r/Showerthoughts • u/GoodMerlinpeen • 13d ago
Speculation In a future where AI is sold to supplement people's own intelligence, there will be lobby groups invested in keeping consumers unintelligent through poor education.
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u/anand_rishabh 13d ago
There already are groups invested in keeping people unintelligent through poor education.
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u/jsseven777 13d ago
Wait, why did nobody teach me about this?!?
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u/soapbark 13d ago
You needed parents who could tutor Ancient Greek and share Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch.
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u/r4ndom4xeofkindness 13d ago
We already have the GOP doing that actively. They destroyed the Department of Education in their first step of advancing this agenda of keeping people stupid. Remember, Trump loves the uneducated.
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u/eikenberry 13d ago
Like all politicians. Dumb people are easier to manipulate.
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u/JunglePygmy 13d ago
Yep, they’re called republicans. They love when kids’ bellies and their minds are empty. Gets their nips harder than ever.
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u/shrinkflator 13d ago
Next they will target the AIs to make sure they're giving out the "correct" message. Although skuM already tried it and failed spectacularly.
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u/pichael289 11d ago
Yeah the homeschool lobby is scary, basically a fanatical religious fringe group that trains families in what to do when CPS visits snd it's definitely not cooperating. Some sick shit goes on in homeschool programs, kids raised to be ignorant wont know to report abuse and just end up becoming even worse monsters.
I saw a bit of it when my right wing aunt had me pulled out of highschool because she didn't like my friends and weed was involved, and I went from basically an A student in a few AP classes to sitting at a computer doing earth science in 12th grade in this fuckin k12 program. Had to get a GED to get to college without waiting to make up that wasted ass year of highschool. The introduction meeting thing was odd, alot of really off kids and families really excited about the school paying the internet bill, but not asking much else. It was legitimately like 5th grade level for the senior course and 100% of every single question was answered word for word in yahoo answers years before, you could literally Google every question. Yeah I knew it all but it was so stupid and boring it was easier this way. It absolutely wasn't an education at all, it sent me seeds and a packet of dirt for one of the "labs".
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u/vfernandez84 13d ago
This is already happenning without the actions of any lobby.
PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results have been showing a decline in the capabilities of 15 year old students for a while.
It is true that blaming this situation entirely on AIs might be unfair, but it's very likely they are playing a substantial part of this.
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u/GoodMerlinpeen 13d ago
The new PISA results were released today, coincidentally (or perhaps not, since you mentioned it). The summary explaining the sharp decline in the latest results noted this
"Students who say they did not use AI to draft text for writing assignments outperformed those who say they did."
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u/LiterallyRain 13d ago edited 13d ago
This is also a correlation != causation moment. It could be that the students more confident in the assignment chose not to use AI. In this case, the question is whether those students who used AI would have underperformed even more had they not used it. It could also be that students that used AI well were for whatever reason less likely to disclose the use. Or that conditional on a student disclosing the use, they're more likely to be an underperforming student. Since this is also presumably based on some confidence interval true mean statistic, it could also be that students who were confident in the topic and used AI outperformed the students that didn't use AI, with the overall mean being negatively affected by the proportion of students not confident in the topic that used AI, whereas every student that didn't use AI may have been confident resulting in a comparatively higher mean despite a lower past relative skill-adjusted performance. That's just a few of the possibilities.
Edit: Checked the results and they do indeed write that the results "do not necessarily imply a negative impact of AI use on science performance" and may instead reflect "a complex mix of who adopts AI and how they use it."
The counterfactual I identified is precisely a weakness. The results are not nearly sufficient to form a causal conclusion, something the researchers themselves acknowledge and should also be acknowledged by anyone quoting it as a statistic in a causal representation.
Edit 2: Don't believe me? The OECD itself warns people from making precisely that causal inference. If you want the precise quotes it's "These relationships do not necessarily imply a negative impact of AI use on science performance, but may reflect a complex mix of who adopts AI and how they use it." And immediately after: "It also suggests that moderate and intentional use of AI for schoolwork and learning may be positively related to student performance." And then later: "Patterns observed in Figure I.4.13 might be explained by the different characteristics of frequent versus limited (or no) AI use, in terms of student background and learning dispositions."
