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Childhood disrupted: is the internet damaging young people’s development?
(yorkshirebylines.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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Technology
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I see a bigger "risk" if you want to call it like that, in AI chats, because they make you really lazy in double checking or overall searching and solving issues by yourself. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it does reduce frustration, especially with technical issues you can solve quickly that way, but the risk of getting overall unskilled in problem solving, is growing bigger. Results are masked behind another layer, creating another instance to trust, on top of already existing ones. Paird with growing AI generated content. Which can be harmful as I'm sure no AI model will be able to stop getting confused by fake content. The wishful thinking, we just filter out AI fake content, is a pipedream.
We've already observed an overall trend of young generations moving backwards in their technical understanding of hard and software, simply because there's no real need to to understand it anymore. A lot of stuff has become one click easy, one pre build purchase, one pre defined way to use something. We removed friction in setups and UIs, no longer requiring to develop a bigger understanding on how something works. The result is a lack of insight on how to solve an out of the box issue.
I'm sure older people would say the same about me, being able to Google something, instead of reading byte code and reading a 1000 pages manual. So maybe everything is fine at the end, because humans adapt just fine.
The internet however, has been there long enough that we can say there's no issue. If anything parents should focus more on providing a necessary early development and not buy them a tablet on birth-day.
Everyone said the same thing about the Internet search engines and people using libraries less to look up research. Almost all the examples you listed below that is specific to technical computer knowledge and honestly isn't even relevant to 95+% of the population. The vast majority of people couldn't care less about knowing what's going on under the hood of computers, and they don't need to. Do you know how to effect repairs on your car engine? I don't, and I don't need to, as I don't care and it's not my specialty. We have mechanics and car engineers for that. It's not like computer engineers, devs, etc. will suddenly stop going to school to learn the nitty-gritty (although, purist devs will lament how so many modern devs don't know how to write low-level code, but again, most devs don't need to).
Those kids you're so worried about will grow up, obtain specialized training in whatever area they desire, and there they'll learn what's going on under the hood of whatever subject it is they're learning. Same as it ever was.
The AI proliferation of fake content is definitely already a problem. It has been for several years, just look at all the social division caused by automated bot trolls in relation to online discourse, as well as automated fake news websites. There are solutions to these problems, it just takes the government and citizens to actively work towards combating it. Taiwan is a recent example of how this can be accomplished with their recent elections coming under intense pressure by these fraudulent systems.
AI has its problems, but I hardly think it's going to cause us all to suddenly become braindead mouth breathers anymore than we already have been.
Edit: I will add that I'm somewhat concerned what AI chatbots that become so human-like will do to socialization. But that's a whole other topic