I commented on the thread on hexbear but I’ll say it here for the sake of perhaps starting a conversation, I think linking cognitive capacity to people becoming reactionaries, is itself a reactionary and ableist idea. Has lead/covid/microplastics affected the cognitive capacity of the population? Yes, most likely, but this alone does not turn a population towards reaction. Being “smart” doesnt turn you into a communist, being disabled doesnt turn you into a reactionary.

I am deeply disappointed seeing how many people in this thread think that the problem with this argument is invoking genetics as the biological cause of reactionary thought, instead of the actual problem that “intelligence” or cognitive capacity has nothing to do with one’s ability to be class conscious or to have solidarity with their own class. Not lead, not covid, and not microplastics can turn a population towards reaction, even if it does affect their cognitive capacity. Being disabled does not make you a reactionary. Being ‘smart’ doesn’t make a communist.

We certainly do not need a day to celebrate christianity that’s for sure

Hello everyone, I’m new here, I’ve been lurking around for a little bit and have finally decided to get myself a lemmygrad account. 🫡 🫡

There has been studies about the effects of search engines on memory before, which I believe might be the closest thing to what we are seeing again today. (DOI 10.1126/science.1207745)

How relevant will these changes to our society really be? we cannot fall into believing in the concept of the “denegeration” of society, you are not going to destroy people’s brains in a decade, or even a hundred years, of using a computer tool (!! not to say anything of actual material changes such as pandemics or pollution !!). This is not to say it will have no effect at all, but rather that the effects will be temporary, and will become yet another facet of capitalist society that will disappear with our transition to communism.

Because the vast majority of human jobs do not require human intelligence. For example, manual labor. Manual labor typically involves moving items from one place to another, searching for items, moving around an environment, etc.

This cannot be true if

Evolution is the true source of human intelligence. An 18-year-old human has 18 years of human experience, and 1 billion years of evolutionary experience.

Within those 1 billion years of evolutionary experience came the experience of interacting with objects in the most primitive way, which is also part of human intelligence.

I agree with the general idea of AI being unable to be “intelligent” as we humans are “intelligent”, but I believe it is more relevant to say that this is because intelligence is not a real metric, through experience we can gain multiple skills that allow us to interact with the world around us, but we cannot really turn all of those skills into a single metric (and where that has been tried, it only served to measure one’s familiarity with the testing method/language/culturally valued skills).

Knowledge is not found inward. The idea of a “know-all” AI that purely iterates internally is invalid.

This is true, i just wanted to highlight it because it reminds me of how (neo)rationalists think, they happen to be the biggest supporters of AI.