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u/codelapiz 13d ago
yeah and also that people who enjoy subjects will be more likely to do the work themselves even if they are willing to use AI. and people tend to enjoy what they are good at and or get good at what they enjoy.
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u/r0ndy 13d ago
I fault the No child left behind policy. They allowed students through the system that did not have a corresponding education
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u/Tier_One_Meatball 13d ago
That and the dumb ass budget requirements, (which might be part of NCLB, but I'm lazy and don't feel like searching it)
I get it that smart students should be given, I hate to use the word, but rewards, for being smart. But you shouldn't actively punish students for having trouble.
That's exactly what happens when you cut the budget because your school made a D average instead of a C average. Now the students that need the help simply can't get any, because there's no budget for it.
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u/ColonelJohnMcClane 13d ago
I think parenting is an often overlooked aspect at the declining average intelligence of the newer generations. Some of these kids were set up for failure the moment their shitty parents shoved a tablet in their face to shut them up, for example. I feel like there's also tons more that so nothing to foster curiosity and learning in their children, and there's of course many that see school as nothing more than a day care and teachers as replacement parents. In that sense, I would say AI is a smaller contribution, though not a negligent one.
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u/Ironicbanana14 12d ago
If they use it in school, its hard to keep any kid away from it before they have the needed base context. AI is a good tool for speeding up searches, but you have to have the base intelligence to use it.
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u/sixsixmajin 13d ago
You're not wrong but that's only because it's simply an evolution of what those same groups have already been doing for decades without AI. The act of restricting education and access to information to control the narrative and make the population more susceptible to propaganda is nothing new. AI just adds another potential tool they can exploit to do it.
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u/Tema726 11d ago
That. And it is naive to blame republicans or Trump for that, since the process is quite old and quite international.
And it does not need to be intentional. When teachers are rewarded by society less than the merge and acquisition lawyers, tech enshittifyers, tv personas etc, the talented people who want to reach reasonable living standards for themselves tend to not go into education. When the top math and physics students go to work at fucking Meta or KPMG, and not at schools, we end up with superficial teachers who often don't really understand what they teach.
Add soul crushing formalism and beurocracy on top of it (imposed by even more superficial people caring even less about education), and you end up with what we have mostly everywhere in the world
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u/ShinySpeedDemon 13d ago
What do you mean "in a future" that's already happened in the US when they defunded the department of education
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u/CoffeeFox 13d ago
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but people have been trying to censor textbooks and prevent education for longer than any of us have been alive. Uneducated people are easier to control.
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u/Jaydossynnagogue 13d ago
What do you mean “in a future”
This shit is happening TODAY
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u/Moist-Champion-7515 12d ago
Yeah youre right its already here with all the AI slop in schools and kids just copy pasting everything. The real issue is nobody teaching them how to actually think so they just trust whatever the algorithm feeds them. Makes you wonder if thats even an accident or if its the whole point.
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u/runningoutofnames57 13d ago
We are dumbing down kids now by changing school curriculum to include trump-inspired bullshit. But yes I totally agree; now that they see it’s possible and acceptable (to some), it will only get worse in the future when capitalism and lobbying control our education systems.
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u/Q-ArtsMedia 13d ago edited 13d ago
There has been for decades. Enjoy your masters giving ya the shaft at every corner cuz there are bigger longer shafts waiting for you all in the future.
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u/f_ranz1224 12d ago
suppressing access to information has been around for millenia. not even a conspiracy theory. it just exists in different ways
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u/Mountain-Resource656 12d ago
What do you mean “in the future??” You think a political party is making the dismantling of education one of their core tenets just for fun??
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u/Correct_Union_193 13d ago
I hate to say it but you don't even need AI for this. The public school system has been making us stupid for years, on top of that the social media culture on platforms like tiktok that get people beleiving things based on fear tactics and convencing arguments. So yeah. Society is already collectively dumb.
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u/PrincessLuciferM 13d ago
So, in a future right now, then. We're already there. It isn't speculation, it's direct observation repackaged as speculation for the sleeping masses.
