Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

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All posts must be showerthoughts
The entire showerthought must be in the title
No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
Posts must be original/unique
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When I was a kid, computers expanded your mind and your freedoms, bringing power to the individual. With AI, now it does the thinking for you, takes your job, gives power only to a few billionaires. (lemmus.org)

submitted 10 months ago by realitista@lemmus.org to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world

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When I was young and starting out with computers, programming, BBS' and later the early internet, technology was something that expanded my mind, helped me to research, learn new skills, and meet people and have interesting conversations. Something decentralized that put power into the hands of the little guy who could start his own business venture with his PC or expand his skillset.

Where we are now with AI, the opposite seems to be happening. We are asking AI to do things for us rather than learning how to do things ourselves. We are losing our research skills. Many people are talking to AI's about their problems instead of other people. And they will take away our jobs and centralize all power into a handful of billionaire sociopaths with robot armies to carry out whatever nefarious deeds they want to do.

I hope we somehow make it through this part of history with some semblance of freedom and autonomy intact, but I'm having a hard time seeing how.

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[–] realitista@lemmus.org [S] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

We don't even know what "thinking" really is so that is just semantics. If it performs as well or better than humans at certain tasks, it really doesn't matter if it's "thinking" or not.

I don't think people primarily want to use it for decision making anyway. For me it just turbocharges research, compiling stuff quickly from many sources, writes code for small modules quite well, generates images for presentations, etc, does more complex data munging from spreadsheets or even saved me a bunch of time taking a 50 page handwritten ledger and near perfectly converting it to excel..

None of that requires decision making, but it saves a bunch of time. Honestly I've never asked it to make a decision so I have no idea how it would perform.. I suspect it would more describe the pros and cons than actually try to decide something.

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