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Andrea Fernández's avatar

If crime novels have taught me anything is that it's all about motive. However, even though we all know who won the space race, I'm pretty sure that doesn't make the moon landing fake. It's an interesting approach to critical thinking, though.

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Jorgen Winther's avatar

Yes, motives are often the reasons for doing things :) And if you consider that there is probably a motive behind anything, especially if it is time-consuming or economically costly, as video production is, then it makes sense to consider what that motive is and what it might lead to.

When the costs (in time and money) for producing fake videos are now smaller, down to almost no costs, because AI can do the work and videos can be distributed for free on the internet, many more people with many motives can be involved in producing the videos you see.

Of course, videos are just part of the input we get, but such as text is, naturally, even easier to falsify. AI has already been used abundantly for voice faking, and it will probably only increase over time.

So, it makes sense to be on guard and not just take in everything as if it was given just to kindly inform you, carefully made as correctly as possible – because that rarely happens.

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Andrea Fernández's avatar

Schools should really devote more time to teaching critical thinking skills than random facts. I've never in my life had to use my hard-earned knowledge of types of rocks... I do love knowledge but critical thinking is becoming crucial.

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Jorgen Winther's avatar

True – those sciences we teach the pupils, they sort of rely on people to have good intentions, but we never learn what the concept of good intentions actually is, or how we find out if it's present.

Having said that, you'll probably bump into a situation sooner or later where you need to know about rocks. All knowledge is useful somewhere, some day :)

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Andrea Fernández's avatar

Oh, I love knowledge for knowledge's sake, but I also understand that 1)not everyone likes storing random trivia in their brains and 2)there are only so many hours in a schoolday. So I think we should rethink our priorities.

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Jorgen Winther's avatar

Maybe we should also try to break that old idea of learning to be something that happens in school, but not after. We need to somehow make people stay interested in learning things, because that is needed in an ever-changing world.

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Andrea Fernández's avatar

I understand. And a lot of us have embraced lifetime learning, but being realistic, not everyone is a lifetime learner, and we should at least give kids a fighting chance…

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