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The simple answers to the questions that get asked about every new technology:
Will [blank] make us all geniuses? No
Will [blank] make us all morons? No
Will [blank] destroy whole industries? Yes
Will [blank] make us more empathetic? No
Will [blank] make us less caring? No
Will teens use [blank] for sex? Yes
Were they going to have sex anyway? Yes
Will [blank] destroy music? No
Will [blank] destroy art? No
But can’t we go back to a time when- No
Will [blank] bring about world peace? No
Will [blank] cause widespread alienation by creating a world of empty experiences? We were already alienated
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Will [____] make us less caring? …NO
I love how well most of this has aged, but that line there feels very pre-2016 to me, unfortunately.
And that’s not even just hinting at politics and world events, but also about how much more we know about those empty experiences from the last line, and how they are meticulously engineered to fuck with people’s brains for juuuust a bit more engagement.
This needs to be updated for AI in 2026.
It needs to be updated for Music and Art to Yes.
It’s a great comic because it’s still up to date
So about making people morons: let me tell you about leaded gasoline…
It made people violent, and crime rate went up like crazy.
Millions of people dying every year from heart attacks related to lead poisoning.
What is worse is it is still happening. Upwards of 5 million people are estimate to die from lead related cardiovascular disease in 2024. Lead poisoning mainly from gasoline has probably accounted for close to a billion deaths on the high end.
They only recently phased it out of cars with no plans to phase out airplanes.
Leaded avgas is only used for piston aircraft, and most countries use a grade that contains minimal and only for engines that require it.
I think the real issue is even though we have stopped a lot of the pollution our land was so thoroughly drenched in it activities as mundane as burning firewood release large amounts of lead.
That means it is so blanketed that is going to take global scale remediation to solve the problem. That is mind bogglingly destructive levels of environmental degredation.
That’s why we started asking.
Will [Technology] go in my butt? Definitely.
I am not a teenager, btw.
A few of those answers need to be reevaluated for “AI”…
Yeah, the problem with this comic is that it somewhat minimizes how
<technology>can exacerbate the ongoing problems.Yep, this comic did not age well. This technology literally targets artists. That’s pretty new.
But it will not destroy art or music.
Often times I see people discuss art and music, and I wonder if they see creative literature as art, or if it’s forgotten.
I mention this because AI has been devastating on the literature world.
This brought to mind a 2012 interview with Eric Wolpaw, writer of Valve games and Psychonauts:
Interviewer: “People take for granted that writing is easy. It’s not.”
Erik Wolpaw: “Yeah. Everybody can write. I mean, you’re a writer. But everybody thinks that they can, because everybody can to a certain extent.”
I think of writing as a form of art, but it’s not the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word.
Man I really hope so. But the vast majority of people consume mass produced formulaic media already, I don’t see AI helping that trend.
No amount of people doing that will ever destroy art or music, the only thing that can is reducing artists living conditions enough to where they can’t make art.
commercial incentives already ruined art if you’re worried about this ruining art.
But now Spotify and co have a financial incentive to generate as much slop as possible and to push it to their users aggressively. Why? Well cause if their users only listen to slop, they won’t have to pay any actual artists anymore. So you know it’s guaranteed to happen. This is capitalism after all.
Spotify makes more money from artists trying to promote their work than they do from people paying to stream music.
That will mean people make music for the love of the craft again, music has sucked because of commercial incentive, maybe this will revive the craft.
I know artists who use AI to help them design something, but then they go out and actually manifest the physical thing…be it a mural or a sculpture or a tattoo. So no, it likely won’t harm the artists who can use it to their advantage, not for a long time.
Isn’t that literally the last line, but for art? The average person gave very little fucks about “art” before AI, and most art happened for purely base reasons, like marketing or porn. Fancy shmancy art will continue to exist.
It will (and already has) HURT them, certainly. But that’s still a far cry from “destroy”.
