• sqgl@beehaw.org
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    7 days ago

    Switzerland is the only country with low tech direct democracy. I only see a dystopia coming and the only way I can think of to defend against it is to have better education in schools.

    Half of US cannot read beyond 6th grade level.

    About 40% don’t know it takes a year to orbit the sun (no they were not nitpicking about leap years).

    A quarter don’t even know the Earth orbits the sun.

    You don’t need neuromorphic hardware to get these facts right.

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
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      7 days ago

      Don’t get me wrong, the US is totally going towards a dystopia. I was talking about the remaining 95% of the world and the long term goals. The US has done its part, some US companies can still do some stuff, but the US as a country, or its monopoly-USD “billionaires”, are no longer a relevant part of the equation.

      Worldwide, NPUs and client-side AIs will lead the next changes. Some people in the US will have a chance to leverage those, learning will become a local query away, only limited by each person’s curiosity. Keep in mind a full copy of the Wikipedia is only 100GB, all of Project Gutenberg is only 70GB, I have both and more on the same smartphone I’m writing this from (and it’s not even a “flagship” model). There is a lot, and I mean A LOT of knowledge to be extracted from there, which just so happens to be part of the training data for chatbot AIs, meaning they’re particularly suited for retrieving it.

      You’re right, you don’t “need” neuromorphic hardware to get those facts right… but at the same time, you don’t “need” those facts to use neuromorphic hardware to retrieve them as quickly as you can ask for, then get them with all explanations, related keywords, topics, plus links to sources for it all. With a simple text-to-voice, it will even help you read it!

      I know, it may sound like the world upside down. Another way of seeing it, is as the pivot point of a balance, the joining of different ways of approaching knowledge. Interesting times lie ahead 😉

      • sqgl@beehaw.org
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        7 days ago

        You sound as optimistic as we were in the 90’s about the internet. We were naive about how it would play out.

        Most people are not curious. That curiosity needs to be cultivated in school but it isn’t. I gave you the statistics which indicate that.

        First Earthers are on the rise. 2% of my GenX and 4% of Millennials.