Are We Losing Our Humanity?

[@PixPunxel]

Very completely right. As it was so nicely put in "Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut. Automatisation, machines, AI will not be our slaves, we will be slaves of theirs.

[@dailyphilosophy]

Vonnegut said many wonderful things. I'm just reading Cat's Cradle again. It's all so true about the craziness of human nature. Unfortunately, he isn't much read today outside the scifi world...

[@PixPunxel]

@@dailyphilosophy “Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.” Cat Cradle is my favorite Vonnegut novel, indeed. And yes, I completely agree - and regardless people need to read more :)

[@marcosfreijeiro8763]

Great thought provoking content, love this content. I'm sorry I don't always have something great to say other than I like very much this channel. As always thank you very much

[@haibint-yt]

Trying to use my chat-GPT-created resume to impress my employers who are reading my resume with chat-GPT.

[@dailyphilosophy]

And your prospective employers probably are using ChatGPT to scan the job applications... So in the end it's robots talking to robots to decide on your future. Isn't this scary?

[@psterud]

Fascinating. While I appreciate efficiency, I very much decry our world becoming modular, for then it loses its capacity for uniqueness and character and charm. The majority of people are themselves modular without being aware of it, working in jobs in which they are easily replaceable, wearing the same clothes and driving the same cars and eating the same food, etc., as most others. Worse, they yearn for it. Still worse, they've been indoctrinated from an early age to yearn for it by opportunists who are making big money from this modularity, this manufactured yearning to conform. That said, I would submit that this trait in humans, that the majority are conformists, is of biological necessity, since that majority is the glue that holds society together. They're the ones doing the majority of the actual work, and doing the majority of the consuming, and making the majority of the babies, to keep the system running. In that sense we are merely perpetuating our pre-existing humanity.

[@dailyphilosophy]

I agree with everything you say. Erich Fromm, by the the way, about whom I made a video recently, says something very similar. But he thinks that it is industrial capitalism that encourages conformity. If we have these factories that churn out thousands of identical pieces of clothing every hour, then we must also have thousands of customers who are all willing to wear the exact same clothes. And the same applies to every mass-produced item. Of course, we must admit that mass-production has also brought unparalleled material wealth to most citizens of industrialised societies. Even the poor today have vastly better access to material goods than, say, the poor of the middle ages. So I'm not sure that we would want to give that up. What do you think?

[@psterud]

@@dailyphilosophy I like Fromm, the little I know so far. While I would agree that industrial capitalism encourages conformity, I would go a little further and opine that industrial capitalism caters to our most fundamental and primitive traits as social animals. Among these traits is the need for a larger share of our population to conform in order to have social cohesion, thus ensuring our continued survival and success. Mass non-conformity would destroy our species. Therefore, one could, with a straight face, say that one's opinion about conformity correlates with one's opinion regarding whether or not humans deserve to exist. Either way, industrial capitalism, like everything else, has a limited lifespan. Some say it's currently in the winter of its life. If that's true and it goes away, we'll still finagle a new way for the majority of us to conform, and we'll insist we had a choice in the matter.

[@hughmuir3063]

What is wrong with marking the papers ? Are you going to have AI teaching next ?

[@dailyphilosophy]

Just to be clear: I'm not advocating to use AI for that. But I think the thought is that it would improve the efficiency of the marking (most years I'm making hundreds of exams over Christmas) and that it would also make sure that grades given by different instructors are really comparable and fair. This is always a problem with human instructors who may have very different standards and expectations when marking a piece of student work.