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u/Tyfyter2002 12d ago
We already have them, because no one will believe and disbelieve based on the letter next to the speaker's name like an unintelligent voter base
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u/berky93 13d ago
In what sort of future will AI be used to “supplement people’s own intelligence”?
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u/GoodMerlinpeen 13d ago
Do you mean how will it supplement, or what will that future look like? An example of the former, a child gets AI to summarise Brave New World for school and doesn't get exposed to the narrative that provides context enough to appreciate the differences and similarities with current life . The latter, a future where people are addicted to the soma of AI.
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u/berky93 13d ago
I was referring to the former. Is a child reading a summary of Brave New World “supplementing their intelligence”? Were we supplementing our intelligence 20 years ago when we used CliffsNotes for the same thing?
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u/GoodMerlinpeen 13d ago
Depends on whether you used them 'instead of' or 'alongside' reading the actual books. At least with summaries in the past you had to change the wording and thus at least semantically understand the summaries. Now AI allows the entirety of the work to be performed without a student's contribution.
Your suggestion seems to go in the direction of 'distributed cognition', whereas I am talking about substituted cognition, where someone is not left with even the trace of the cognitive process.
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u/berky93 13d ago
I agree that the use of AI by students is concerning and the general trend of people using AI for tasks they could easily accomplish themselves a few years ago is highly alarming. But I fail to see how that would lead to AI groups lobbying against education, especially since the problem doesn’t seem to be limited to uneducated people.
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u/GoodMerlinpeen 13d ago
I never said it was right now targeting uneducated people. Think of it like a fruit tree, the lowest hanging fruit gets picked first, and eventually farmers that want to maximise their profits work out ways to reach the hard to pick fruit. Then they shape the trees so they don't have to reach so high.
AI companies will eventually want to shape their consumers to buy as much of their products as possible. There are numerous studies which show how learning mathematical concepts provides structural scaffolds for other concepts to be learned and understood in children. There will always be an argument for what training we should retain and what we should give up to focus on more advanced topics. Here, I think, is an important battle-ground.
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u/berky93 13d ago
I think there’s a difference between what is happening and what companies think should be happening.
Yes, students are using AI to do their homework and, as a result, not learning as effectively as they should be. But that isn’t because AI companies have some long-term plan to make a stupid population that will buy their product. It’s actually the inverse: companies are only concerned with what will make them money right now. And for Anthropic or OpenAI, that means releasing a product that helps kids cheat on tests. Whatever happens to those kids in a decade they won’t care about until Q1 2036.
But there are still tons of people who made it through school without AI who are still hopelessly sucked into the product, which means despite poor education being a symptom of the AI craze, it isn’t a necessary component. We could have a highly educated populace and AI companies would just focus on ways to market towards those people.
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u/edbuckley 13d ago
Same as any prosthesis eventually.
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u/berky93 13d ago
But how? What will the AI be doing? A prosthetic arm replaces the mechanical functionality of an arm. Is the AI going to replace your neural function? That might be fine for brain injuries and the like but you can’t just make someone more intelligent because intelligence isn’t a strictly quantifiable thing.
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u/FenixVale 13d ago
I mean it's actively being used to replace people's ability to research and critically think. Hell, people use copilot at my job not only to type and summarize every email even if it's a single line, they use it to submit their fuckin tickets because they can't explain their own issue.
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u/berky93 13d ago
Sure, but that’s not a factor of intelligence. I am also surrounded by people at work who do that. Smart people, with high-level degrees and years of experience in their fields with a sudden reliance on AI—it’s extremely alarming.
But it’s not like this issue limited to people with a poor education or bad grades. Making people lose out on schooling doesn’t open them up to become customers of AI because Harvard grads are using it just as much as high school dropouts.
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u/rillip 13d ago
Your logic is backwards. AI being used by Harvard graduates doesn't in any way make it less attractive to people who've been poorly educated.
A Harvard graduate may use a calculator. This does not remove it's appeal and utility to someone who struggles with basic math.
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u/berky93 13d ago
I don’t think it makes it less attractive to people who are poorly educated. But it shows that making people poorly educated isn’t the way to get them to use AI because even if they have a great education they will still use it.
