And now the narrative has shifted to doing things fast without understanding. Otherwise you’ll be antiquated and outclassed.

It is true. I feel left behind—like I don’t belong in a world infested with ai slop.

  • wheezy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    494·
    1 day ago

    Gonna be unpopular here but here it goes anyway.

    The promotion of free thought and “using your brain” was a remnant of lies told to you in your childhood. We are (correctly to a degree) associating this with AI because it is the current evolution of working class control. However, it is not unique in its goal. You are an adult now. You are seeing the reality of living under a capitalist society and what it rewards. It rewards serving capital. You were supposed to stop thinking after you entered the workforce. As your parents and grandparents did.

    Your parents and grandparents experienced this in similar ways. Sometimes the carrot and sometimes the stick. But, we romanticize the past so we focus on previous generations “having it easier”. And, again, there is truth to this, clearly. The material conditions of the current and upcoming generations have declined. But, this is only because the ruling class of society has grown more confident in their ability to distract and corral it’s laboring class.

    For no generation in recent history have we been encouraged to “use our brains” or “think freely”. That was all nonsense they told you while you grew up. There was just a lot more carrot previously than there was the stick. The bread and circus was better maintained. So, there was really no reason for most of population to keep thinking. They accepted their single family home and ignored the few that suffered.

    AI is not primarily used to keep you from thinking. No, the systems that existed before it worked and are working quite well for that. It may have that side effect and it’s welcome for the capitalist class. But AI is meant primarily to empower “the stick” with constant surveillance and control over each and every individual that dares to ask what happened to “the carrots”.

    AI is more about the ruling class being able to say “yeah, you can see how things are. But, you can’t do anything about it.”

    And they’re wrong. Their confidence will be their undoing.

    OP, your feelings of alienation are not unique to living in a world of AI. They are just being allowed to be realized without any distractions because of the degree of hubris that AI has given the capitalist/ruling class. It is a good thing in a way. Allow it to give you clarity and class consciousness where your parents lacked. It is through this class struggle we can free ourselves from this alienation you are describing.

    Edit: Appreciate the upvotes. Have been use to downvotes anytime I try to explain why AI feels so awful. It’s not just AI.

    • OmegaMouse@pawb.social
      10·
      1 day ago

      I do agree with what you’ve said here, and you’ve said it very eloquently. But for the sake of my understanding I’m going to play devil’s advocate.

      Does a capitalist society really benefit from discouraging free thought? And is to do so a conscious decision by the ruling class, or is it just the nature of the system in general? Libraries, bookshops and newspapers have existed for a long time, and information flows quite freely on the internet. I hate AI, but I struggle to imagine some shadowy cabal created it with the goal to dumb down the population; that feels more like an insidious side effect. Obviously it was created with profit in mind though, and organisations are only to happy to replace workers with AI if it’ll save them some money. The fact that it’s available to the public feels like a way to appease the general population and get us used to its existence more than anything. So we gain some small ‘benefit’ from it whilst it replaces us in the workplace.

      • Talcosis@lemmy.zip
        9·
        19 hours ago

        Society doesn’t benefit. The people in charge of society do benefit.

        Someone who has nothing likes change, because change is how you get something. Once you’re a billionaire…well, you now have a couple billion incentives to keep everything exactly how it is. How it was when you made it to the top.

        So it’s a fight between society and the elites. Once the balance of power tips in the favor of the elites, society begins to stagnate. In some cases, because at a certain point getting more billions won’t make a dent in your power the same way that removing money from the working class and making them more desperate and dependent does.

      • TronBronson@lemmy.world
        1·
        12 hours ago

        It’s not a shadowy Cabal it’s 40 years of Republicans attacking education with shitty policy. It was no child left behind… It was refusing to update curriculum. It was our weird obsession with sports over education. It’s way easier to trick dumb people into voting for a felon and ignoring the constitution for four years