The famous Oracle of Delphi in Ancient Greece was said to be the center of the universe in its time. Kings, generals, and officials from poleis across and from without Greece would seek the Oracle’s counsel on important decisions.
Stories of Apollo’s favor and hallucinogenic gases abound, but I think the late Yale professor of Ancient Greek history, Donald Kagan, explained it best:
“Now, you can bet when these folks came and consulted the priests and said, ‘could you please put us down on the list, we want to consult the oracle’, the priests said ‘sure, have a beer, let's talk about your hometown, what's going on out there’. What I'm suggesting to you is that this was the best information gathering and storing device that existed in the Mediterranean world. These people knew more than anybody else about these things, and so consulting that oracle was a very rational act indeed.”
In Scandinavia in particular, there’s a tendency of pescatarians to refer to themselves as vegetarian for social convenience, but that hasn’t changed the definition of “vegetarian”.
You’re an intelligent mammal, your biological makeup encoded in DNA. So are all other people, who largely share that same DNA. You’re conscious. It’s not a big leap to conclude that so are other people, too.
This kind of solipsistic sophistry is not productive. It might be entertaining if you’re contemplating the underpinnings of epistemology for the first time in your life, but it’s not an honest contribution to the debate.
You might as well claim that you have no idea if gravity will be in effect tomorrow.
You can put a candy bowl in front of kids and tell them not to touch it. Or you can just not put it there. Ultimately kids will be less distracted when you remove the source of distractions. Phone bans in schools are showing this already.
Are we talking about laptops in grades advanced enough for students to waste time on Reddit, or smartphones in the hands of young children?
My contention is that it's feasible to use laptops in classrooms productively, especially considering the value in applications like word processors. Of course it's necessary to balance the educational value with the potential for distraction. A way to minimize the latter is to extend classroom management to address device use, e.g., instilling discipline. I've personally seen it done well and done poorly (often not attempted at all), and given an otherwise healthy classroom setting, it comes down to discipline and ethics that address device use. That comes after tailoring the specific device format (e.g., tablets lending themselves more to entertainment, socially and habitually) to the appropriate grade level (maturity, responsibility, and technical potential increasing with age).
Some classrooms are too disruptive for device use, but that's not inherently a tech problem, even if you blame disruptive classrooms on broader cultural problems stemming from tech's role in society. Other classrooms exist in cultures that reject the necessary classroom management strategies.
It's not my contention that any device format should be used at any grade level and that distractions can be managed by simply saying "don't" and expecting success.
To address your other point above, yes, reading a book is different, often better, than reading on a screen, even for adults, so I'm also not arguing that devices should replace books.
The challenge is that enforcing a ban would presumably require strict incursions into personal freedoms organized at a scale where AI-based solutions would be particularly effective and thus tempting, paradoxically.
On the other hand, assuming the dangers are real, you lose by default if you do nothing.
One cannot (in most of the planet) go to the supermarket and buy an M16 and a box of hand grenades, or get a hold of a couple of kg of plutonium cause they want some free energy at home.
We also have rules in place of what one individual/company can and cannot do from the point of view of the greater good. I cannot go and kill my neighbour for my benefit (or purposefully destroy his life) without consequences. A myriad of things are not allowed, and I don't see people complaining about any incursion into personal freedoms.
The reason people have accepted these is that we have already proven that having access to those things could be catastrophic. We haven't proven hat yet with AI.
But I don't see much difference between those established and well accepted rules, and a rule that says: A company cannot release or use for its benefit a technology that will impact the need of humans at scale, because of the impact (again at scale) that it would have in society.
In other words, if you are a company and have the potential to release a product, or buy a product from a provider that would cause mass unemployment, should you be legally allowed to do so? I do not think so.
That’s a fair objection. Having ruminated on it some more, I’ll admit it might be tenable.
As for achieving an effective ban, occupational collapse might be the stronger motivator once workplace adoption broadens and accelerates, but risk of epistemic collapse might register sooner among the general public, already broadly suffering slop.
Like Bill Gates, I wonder why it’s not yet become a theme in mainstream politics.
Stories of Apollo’s favor and hallucinogenic gases abound, but I think the late Yale professor of Ancient Greek history, Donald Kagan, explained it best:
“Now, you can bet when these folks came and consulted the priests and said, ‘could you please put us down on the list, we want to consult the oracle’, the priests said ‘sure, have a beer, let's talk about your hometown, what's going on out there’. What I'm suggesting to you is that this was the best information gathering and storing device that existed in the Mediterranean world. These people knew more than anybody else about these things, and so consulting that oracle was a very rational act indeed.”
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