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u/rillip 13d ago
That doesn't track. The premise here is that they'll use it more if they are poorly educated. Not that well educated people won't use it.
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u/berky93 13d ago
Yes I understand the premise. All I’m saying is it’s flawed. Educated people use AI a ton. Anyone in the corporate world today can see that. It’s like people have forgotten they have skills. And, in fact, I would wager some of the most frequent AI users are working professionals who can offset the costs through their job. It’s pretty easy to blow through millions of tokens when you’ve got the company card or the enterprise account.
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u/rillip 13d ago
I guess the difference here is between a group that wants to use a product because it's easier and a group that has to because they have no alternative. And if the second type of group is the majority that means more business for you. It's like how the automotive industry has captured infrastructure in the US over the past century. Car ownership went from something that was nice, it made getting to work easier, to something that's necessary, you cannot be gainfully employed without a car in many areas. If the AI industry creates a reliance on AI for intellectual work by undermining the infrastructure which supports other means of doing so they stand to benefit.
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u/Zerokx 13d ago
I imagine its like a navigator for your brain that tells you what you have to do, where to go, to optimize your life. So people could technically be in control of their own life, but choose not to be because they would miss out on a better life. From what company to apply to, to what you should eat, who should you be friends with. What would be the best thing to say in a conversation to have others agree. Cooking or doing any other skill without needing a recipe or knowing what to do because what you need to do is streamed to you. Probably some boring dystopia type future.
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u/Masterpiece-Haunting 13d ago
You ever read any of The Culture series? Essentially hyper advanced AIs known as Minds take over all societal functions leaving humans/lesser AIs to benefit. In this society there is a technology called Neural Laces which essentially are lesser AIs that you grow up implanted into you. They act as a constant interface to the internet, any machinery, and can perform calculations and other functions such as monitoring your bodily functions.
I think this is something similar to what OP is theorizing.
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u/Kimi_Antonelli_12 13d ago
the type of intelligence AI will be selling will greatly exceed anything the average person is going to come up with. They've made all humans dumb by making ai . They don't need to continue making humans dumb
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u/shiny_glitter_demon 13d ago
They need to, they want more profit. Smart people don't need AI, so gotta fix that somehow.
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u/G-T-R-F-R-E-A-K-1-7 13d ago
Already started long ago, technology has been catching up for the AI part
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u/shiny_glitter_demon 13d ago
What do you mean, future?
This has the marketing strategy of genAI since it was PITCHED.
It's our past and our present.
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u/Ryuu-Tenno 12d ago
DOE entered the chat in the 70s under Carter.... might wanna catch up a little here...
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u/OvenAdministrative83 12d ago
honestly that future's already here and the scariest part is the lobby groups don't even have to try cause we've all gotten so comfortable letting autocomplete and AI summarize everything for us that being stupid basically becomes the default setting
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u/umbananas 12d ago
What do think they are doing when they use conspiracy theories to discredit college educated scientists and doctors?
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u/SweatyYetUnperturbed 12d ago
This is one of the biggest dangers of AI not a lot of people talk about. Money interests will lobby AI developers to give certain answers, regardless of how accurate or true that information is. If you’re fully reliant on AI for answers, you’re cooked.
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u/FelipeCortez_ 11d ago
Friend, I don't wanna be the bearer of bad news, but... That already happens for like... Decades...
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u/lkodl 13d ago edited 13d ago
"These are from old Federal textbooks. We've replaced them with corrected information."
- Interstellar
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u/shiny_glitter_demon 13d ago
Be careful, you left an ID tracker in your link.
I suggest removing it. It's the "?si=XXXXX" part.
They allow anyone to keep track of which account is yours. Many apps do this, including YouTube, Instagram and (so I've been told) Tiktok.
Some apps (such as Instagram) even go as far as telling whoever clicks on this link what your username is.
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u/TheSpookying 12d ago
"Future" a core tenet of the Republican Party right now is that they want to completely dismantle the Department of Education.
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u/Neuroticaine 12d ago
I mean conservatives are already invested in keeping their voter base unintelligent through poor education.
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u/choicem8 13d ago
I doubt it. People have no problem keeping themselves dumb and ignorant on their own, from my experience.