Art is a fundamental human drive. In fact, not even human - neanderthals also made art. The fact that we can make cool looking pictures really easily with a computer will no more destroy art than photography did.
i still think it holds up tbqh, ai exacerbates and concentrates many problems but it doesn’t really create new ones. content farm slop existed before ai, it’s just easier to make now. people who use ai for everything already didn’t give a shit about most things. people are still making awesome music and art. there are still many smart, talented people and there still will be. and we were already alienated.
as always, the problem is capitalism
Blaming capitalism is a cop out at this point. You can’t just ignore some very specific problems about a very specific technology then gesture wildly at the world and be like, “if only we didn’t have the entire system set up the way we do, if only we had a perfect economy”.
Good and bad things can still happen in capitalism. You can’t just throw up your hands and say “capitalism” when rat poison ends up in baby food. Regulation can still exist in capitalism and has a proven track record to work. You don’t have to replace the entirety of your economic system to prevent AI data centers from being built.
You don’t have to replace the entirety of your economic system to prevent AI data centers from being built.
obviously not, and i support people who stop them. but even there, ai isn’t exceptional. streaming services like youtube or netflix, or massive online games, also consume a ton of electricity and have polluting datacenters, datacenters used for ai aren’t fundamentally different from datacenters used for something else, and yet people only build movements against them when it’s ai. don’t get me wrong it’s good that we’re educating people on the harms caused by datacenters. and it’s good that many of these projects are being canceled. but datacenters are a problem exacerbated by ai, not created by it.
and you’re right that a communist economy would not inherently fix this. maybe there would be less datacenters overall because people (and their governments) would prioritize the health of communities over chatbots, netflix and fortnite. but datacenters are not inherent to any economic model.
for everything else tho?
- deskilling by ai is a problem because it makes you dependent on an ai company for doing the skill you used to do. without capitalism, there wouldn’t be an incentive to make you dependent on a product.
- ai taking jobs is a problem because under capitalism, you need a job to live.
- ai slop creations are a problem because they’re low quality trash created not for their artistic merit, but for something else, like an ad, or pure revenue (like with content farms). without capitalism there would be no incentive to pump these out as much. people would probably still create them as art, but, whatever. shitty art exists and has always existed. same goes for code.
AI is a huge umbrella term, not a very specific technology at all.
Well, the new problems are the scale of things. For example if humanity had only burned a small amount of oil each year, earth would have been pretty alright, at least until the heat death of the sun. But we started burning way too much and fucked. Same here, a few people being able to create slop kinda just self regulated, but now all of humanity can do it for free and it’s incredibly destructive.
Which? They all seem accurate
There is already science that shows that people using llms makes them measurably worse, in an incredibly short amount of time, at tasks than they were before using llms.
So, “will x make us all morons? No” actually has some peer reviewed work that seems to imply "possibly NOT ‘no’ "
Said “science” is a handful of cherrypicked studies that cannot reliably say such things. The US has been in a downward spiral of ignorance for a little while now. And if it is caused by anything, it’s a combination of poor schooling, poor parenting, and social media.
Google Maps also makes us bad at finding our way manually. Are we therefore a moron?
If you’ve offloaded your capacity to navigate, and are worse at navigating, then you’re objectively worse at navigating, that’s the reality.
What are you offloading to ai? Are you worse at it now? Is it critical thinking? Then yes.
Getting worse at tasks doesn’t make you a moron. Are you a moron because you aren’t as good at mental arithmetic as you were when you practiced it for school? No.
“What should I do” and “what is 17+19” are fundamentally different questions.
What cognitive deficiency makes one a moron? This is the question.
If you believe there is nothing one could be deficient at that makes one a moron, then yes: no technology would make you a moron. You’re starting from a position where there is no prerequisite to not be a moron. It’s a tautology.
If there is a nugget… some bare minimum of performance required to not be a moron… then you must consider if a technology is driving people to that state.
I know morons.
I know they exist. I know what they lack.
I know why AI excites them. It provides a leveling mechanic that allows them to put up a facade of competence. I have no frame of reference to viscerally comprehend the excitement of being able to cosplay as a competent person. It must be the most exciting thing in the world.
