Interesting argument, but I think that it takes an unfairly negative view of humanity. I don't agree that "humans are lazy" -- I think the important thing is that all of us, even the brightest, are cognitively limited. No single one of us can hold more than 5-9 pieces of information in our brains at any one time (Mandler), at an instant where there may be billions or maybe trillions of data points we could pay attention to.
As a species, we manage this cognitive limitation by creating hierarchies, companies, civil services and suchlike that help us "chunk down", aggregate and manage particular types of information, but these are necessarily rigid and imperfect, and they have blindspots.
The architecture of our brains simply does not allow us to do any better. This would be true of any species with a similar brain architecture.
I think this is where the "life is great, life is awful, life is getting better" idea is important. Yes, there are some terrible human beings, but there are many, many more good human beings who are quietly, unspectacularly, doing their best to play their part in making things better.
The job of our news media is to alert us to what is going wrong, not what is going right. There is so much more that is going right than is going wrong, and that is reflected in statistics on poverty reduction, reduction in child mortality, reduction in disease load and suchlike (even if, in the short term, specific politicians are working against this.)
Further to this, it looks like the government may be going against us on this: https://www.politico.eu/article/how-labour-fell-out-love-with-ai-bill-peter-kyle/#:~:text=Ministers%20have%20gone%20from%20promising,for%20a%20big%20AI%20bill.&text=LONDON%20%E2%80%94%20Standing%20in%20Imperial%20College,further%20than%20that%20September%20morning.
We need to campaign.
I like Control AI, and what a great reference!
There were a number of good points put to the government's spokesman, most of which were ignored.
Hi Nick
Thank you for your reply. Are we all introverts? :)
I do think we need to get out of our 'comfort zones', though. It's all too easy to try to do everything digitally, but everyone else is too!
Interesting argument, but I think that it takes an unfairly negative view of humanity. I don't agree that "humans are lazy" -- I think the important thing is that all of us, even the brightest, are cognitively limited. No single one of us can hold more than 5-9 pieces of information in our brains at any one time (Mandler), at an instant where there may be billions or maybe trillions of data points we could pay attention to.
As a species, we manage this cognitive limitation by creating hierarchies, companies, civil services and suchlike that help us "chunk down", aggregate and manage particular types of information, but these are necessarily rigid and imperfect, and they have blindspots.
The architecture of our brains simply does not allow us to do any better. This would be true of any species with a similar brain architecture.
I think this is where the "life is great, life is awful, life is getting better" idea is important. Yes, there are some terrible human beings, but there are many, many more good human beings who are quietly, unspectacularly, doing their best to play their part in making things better.
The job of our news media is to alert us to what is going wrong, not what is going right. There is so much more that is going right than is going wrong, and that is reflected in statistics on poverty reduction, reduction in child mortality, reduction in disease load and suchlike (even if, in the short term, specific politicians are working against this.)