Overabundance of calories and fast food led to an obesity epidemic and now nearly half the youth at risk of type 2 diabetes.
However, it also led to the counter reaction of cross fit and extreme fitness by a small percentage.
The same will happen with AI. Most people will become smooth brains when they don’t have to exercise thought and a small fraction will use it to push the bounds of what humans are capable of.
> Also on the panel, Father Michael Baggot worried that "artificial intimacy is going to distract us from, and deter us from, the deep interpersonal bonds that are central to our happiness and our flourishing."
> He called for guardrails on AI to stop it capturing individuals' "minds but … also our affections."
> Fr Baggot cited the example of Magisterium AI, a Catholic chatbot. He sits on the scholarly advisory board for the service, and said its creators had worked to prevent it being "anthropomorphic" adding, "We do not want people having an intimate relationship with it."
I appreciate that coinage, "artificial intimacy," and want to explore the implications of it more.
It seems pretty clear that LLMs will create another cleavage between the upper and lower classes. 200 years ago if you were rich you were overweight, and everyone else was skinny. These days it's reversed. You need a combination of money and impulse control to avoid being overweight. Right now, if you're scrolling on your phone constantly vs. reading, working out, doing chores, etc., you probably fall somewhere between the middle and the bottom of the bell curve for impulse control. The privileged few among us (I am not one of them) don't struggle with avoiding these addictions.
And finally, LLMs. They certainly _could_ be used to help individuals bootstrap and quickly gain a basic competence in a new topic, and allow those individuals to reach greater expertise more quickly. But _a lot_ of people will just offload their thinking to the LLMs and actually erode their skills. Is this strictly inevitable from a conceptual standpoint? No. But practically speaking a lot of people will fall into this trap, which enlightened technologists will scratch their heads. "I don't understand why people say LLMs make you dumber, I've used them to advance my career and expand my knowledge, etc. Sounds like you guys just don't like progress."
> Wilson rejected the idea of mass joblessness due to AI as "a very silly fear because human desires and human wants are infinite, and therefore, we always find new things for people to do."
What are companies going to pay these now-dumber people to do, once they've automated away the jobs the smarter versions of these people did? Will the AI be able to perform the original jobs but unable to perform the jobs achievable by these now-dumber people?
Are we a better-off society if a net dumber population is doing a manual labor job that the robotics companies haven't solved yet?
Misuse of AI is mass stupidity. The problem is that people don't understand how these things work, and the technology has been oversold (as nearly every new tech is) as something more powerful and more trustworthy than it actually is.
AI is incredibly useful. I'm already getting a ton of use out of it. But you have to treat it like an untrustworthy source, or at least have a "trust but verify" attitude. You also have to understand that it is not sentient, doesn't "care" about you, and is just a hugely powerful autocomplete engine. Any sense of intimacy or understanding you have with it is an illusion.
In engineering I treat it like a junior intern that is very fast, has memorized a huge amount of info, but makes mistakes and has to be hand-held and anything they produce must be examined and tested.
For every person that uses AI to learn, there are one or more people that use it to avoid learning. The gap between people exacerbates. Some people are driven by curiosity, but they are the minority. The effect of AI is that the productivity of the few is multiplied by a higher number than the productivity of everyone else, from my anecdotal experience.
> Wilson rejected the idea of mass joblessness due to AI as "a very silly fear because human desires and human wants are infinite, and therefore, we always find new things for people to do."
While I'm highly skeptical that the current iteration of LLM tech will lead to mass joblessness, the reasoning above is flawed. If it costs less to employ a bot than to employ a human, then the price of human labor will fall until it reaches equilibrium with the bot. And if that equilibrium price happens to be below what it takes to keep a human alive, then it doesn't matter if "human wants are infinite" because it would be cheaper to fulfill those wants without paying a human.
In these times I'm finding myself more drawn to reading and trying to understand christian views on a number of modern issues.
Does anyone know where to find more? Where are the modern christian scholars? Are there christian publications easily available? In the universities I found those sources are available, but only in the specific context of studying religion but much less so as another voice on the subject at hand.
