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Comment by ungovernableCat | Hacker News Reader

I'll be the negative nancy and say that I think it's more likely we see an acceleration of the current trend. If we're talking about students, the top students will be doing as well or better than today but the median might see a big regression.

I have friends who work in primary education and they say there's definitely been some sort of decline in cognitive skills. A lot more kids struggle with holding attention and thinking outside of the box.

I think too much screen exposure has been terrible for the average child.

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I definitely don't disagree with screen or exposure or social media exposure being deleterious.

That said, I suspect this technology will allow us to study and mitigate those effects in ways we weren't previously capable of. That's in addition to the other broad swathe of things that should make us healthier and more intelligent (see some of my other posts here). I'm not particularly negative about our chances.

I do hope for an optimistic outcome of course. But the same cohort that gave us algorithmic screen maximisation is also funding and leading the AI revolution so I'm a bit sceptical they have our best interest in mind.

Not only are they leading the AI revolution, but consumer AI app design follows the same principles as the screen-time-maximization apps.

Skinner box design, pull a lever and get an answer (or an app, or a song, or a poem, or a research paper).

A common complaint amongst colleagues is that they aren't able to stop "checking on their agents" after hours. This stuff is just as addictive as the rest of the consumer apps eating up all of our time and attention.

If the top students are doing better, especially if it is significantly better, I think that can be a net positive outcome. If you look at the distribution of contribution to society it's not like it's remotely even and there is an argument to primarily focusing on and pouring most of our resources into the top Nth percent instead of trying to slightly improve everyone.

Democracy gets in the way of that. If the median voter declines enough, nobody will have nice things.

If the median voter "declines" because they're become skilled at and accustomed to using a bot to help them make complex decisions, then maybe they'll skip lazily voting D or R down the line and we'll be alright anyway.

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