What happened to America?

@wildgrass said

EDIT: Or another solution. Maybe we just let the chatbots run governments instead of politicians? That's I think what the Sam Altmans of the world are thinking about now.

Never mind how much water and electricity they need. Has anybody said what these proposed data centers are going to be doing? Asking for a friend.

@moonbus said
Never mind how much water and electricity they need. Has anybody said what these proposed data centers are going to be doing? Asking for a friend.

Great question, along with what our adversaries are doing.

@mike69 said
Great question, along with what our adversaries are doing.

Mass surveillance, one has to suspect. Flock cameras are networked, as you probably know.

@shavixmir said
Yeah, that’s not how science, proof or chemistry works dude.

Are you disputing that eating unhealthy foods make people more hungry?
You seem to be a drug pusher. You want people to buy weight loss drugs because you invested in stock shares of their makers.

Those drugs have bad side effects. And over the years it may become apparent it causes health problems later on. You don't meed drugs that "interfere" with the signal from the stomach to the brain. Eat healthy and there will be no signal telling your brain to eat more. Your stomach will be satisfied with the nutrition and tell your brain you have had enough to eat for now.

Are you taking those drugs that are unproven to be safe?

@moonbus said
Never mind how much water and electricity they need. Has anybody said what these proposed data centers are going to be doing? Asking for a friend.

They say to support AI. What they will not tell you is that it is mostly for mass surveillance and data of all of your communications (Prism) for the NSA. Using AI, so the first part is not a lie. It is for both.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

@moonbus said
Mass surveillance, one has to suspect. Flock cameras are networked, as you probably know.

I agree, but haven’t watched anything about them.

@moonbus said
Never mind how much water and electricity they need. Has anybody said what these proposed data centers are going to be doing? Asking for a friend.

Indeed. It seems like the infrastructure (which is bad for the environment and electrical infrastructure) currently outpaces need. But how much AI do we actually need? When can we stop building them? Why do they still need tax breaks? Why aren't local politicians asking AI companies these questions before they start building? What is happening inside those little whirring boxes? It seems like Claude and ChatGPT are working fine now editing photos, comparing pancake recipes, doing kids homework for them, and spying on everyday law abiding Americans. Water is a basic, fundamental thing we need but we're giving 500 million gallons per day to the machines? And then we're debating how much water is too much water for the data centers to be polluting before it becomes a problem?

@moonbus said
Because they offer hope for a better future. Never mind that it’s false hope for 99.999999% of the population; everyone still hopes he’ll be among the 0.000001%,

Wait, how does low taxes on the rich offer hope for a better future?

The major gears of the economy are run by blue states that offer relatively high tax burden. Red states run by the same political party for 30 years, built by Republicans, run into the ground by Republicans, and the Republicans currently running are claiming they can fix things?

@AThousandYoung said
I’d love to see a contest of your cognitively powerful and critically thinking old people vs the dumber young generation where you compete over who can identify AI imagery or how to find the series you want to watch amongst the many remote controls and streaming services available in the typical modern home.

Or who could more efficiently program macro commands into modern drones.

I'm still mulling over this point. Critical thinking isn't an important skillset anymore? And that's progress? Why would it be considered as progress to just accept the fact that we've offloaded the task of cognition to the machines and are now losing the ability to reason and remember things in our biological brains?

@wildgrass said
Wait, how does low taxes on the rich offer hope for a better future?

The major gears of the economy are run by blue states that offer relatively high tax burden. Red states run by the same political party for 30 years, built by Republicans, run into the ground by Republicans, and the Republicans currently running are claiming they can fix things?

Here's the myth, the myth AvJoe here repeats ad nauseam: if you work hard, you too can be rich and get a tax break.

Of course, it's not a better future for anyone but the rich, and the other dum(b) suckers can go take a flying fook at the moon.

Of course, it's false, no one ever got rich by working hard; the rich get rich by making other people work hard. But that is what the rich want the working classes to believe, so they perpetuate the myth.

@wildgrass said
I'm still mulling over this point. Critical thinking isn't an important skillset anymore? And that's progress? Why would it be considered as progress to just accept the fact that we've offloaded the task of cognition to the machines and are now losing the ability to reason and remember things in our biological brains?

Identifying AI imagery is a central CT skill.

So is identifying propaganda which old people are suckers for.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/01/why-are-older-adults-more-likely-to-share-misinformation-online/

@AThousandYoung said
Identifying AI imagery is a central CT skill.

So is identifying propaganda which old people are suckers for.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/01/why-are-older-adults-more-likely-to-share-misinformation-online/

That is tangential to the point I was making, but okay. Yes, the youths are better at adapting to emergent technology, because their brains are processing information over a shorter historical time frame. As propaganda methodologies shift, the younger generations adapt to it.

That wasn't my point. Gen Z's brains are atrophied and unprepared because they think less than prior generations did. Its not enormously surprising actually, and somewhat obvious that if you think less then you are more dumb. You can also see this in human brains with technologies like GPS/google maps where the hippocampus isn't able to generate mental maps and alternate routes as clearly as physical map readers. That's a specialized tasked but AI now is doing the same thing for cooking, vacation planning, academic research, etc. Our brains are obviously going to atrophy in the absence of thinking.

There is lots of research on this subject, but if Gen Z ever saw that research they wouldn't read it. They ask a chatbot to summarize it. The path of least resistance to humanity moving forward is the progressive loss of critical thinking, just as we have already done to attention,

https://futurism.com/study-ai-critical-thinking

@wildgrass said
That is tangential to the point I was making, but okay. Yes, the youths are better at adapting to emergent technology, because their brains are processing information over a shorter historical time frame. As propaganda methodologies shift, the younger generations adapt to it.

That wasn't my point. Gen Z's brains are atrophied and unprepared because they think less than p ...[text shortened]... king, just as we have already done to attention,

https://futurism.com/study-ai-critical-thinking

I teach them and I see no evidence of lack of intelligence. Yes I'm sure lots of older people have written very wordy papers insulting the youth but that's been going on since Ancient Greece.

Can you imagine the loss of intelligence perceived by farmers when their children moved to the city during industrialization?

YouTube : Cashmere Cow commercial

@wildgrass said
That is tangential to the point I was making, but okay. Yes, the youths are better at adapting to emergent technology, because their brains are processing information over a shorter historical time frame. As propaganda methodologies shift, the younger generations adapt to it.

That wasn't my point. Gen Z's brains are atrophied and unprepared because they think less than p ...[text shortened]... king, just as we have already done to attention,

https://futurism.com/study-ai-critical-thinking

Critical thinking will instantly lead to the realization that the article you link to does not talk about the youth in any way.

@wildgrass said
That is tangential to the point I was making, but okay. Yes, the youths are better at adapting to emergent technology, because their brains are processing information over a shorter historical time frame. As propaganda methodologies shift, the younger generations adapt to it.

That wasn't my point. Gen Z's brains are atrophied and unprepared because they think less than p ...[text shortened]... king, just as we have already done to attention,

https://futurism.com/study-ai-critical-thinking

I tend to agree with you, that critical thinking, like a muscle, atrophies, if not used continuously. Furthermore, it is a skill which must be learned--it is not innate. No one understands the Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem by skimming an AI summary of it; one learns it by working through the proof of it for oneself and grasping why it is valid.