I am one of the people who was on the panel. As always, it's a very lossy process when a journalist is summarizing another journalist summarizing a 90 minute discussion. Happy to expand in the comments here on any of the issues that got brought up.
The phrase "artificial intimacy" really sticks with me. If machines can simulate emotional engagement good enough and past a certain threshold, many users will treat AI more as real people. This might happen consciously or unconsciously.
That illusion of closeness could have the potential to warp how we relate to REAL people. Over time, if your "listener" never judges you or walks away, you might measure real human bonds against an unfair standard.
I think this will be the inevitable outcome. I wrote a post [1] about this a few months back explaining how (I think) the long shot of AI adoption is an extreme dumbing down to the point where humans no longer know how to organically build or maintain what they need without AI.
Not one comment in this thread mentions exorcism. I was floored by information that those are still real and practising and even holding conferences. So I went to read the Catholic church's explanation on the topic [0] and yes, demonic possession is rare but it exists in their worldview. What exactly are those exorcists doing - more to the point why would you need 1000 of them? It's 2025 and we're talking demons in the same breath as AI.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 41.7 ms ] threadHowever, it also led to the counter reaction of cross fit and extreme fitness by a small percentage.
The same will happen with AI. Most people will become smooth brains when they don’t have to exercise thought and a small fraction will use it to push the bounds of what humans are capable of.
> He called for guardrails on AI to stop it capturing individuals' "minds but … also our affections."
> Fr Baggot cited the example of Magisterium AI, a Catholic chatbot. He sits on the scholarly advisory board for the service, and said its creators had worked to prevent it being "anthropomorphic" adding, "We do not want people having an intimate relationship with it."
I appreciate that coinage, "artificial intimacy," and want to explore the implications of it more.
And finally, LLMs. They certainly _could_ be used to help individuals bootstrap and quickly gain a basic competence in a new topic, and allow those individuals to reach greater expertise more quickly. But _a lot_ of people will just offload their thinking to the LLMs and actually erode their skills. Is this strictly inevitable from a conceptual standpoint? No. But practically speaking a lot of people will fall into this trap, which enlightened technologists will scratch their heads. "I don't understand why people say LLMs make you dumber, I've used them to advance my career and expand my knowledge, etc. Sounds like you guys just don't like progress."
What are companies going to pay these now-dumber people to do, once they've automated away the jobs the smarter versions of these people did? Will the AI be able to perform the original jobs but unable to perform the jobs achievable by these now-dumber people?
Are we a better-off society if a net dumber population is doing a manual labor job that the robotics companies haven't solved yet?
AI is incredibly useful. I'm already getting a ton of use out of it. But you have to treat it like an untrustworthy source, or at least have a "trust but verify" attitude. You also have to understand that it is not sentient, doesn't "care" about you, and is just a hugely powerful autocomplete engine. Any sense of intimacy or understanding you have with it is an illusion.
In engineering I treat it like a junior intern that is very fast, has memorized a huge amount of info, but makes mistakes and has to be hand-held and anything they produce must be examined and tested.
While I'm highly skeptical that the current iteration of LLM tech will lead to mass joblessness, the reasoning above is flawed. If it costs less to employ a bot than to employ a human, then the price of human labor will fall until it reaches equilibrium with the bot. And if that equilibrium price happens to be below what it takes to keep a human alive, then it doesn't matter if "human wants are infinite" because it would be cheaper to fulfill those wants without paying a human.
Does anyone know where to find more? Where are the modern christian scholars? Are there christian publications easily available? In the universities I found those sources are available, but only in the specific context of studying religion but much less so as another voice on the subject at hand.
That illusion of closeness could have the potential to warp how we relate to REAL people. Over time, if your "listener" never judges you or walks away, you might measure real human bonds against an unfair standard.
[1] https://ryanglover.net/blog/chauffeur-knowledge-and-the-impe...
[0] https://catholicus.eu/en/the-exorcists-of-the-vatican-realit...