Ruth just introduced me to the idea for the need for the Friction given by human interaction and debate for keeping our brains active and developing. Aside from dismissing it as the next fad in brain training circles and Ruth’s understandable need to remind me of of reclusive tendencies, I realised that it gelled with earlier things I have written and said. When calculators started to become compulsory for schooling I saw that students started to trust them too much. They didn’t have the general estimating ability to see that their answer was way too small or large. My own struggles with mental arithmetic have at least schooled me in checking those problems of scale. Those struggles are one form of stimulative friction. I started giving lessons in estimating to counter the calculator tendency.
The huge rise in the trust in AI, at the same time as the rise in doom stories, is another calculator moment. We need to find ways of helping people to see through the mist of AI to recognise what is trustworthy and what is not.
I’ll be mulling over that from now on.
My last AI briefing was https://valleycreations.me/wp-admin/post.php?post=5083&action=edit