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It’s weird how everyone is having big apprehensive reaction about a technology that changes the nature of humanity

how do you think the tech “changes the nature of humanity”?

First as the understanding of self, in the same way astronomy changed our understanding of our place in the universe, and augmentation of abilities, in the sense that a toaster gives us the power of toast

Psychologist here. Pardon my rudeness, but that notion is just silly. This is like saying the invention of the calculator fundamentally changed our understanding of mathematics.

ha. was wondering what “nature of humanity” meant here to others. and if nature of humanity can be changed by anything from a toaster to astronomy- that’s a pretty easily changed “nature.” made me laugh though. contemplating profound impact of toasters…

I feel like there’s a misunderstanding going on that’s similar to the notion of “remembering a TV episode rewires your brain!” Yeah well, that’s true, but that’s just how learning works. It’s legit to use this as your threshold for “rewiring the brain” but it also makes the phrase kinda meaningless

i don’t know if the quality or essence of being a human changes because we now have sophisticated text & image generators & calculators & language models & vibe coding tools & better robots. tech is what’s new after we’re born. idk that this is more profound than many earlier tech advances. tbd.

A lot of this gets lost in the pivot around whether the machine is meaningfully thinking, and I think a lot of people in today's conversations are pretty sure it is not.

But I think there's a lot of reason that people would resist the idea that the machines are thinking exactly because that would very much challenge our idea of ourselves and what makes us all unique in the world.

If that's the case, I'd tell people that they are unique and valuable regardless of what a machine does. I'd also add there's nothing wholly conclusive about the situation, but it does seem that the measures for reasoning are a moving target in popular discussion