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Is AI the pocket calculator of comprehension?

I was still at school when the pocket calculator became a thing.

Before this nifty little gadget became affordable and commonplace, we would have to spend hours, laboriously slogging away at long division and long multiplication.

Of course there was the slide rule but, being an analog device, there was always a risk that we'd be a digit or two out in high precision calculations so pencil and paper was the mandated method, at least in the classroom.

I recall the outrage when kids started rolling up with their basic four-function pocket calculators, complete with *tiny* little red LED bubble displays that required "just the right angle" of view to actually make out the sub-atomic sized numerals that formed within them.

There was huge concern that people would lose the ability to do even the most basic mathematical work, if they became reliant on these new devices of the devil.

Predictions were made that if we relied on these calculators, our math skills would decline to the point where we'd be dependent left powerless if we didn't have access to them.

Suffice to say, that really hasn't become the case.

I believe they still teach long-multiplication and long-division in schools, even if kids no longer actually have to exercise those skills thanks to every smartphone and computer having an inbuilt calculator app of some kind.

The computing power behind the pocket calculator has been empowering rather than disempowering; or at least I'd like to think so.

Are we seeing exactly the same situation with AI right now?

One of the primary uses for AI is to scan complex documents, sometimes many complex documents, and come up with a concise summary of their content. In school, this was a skill called "comprehension" and it's an essential skill that everyone should have. Comprehension was also referred to as "reading for meaning" in some schools.

Do we now risk losing our comprehension skills if we start relying entirely on AI to do the hard work for us?

Many social media platforms are exacerbating this situation through their application of AI. For instance, YouTube is now producing "A Summaries" of a video's description.

Why?

In many cases, the uploader's description of a video is barely a line or two of text -- does that really need an artificial intelligence to analyse and spit out an other two-line "summary"?

Of course not -- but Google and other platforms are very busy right now trying to prove that their AI tech is making the world a better place so being able to claim that millions of videos have been summarized by AI to make the viewer's experience a better one helps justify the billions of dollars they're throwing at the AI beast.

I don't think AI will kill our ability to manually draw meaning from large or complex documents but it will blunt it somewhat over time.

Just as I would probably be a lot better at performing manual long division and multiplication than your average 20 year old, I suspect that within a decade or so, those who have already had plenty of practice at "reading for meaning" will be a damned sight better off than those who have grown up relying on AI to do that for them.

All skills require constant use if they're to be maintained to a high standard and so it is with our ability to extract meaning from large and/or complex documents. Relying heavily on AI to make that task much, much easier might put future generations at risk of being insulated from the actual meaning of what has been written.

How easy would it be for those who own/operate the AI systems to introduce their own biases, ideologies and imperatives to AI systems so that when a document is "interpreted", the resulting summary is highly biased in favour of those ideologies? And when this happens, who is going to actually check and read the citations provided (assuming that the AI even bothers with such things)?

Just like the pocket calculator and the slide-rule before it, AI is a powerful tool that can significantly improve our abilities and productivity. However, unlike our mathematical tools, AI also has the potential to disable or weaken our ability to extract the real meaning from important documents, especially historical ones. This will make us vulnerable to manipulation and deception by those who control such systems and wish to pursue their own agendas.

Forewarned is forearmed!

Carpe Diem folks!

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