I miss scarcity

@hilde45 YES, I've been wanting to post something to this effect myself. 

Umberto Eco says somewhere (in _This is Not the End of the Book_, maybe?) that, notwithstanding the Borgesian Universal Library that the internet has already largely brought into being (by digitizing the Bodleian, etc.), he will miss the excitement of discovery, the special thrill of hunting through monastic libraries for ancient texts, the many rewards of travel that compensate for its many trials. Whenever I visited a new city in the past, seeking out used bookstores for items on a list of lusted-after rarities was one of my principal pleasures. Same for used record and CD stores. Now I don't bother; whatever I might want I can order from the comfort of home. Is that a good thing? Well, yes; how could it not be. And yet....

Your last paragraph nails my concern exactly.

But @ghdprentice also is on the mark: "The decisive variable is whether humans continue to own the interpretive act. Meaning is not produced by symbols. Meaning is produced by embodied beings who care. A prompt does not make one an artist. Neither does a paintbrush."

This could be a succinct summary statement of a paper I published recently on AI and mind: https://www.cckp.space/single-post/bp-7-2024-paul-miklowitz-our-minds-our-selves-mind-meaning-and-machines-109-131

YAWN. Smart Phones made people stupid, AI will do the same.

I read reports from my engineers and it is quite evident and telling, those who know their field and those who use AI and fake it.

Very well said. It is the matter of the last book of McLuhan with his son Eric."laws of medias" which imply a tetrad of factor with a missing fifth factor we discovered nowadays only  with A.I. 

There are those who believe that the next step is when we create something that constructs its own abstract patterns to link things and give them a value weight to make independent decisions. That is truly scary. To me it is not human intelligence, and I do not see a way that it can contain emotional, social, or temporal weight to make any of its decisions human friendly.

To me human intelligence is a merging of sensory and emotional patterns that have social and temporal context that leads to a decision or action that may not be win or lose (binary). This is also where creativity originates in my view.

Sensory patterns are somewhat fixed, but can vary by individual. Emotional patterns I don't think are fixed. They seem to change based on hormones and environment. And social and temporal patterns can have similarities but also seem to be in a state constant change.

Thanks i will read it for sure.

This could be a succinct summary statement of a paper I published recently on AI and mind: https://www.cckp.space/single-post/bp-7-2024-paul-miklowitz-our-minds-our-selves-mind-meaning-and-machines-109-131

AI has to be managed as a useful tool; I doubt the world is ending as many seem to fear.  Looking back in history many of the same things were said by our parents and grandparents regarding, rock and roll, calculators, computers, ATM cards, global commerce, internet, social media etc.  Change is really hard for most humans but is essential for progress.  Becomes even harder as we get older because nostalgia and mortality creep in at an ever-increasing rate.  One certainly has to be aware of the potential downsides of change, but I personally try to focus on the constructive possibilities.  I'm trying to never yell "get off my lawn"!