For everyone else who alreadyhad two brain cells to rub together, it’s a Tuesday.
Synthesizing direction from inputs is intelligence. Deriving future inputs from observed data is a calculator. They couldn’t be more different. It’s obscene delusion to suggest they’re the same let alone similar
AI making you a moron requires not only that using AI degrades your faculties to such an extent that you become one, but that “all of us” (let’s say, the majority of people in rich countries) use it so much it has that effect.
I’m sure it will have some effect on the unexpected portions of one’s brain, but still doubt the first part is true, as do I doubt the second.
I was enjoying this as a new, modern xkcd I haven’t seen before until I saw the title
Giving simple answers like that without evaluating the context and letting anything go on without restrictions is the path to alienation and corporate dystopia
Welcome to life, boyo
I fear that this is to much of a sensible take for lemmy nowadays. There have always been dumb arguments, but anecdotally I think we’ve been invaded by either bots or the general public. But should use statistics to back this up. Another project on the pile.
What industry will VR destroy I wonder now
The VR industry.
As is tradition
Physical scale modeling. There’s already VR headsets actively used to preview 3D models of things like vehicles and architectural blueprints.
Big Grads because they can’t sell you more to touch
deleted by creator
Title text:
‘Will [ ] allow us to better understand each other and thus make war undesirable?’ is one that pops up whenever we invent a new communication medium.
War never changes…
Nor do people sadly
aged like 🍷
also woah heyhi dear chloe! <3 🥕
oh umm… i - … i see ur posting a whole bunch of anti-ai stuffs lately.,.,. no—
nothing wrong with that! just umm—…, just noticed that.,…,.
hiiii maria!! :3 🧡
i hope you’re doing well!
i have nothing against the technologies behind ai, you know, large language models and all that, the tech itself is just that, a tech
i do have a big problem with the way it’s used tho, how companies are forcing its use, how they (the companies) and their tools make people lose their jobs, fill the internet with low quality stuff, lead to sloppy work all over, and try to make us cognitively dependent on them, all the while polluting the environment with all of this… but like i said in another comment the root problem here is capitalism, none of the problems of ai are exclusive to it
it’s a tool, like a knife, you know? a knife can be used to stab people, but it can also be used to cook delicious meals. it’s just that with ai there’s been a ton of stabbing and not much cooking…
imo ai is fine when it’s very specific tasks run locally that are double-checked by a human, like isolating a voice track in a song, generating automatic subtitles (and cleaning them manually afterwards, this part is important, looking at you youtube), isolating a subject from its background in a photo… but generating entire images, vibecoding or writing essays? that’s where we enter stab territory imo, especially when you do those on a big datacenter
at the end of the day, if you don’t agree with me that’s fine. i’m not gonna pretend i’m a beacon of moral purity either. i’m not vegan, i drive a car, and i am the descendant of colonizers, living on the land they stole…
The way I like to understand it is that I’m pro machine learning, but anti “AI.” None of what we have now is really that intelligent; AI is just a marketing buzzword to sell people on the idea that a tool can replace labor entirely. They despise workers and want to believe that AI can get rid of them. It’s why they keep throwing money at AI development despite it providing no clear economic benefit. As masters, they want to rid of the need for slaves, because in our current reality they are nothing without them.
oooh yea you’re right, and that’s a good way to put it! thanks for adding this
^ ^ ^ woag most reasonable ai take :o ^ ^ ^
🥕💖
(gosh those yt subtitles yesyes those suck sometime…)
Did age well
You can use double space to create a jumpline
is there a missing jumpline somewhere? on my end everything seems fine… 😅
In the alt text
the alt text of the image didn’t have correct newlines before but i fixed them a bit later, maybe the fix hasn’t federated to you yet (that would be weird because i fixed it not long after posting)
the alt text in the post body looks fine on my end… everything looks fine seeing from your instance too… maybe it’s a client thing
Cheating because this shitty reality is from 2013 too
Did not age well
Typewriters didn’t destroy calligraphy and cameras didn’t destroy painting.
