Skill erosion
In a grim future tainted by the allure of technological convenience, Filipinos witness a troubling erosion of skills.
Youth, tethered to the confines of remote education, find themselves adrift in a sea of minimal learning opportunities. With the ease of technology at their fingertips, students succumb to the temptation of instant gratification, accessing quiz answers and AI-generated content with little effort. Motivation wanes, and the once-vibrant halls of learning become hollow echoes of potential unfulfilled.
As reliance on technology deepens, Filipinos unwittingly surrender essential skills at the altar of convenience. Critical thinking, once a cornerstone of education, withers in the face of AI assistance, leaving minds dulled and unchallenged. Like lost explorers without a GPS, Filipinos navigate their world with blind reliance on technology, their own faculties diminished by disuse.
The consequence is stark: a decline in IQ rates mirrors the dystopian vision of "Idiocracy," wherein only the uneducated would reproduce, leading to an intellctually deficient population. With the erosion of foundational skills, the very fabric of society frays, leaving a generation ill-equipped to navigate the complexities of the modern world.
Nowadays, most students cannot imagine being able to write on their own without the help of AI. Even basic tasks like answering discussion boards require heavy reliance on AI-generated suggestions and corrections. AI is now an indispensable crutch for these students, who perceive writing as a collaborative effort with machines.
Even when the government relays wrong information, Filipinos are unable to question it. To them, whatever they say is the absolute truth. They don't know any better.
Selected Quotes
...[I]f cheating has advanced enough, or if technology is advanced enough for cheating to easily happen...people [won't] actually value their education anymore. If it's so easy to search a single question on the Internet [with platforms like ChatGPT and Chegg], and you're taking an online exam, what's preventing you from doing that? If you can get the high score [easily]...Students wouldn't be motivated to study anymore and education as a whole would just fail.
In a couple of months, you probably won't have to do your math homework any more. In some cases that's already a thing. I remember an upheaval with the release of ChatGPT; suddenly, people were able to write essays and etc. by just prompting the the models. This is not unique to the Philippines, but, like we will have to grapple with these issues in the near-term.
...I guess the behavioral impact [of AI] could be silly little things like...I don't have to remember anything anymore. I've just got like this AI assistant with a perfect brain, because it's connected to the Internet and and Google, or...whichever. AI it is. I guess we already kind of have that a little bit with our phones, no? It's like...[back in the days] when people drove, and they had to remember the directions to the place they had to go to. These days, it's just...I get into the car, [and] I have no freaking clue which way I'm going, [because] Waze just tells me, right. And we're so used to that now...I kind of marvel now when I think about ...how my dad used to drive when he was my age, [because] he had to actually remember...where to turn. And then he had to remember which streets were one way...I don't have to think about any of that anymore; [Waze] just does it. It will eventually get to the point where we won't even know how to drive anymore, because our cars will just do it for us. So again, are these net positives? I guess you could argue that maybe...the human condition is not defined by our knowledge of our streets, anyways. So maybe it's okay. I don't know.
...I have friends who are teachers who have already caught students writing papers with ChatGPT. It's quite easy to figure it out. Well, not really, [it still] depends; if you're a teacher, probably it's easier. But you can run it through an AI checker...So culturally, because culture generally is done through education, that might be affected.
So this means that the human connection itself, or like speaking in front of a person, will definitely be affected. And it's really important for us to preserve that, especially right now that having technology so immersed with our communication, it affects our brains, [and] the way we communicate. For example, I think I've read this study recently that smartphones are concluded to be really detrimental for children...it affects their brain development at an early stage, so it hampers the ability to communicate effectively or affects that social interaction. So...mas less optimistic ako dahil sa part na yan when it comes to social relations.
If having the technology around us becomes too overwhelming, and education wouldn't be affected because of how we think. For a concrete example, I can think of...this generation of iPad kids, where [very young kids], like 2 to 4, their brains, haven't even [adjusted and developed], but they are already given these devices, iPads for them to keep on watching. They play, or they get heavily influenced by other stuff, whereas they can't even think yet, so that you can picture how that can raise a generation of educationally deprived students. I believe if you become an iPad kid, your brain hasn't developed, your parents haven't taken really good care of you, and you just had this device all the time, when you go to school, you're gonna have problems, I believe there's been a lot of research, I can't cite any right now. But I I'm pretty sure like that's gonna happen if someone spends too much time of their early years facing a device, facing technology, they are going to have issues with school.
...[M]y nephew is 7 years old. He's gonna grow up in a world where AI is just a thing...and he doesn't know what it's like to not have a smartphone that can do everything...[like] every entertainment desire that he has that his phone can kind of handle. He doesn't know what it's like to sit in front of a TV at 7 PM on a Friday night and wait for your favorite show to come on because you just call it up, right. You just choose what you want to watch. It's not something you have to wait for. So I guess the behaviors are just like everything is instant, whenever you need it. And then everything is a little easier than before. And I guess, as someone who grew up not particularly wealthy, I wonder if that'll make us all lazy...To reference something else, I guess...are we going to end up like those humans in Wall-E? You know where they're all just kind of super overweight, and they're all in floating chairs, and all they do is eat and watch TV...is that what we're gonna end up becoming? I hope not; I really hope not.
Actually...the other really great [dystopian] sci-fi for this is Idiocracy...that's a pretty amazing one. That's created by Mike Judge, who is the creator of, amongst other things, Beavis and Butthead, but also the Silicon Valley comedy series. And in Idiocracy, the main premise is that...humans in more industrialized countries, like the more intelligent people, the more educated people...they tend to stop having kids because...they don't want the burden of having a family, whereas the people who were not as educated, they tend to make babies. We know that, just demographically speaking. So what happens if that's all that's left of humans, right? Like it's just...the people who are not educated, who don't really care about anything but themselves, those are the only people who make babies. So it's like a 100 years from now, humanity is just gonna be a whole bunch of idiots, which...[is] the title of the movie...Idiocracy.