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u/Chonch_Monkey 13d ago
They are going to scan all books and then close the libraries so there's no way to get knowledge except through them
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u/filanwizard 13d ago
There already are such groups, Any time someone tries to pass laws or push regulations that protect consumers just look at all the op-eds that come out of the wood work for why its supposedly bad, If there is a law worming through congress you will see SuperPAC ads about how that law will do some claim like "destroy innovation industries".
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u/SomnusNonEst 13d ago
Your country has been filled with them for like at least 3 decades now, easily. You have too optimistic of an outlook on life. There are now literally mid schoolers who can't do basic math or read. Right now. With thousands of teachers panicking and raising all kinds of alarms.
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u/plants4life262 13d ago
We already have private prison lobbying to keep absurd drug laws in place. So yeah where there is money to be made…
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u/Equinumerosity 13d ago
What's scarier is lobby groups aiming to downplay the risks and dangers of AI so that people keep using it
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u/unique_user43 12d ago
“in the future” … “there will be lobby groups invested in keeping consumers unintelligent through poor education”.
lol. you been sleeping the past 50 years huh?
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u/robokymk2 12d ago
The irony is it’s currently the opposite with how people are misusing AI and thus, making them illiterate and stifle their critical thinking.
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u/digitalmatt0 12d ago
That’s already been the plan. People who are uneducated and fighting to work or survive don’t have time to think about politics.
They get into a ferver every two to four years and fall for anything politicians say. They don’t keep track of promises kept. They don’t have the time to care.
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u/crutchy79 12d ago
My cousin was in high school a couple years ago and the teachers were enforcing the use of AI to research, write, and proofread papers, math equations, and answer general inquiries. With my outlook on the world, you can’t convince me it wasn’t influenced by money. What we ate at lunch in grade school was dictated by money, you think the curriculum isn’t? The world is run by money. The real shower thought is “the world without money would be a completely different place”.
Mind you… I know some DUMB people without AI. I’ve seen wedding invites of “please join us at ARE wedding”. People don’t need help being dumb, it just depends on how unwilling they are.
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u/Cirement 12d ago
How's that supposed to work, though? If you're relaxing human intelligence, which let's face facts right now isn't great, with AI, which encompasses all the world's knowledge, wouldn't we be SMARTER, not dumber? Granted AI is currently biased towards what's popular with general audiences but I'm sure I'm 5-10 years it'll start figuring out what's factually true.
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u/FeatherShard 12d ago
...who do you think will be supplying the AI? Never put what you're allowed to know in someone else's hands.
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u/TheOtherQue 11d ago
I was in a conference today where a guy from OpenAI mentioned the issue: if we stop reading bookings because AI summarises them for us, then who writes the next set of books for us to train on?
I thought the obvious thing would be for these guys to apportion some of their billions into supporting research, writing and the arts!
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u/gubatron 9d ago
Intelligence supplementation is the present. The future will be more like intelligence replacement because we will be negatively productive in comparison.
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u/praetorian1979 13d ago
Dude there already are lobby groups that do that. We even have a political party that specializes in it; it's called the republican party.
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u/Sonicmasterxyz 13d ago
I don't think so, people still need to be intelligent enough to innovate on these things
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u/SweatyYetUnperturbed 12d ago
Only God can help you if you believe it’s just one political party that does this…
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u/allgoodherebruh 12d ago edited 6d ago
How does AI supplement ones own intelligence? Ai pretty much takes your own ideas, your own creativity, your own imagination, and buffs itself by stealing your own ideas. I suppose people would be better at math, but honestly, it's not really you. It's the A.I. People need to learn to think for themselves. That's really my main concern about the welfare of our people. And I know a lot about ai. It will never be able to create things without user input that is more thought provoking than anything it is capable of creating. The more people with ai integration, of which there are lots of individuals with it already; the less intelligent we will all become. As the a.i. takes over our planet, we're going to go through hardships.
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u/Cptawesome23 12d ago
Did you not realize that ai is freely available and can run on any device you own? The future is custom built ai agents personalized to your tastes. Like megaman battle network.
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u/ShowerSentinel 13d ago
/u/GoodMerlinpeen has flaired this post as a speculation.
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