since grade school can become a buggy whip profession before they even start filling out their college applications. We have to develop the ability to look ahead and perceive what’s coming so we can help them to make wise career decisions.
We can show by example the thrill and joy that comes from learning hands-on skills that will not only make us more well-rounded, but help prepare us for a SHTF event no matter how remote we may think the possibility is. Whether the Schumer ever hits the Fan or not, living a prepper lifestyle has many, many benefits to make our everyday lives not only easier but more fulfilling.
We can’t just stand by and let AI steamroll us. We can be interested, entertained, and fascinated by many aspects of it, but some of the more important and dangerous things are those that are affecting our youth at this very moment. These include the skill-robbing shortcuts AI provides, the propaganda they’re not aware of that’s in so many AI-driven phone apps and Internet tools.
We’ve got to do everything we can to get our youth to understand all of this. They’ll no doubt consider us dinosaurs and Luddites who need to get with the times, but if only 10% gets through, then it will be worth the effort!
Read the full article here