How many of you know how to do home improvement? Fix your own clothes? Grow your own food? Cook your own food? How about making a fire or shelter? People used to know all of those things. Now they don't, but we seem to be getting along in life fine anyway. Sure we're all frightened by the media at the dangers lurking from not knowing more, but actually our lives are fine.
The things that are actually dangerous in our lives? Not informing ourselves enough about science, politics, economics, history, and letting angry people lead us astray. Nobody writes about that. Instead they write about spooky things that can't be predicted and shudder. It's easier to wonder about future uncertainty than deal with current certainty.
Executive function is not the same as weaving or carpentry. The scary problem comes from people who are trying to abdicate their entire understand-and-decide phase to an outside entity.
What's more, that's not fundamentally a new thing, it's always been possible for someone to helplessly cling to another human as their brain... but we've typically considered that to be a mental-disorder and/or abuse.
What you described is what people do every single day. Every decision we make, choice, piece of information we think, has been selected for us by others. And we don't even stop to think about that, we just accept it.
Here's another cooking example: try to look up a recipe right now. It should contain meat, veggies, fiber. What will you get? A recipe that is generic and tailored to the masses in your general location. It's genuinely hard to find a recipe for food that isn't extremely familiar to the culture assigned to you (even if you're actually 1st generation Chinese, if you're browsing from Ohio with Google using English language, you aren't gonna get authentic Chinese dishes back). Because whatever system of systems is looking up recipes for you, is designed to do that; to think for you, and provide you a set of basic, canned responses.
The entire world is that. Nearly every part of our world, we abdicate. Our decisions are not really ours; they're a constructed set of possible decisions defined by other people, programmed into our brains by osmosis. And you go with it, because otherwise the world would be too hard to deal with.
This causes you to not only "lose" information and skills people had in the past, it defines who you are now and what you do. And it's been happening since civilization started. Actually before, since it's about your ecosystem, and systems of systems. AI is now a part of our ecosystem and will define who we are, and we don't really have a choice in the matter, because it's systemic.
I know how to cook! You open the freezer, grab a Hot Pocket, Unwrap it, put it in the microwave, hit 2, and wait 3 minutes (it has to cool). That's what you meant, right?
I mean grill a steak, cook a chicken in the oven, chop some vegetables and prepare a salad, cook some pasta with a simple tomato sauce, etc. Do people really don't know how to do this? It's not rocket science.
It seems wild to me to assume most people on HN don't know how to cook even basic stuff...
Systems used to be robust, now they’re fragile due to extreme outsourcing and specialization. I challenge the belief that we’re getting along fine. I argue systems are headed to failure, because of over optimization that prioritized output over resilience.
The things that are actually dangerous in our lives? Not informing ourselves enough about science, politics, economics, history, and letting angry people lead us astray. Nobody writes about that. Instead they write about spooky things that can't be predicted and shudder. It's easier to wonder about future uncertainty than deal with current certainty.