Yes! Exactly this... Attention... We become so dependent on always being distracted so that we can not function without it. I remember there where a similar discussion about TV back in the days.. but the level it is on now is unprecedented.
I think society will adjust to this behavior as it has always done before. How damning or not is yet to be decided. It does not necessarily has to be a bad thing... but being dependent on something usually is.
I think most of us older than 25 understands this. We have seen the development and the war on attention. I guess the term Dopamine Fracking is not bad. I don't think we should be too alarmist though... we are kids of our time.. in that we will arrange the society around us. In essence we are not that different from the Romans. We just have a lot more toys.
Unregulated capitalism is bad. We all know that. I think the automation will ultimately be that thing that brings us past that. Via UBI or something similar... but that is far from now.
This is almost the same as going from making fire with a stick to using a lighter.. sure it is simplified but still not wrong. Humans while still doing grunt work can still make mistakes as does the machine.. the machine will eventually discover it. The same can not be said of the human because of the work needed to do so might be too much. In the end we might not learn as much.. but it will not matter and thus is really not an issue.
I think I disagree in what I see around me it’s less like going from fire to lighter and more like going from hand tools to power tools. If your skill was in understanding how the hand tools work, it’s harder to get a level of abstraction up and have a vision for building a house. If we’re not able to learn than less people are going to be able to get that vision, especially if you’re in technical domains where engineering and architecture matter. It’s going to be a weird future. I’m pretty effective with these tools, but I’m fifteen years of hacking on them manually. Some folks who are not as far into their careers don’t seem to know where to start.
There’s a reason most people aren’t promoted to manager until they have years of experience under their belt. And now we’re expecting folks to be managers on day 1.
I think people are forgetting that handwriting is also a technology. It is kinda a similar shift from using a stick to make fire and a lighter. The more work you put into something the more cognition you are using... so I am not sure those studies are of that much value.. We will not need to write in the future.. we will have AI for that. People are always looking for convenience and it will win in the end.
This made me think of Pauling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling) who was a famous scientist and big proponent of high-dosage C-vitamin. He claimed it could cure everything from a cold to heart disease and cancer. Later studies did though not find any benefit of high-dosage C-vitamin and that potentially had a higher risk of prostate cancer. Pauling died of prostate cancer.
This is kinda huge as a lot of services depend on 2g and 3g and which will now stop working. I think mainly on stuff like built-in remote systems for cars etc..
This I am afraid does not feel as the right thing to do. I think the KISS-principle is a good standard to follow and while terminals have to do more than one thing, it should not do everything. Complexity leads to instability. Terminals has to be nimble and not clumsy behemoths like web browsers.
Terminals are far from simple, that's the whole problem. We carry the weight of decades of technical constraints and arbitrary decisions on our shoulders every time we fire up a terminal emulator.
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