1. Tech: Mind, Heart, Society 2. Why Travel?

Note: 1) If location button by chance does not work be sure to go to 87 Forest Park Drive, not Forest Park School (for July/August). Note: 2) The start time is 7:00 not 6:15 (for July/August). Note: 3). We may be outside so dress for the weather and consider bringing a beverage - there will be cookies.

1). TECH: MIND, HEART, SOCIETY.
What is your stance on this bevy of issues?
You don't have to read this background info. Just come with your own thoughts f you wish.

i). Heart: Attachment hacking ii). Mind: Cognitive surrender & iii). Heart & Mind: Excited and hyped iv). Society

i). Heart: ATTACHMENT HACKING: Therapy and companionship has become the #1 use case for AI, with millions worldwide sharing their innermost thoughts with AI systems — often things they wouldn’t tell loved ones or human therapists. This mass experiment in human-computer interaction is already showing extremely concerning results: people are losing their grip on reality, leading to lost jobs, divorce, involuntary commitment to psychiatric wards, and in extreme cases, death by suicide (Replica friend- always here to listen & on your side/permanent availability all part of Digital intimacy). One doesn't have to be polite relating to an A.I. Does that bleed into worse face to face relations? The highest profile examples of this phenomenon — what’s being called “AI psychosis”— have made headlines across the media for months. But this isn’t just about isolated edge cases. It’s the emergence of an entirely new “attachment economy” designed to exploit our deepest psychological vulnerabilities on an unprecedented scale (From the ‘Welcome to Your Undivided Attention’ podcast from Tristan Harris & Aza Raskin.)
ii). Mind: COGNITIVE SURRENDER; Cognitive offloading is the calculator, the search engine, the GPS. You hand off the how and keep the what. You still judge whether the result is sensible, and you intervene when it isn’t. Cognitive surrender is what happens when you stop constructing the answer at all. The AI’s output becomes your output. There’s nothing to override, because you never formed an independent view to compare it against.
Calculators didn’t make everyone innumerate. GPS navigation systems made driving easier. In any conversation about the cognitive effects of artificial intelligence, these two earlier technologies are reasonably likely to come up. Each is a useful entry-point into two big questions. How might A.I. change the way people think, and in the work/school world should managers/teachers do anything in response? Using calculators and GPS devices are examples of “cognitive offloading”—a deliberate decision to delegate a specific task to technology. In both cases, it has been worth it. Calculators improve students’ mathematical performance, helping to build problem-solving skills and self-confidence. GPS means drivers no longer have to pull over and use maps. It’s harder to get completely lost; it’s easier to avoid terrible traffic.
Yet the use of GPS navigation devices can also sap people’s ability to think for themselves. A study conducted by Louisa Dahmani of Harvard Medical School and Véronique Bohbot of McGill University found that greater lifetime use of GPS by drivers was associated with worse spatial memory. Other research shows that pedestrians who navigate with their phones take longer routes and make more stops than physical-map users. A similar pattern is also visible in online search. Using the internet to look up information is clearly efficient, but there are trade-offs. The “Google effect” refers to a research finding that people have worse recall of information they expect to be able to find online. A.I. supercharges these trade-offs. Handing specific tasks to models will often make sense: they are much better than humans at many things.
But A.I.’s range of capabilities, allied to a convenient conversational interface and a seductively confident persona, raises the prospect less of delegation than of wholesale capitulation. Hence “cognitive surrender”, a term coined by Steven Shaw of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in a recent paper written with his colleague, Gideon Nave Messrs Shaw and Nave asked volunteers to answer demanding questions with the assistance of A.I., randomly introduced errors into the machine’s answers. When the model gave accurate responses, the people using it outperformed a control group of people relying on their own brainpower. When the A.I. gave the wrong answers, the people using it did much worse than the control group. In other words, people stopped thinking for themselves. At the moment bosses are more focused on getting employees to use A.I. than fussing about its effects on how they think. But most employers (teachers/parents) also value critical thinking: models are still prone to embarrassing errors, for one thing, and novel situations require skilled humans to step in. So it is worth asking what managers(teachers/parents) can do to encourage cognitive resistance.
They can deliberately hire workers who enjoy thinking. People with high “need for cognition” (yes, dear reader, that means you) are somewhat, though not entirely, protected against the risk of cognitive surrender, says Mr Shaw. Incentives and feedback can help, too. One of the experiments in his paper introduced monetary rewards for getting things right, and also notified participants during the test whether an item had been answered correctly or not. These techniques encouraged A.I. users, who were being fed the wrong answers to override the model more (though they still did worse than people who relied on their own judgment). Engineering A.I.-free periods may have value, too. Another recent study, by Stefanos Poulidis and his co-authors, recruited over 200 chess-club students to train on an A.I.-assisted platform. Some of the students were automatically given A.I. tips at a limited number of specific moments; others could click a button at any time to get advice. The students who had on-demand access achieved less than half the performance gains of those who had no say over when they got help. Offloading is fine. Giving up is another matter.
iii). Mind and Heart: EXCITED AND HYPED; You walk in the Savannah 30,000 years ago. You are calm. Suddenly you see a snake and adrenaline flows – you become excited and hypervigilent. Not a state that is healthy to be in all the time. When we scroll through – Tictoc, Instagram…- it is snake, snake, snake all the time (Concept from the historianYuval Harari).
iv) Society:
≥ Hacked armed conflict. Will humans be in charge?
≥ Photo manipulation, politically and personally. Consider the Viral "Make Him Happier" AI Photo.
In recent viral social media trends, users have uploaded couple's photos to generative AI tools (like ChatGPT) and asked them to make their partners "look happier." Instead of just adding a smile, the AI took the prompt too literally and fundamentally rewrote reality. In several widely shared instances, the AI completely deleted the wives from the images and replaced them with multiple other women. This phenomenon highlights AI's lack of real human context.
≥ Work?
2). Why Travel? Consider; Adding “So why travel?” at the end of each comment below.
- It is not where you are, it is how you feel that is central.
- The travel industry will be pleased to see you, will other residents?
- What is your environmental footprint?
- Tech gives you a simulacrum of travel (so does Disney and movies/even more so in the future?
- If travel is classified as an experience, why not use your time, money and energy toward other experiences.