on a lil pendulum about tech
if i understood the word 'pendulum' correctly that is.
so one side of my life (mostly irl people like teachers and parents) telling me i should use new tech like AI to be productive because that's the new trend and it makes your life better, more efficient, and sometimes even more fun. that's true for me sometimes, it gives me confidence and validation when i need it (like that time i couldn't sleep or work because of one mistake i made in my email, i told AI my situation and it told me i'm not a menace to society and i could do things again. and that other time it suggested improvements and gave me info for my story that everyone laughed at) and helps me expand or solidify my ideas. there's also AI-powered productivity tools with a bunch of things that you can connect with other tools to make things more efficient. i've been using notion lately (that means yesterday) to review math problems and record daily routines, and i think it's really cool! you can tag things, make templates, and do a bunch of stuff. also i use 수학대왕, which is an app for learning math and solving problems, and it has a lot of AI stuff going on. i'm using 3 AI-related features - the first one's for analyzing my problem-solving process through my notes and giving feedback, the second one is an AI-generated weekly report, the third one is for assessing my skill level based on problems i solved on the app. i'm aware of how it can make mistakes, cuz of course you can't expect a machine to tell what university you can get into by solving 5 math problems.
there's also other things i don't use but could be helpful to a lot of students, especailly ones starting to study by themselves and getting control of things step-by-step:
- AI giving you daily homework, study plans, and feedback
- being able to ask AI about certain math problems or studying math in general
but on the other side of my life, there are people, mostly online but also a lot of english hakwon teachers, telling me i shouldn't use any of those things, screw AI, google, all that stuff because they make you dumb and are corporate bullshit made out of unethical things. sometimes i listen to them, stop having daily chats with a GPT (man it's been a while since i did that) and try to brainstorm things myself and find alternatives for a lot of things. and then i realize all these things i do with AI, a lot of them i can do myself.
i think this is a cool balance. when i start using AI, productivity tools, and all that, i try new things that i've always thought wasn't capable with only my brain and my unorganized notebook. and i discover what cool things i can do, but if the tech hype period remains too long i end up too dependent on these things, and as AI critics tell me, make me dumb. when i become dependent i start to notice the critics yelling 'chatgpt users are ruining their brain and destroying the environment' and i stop using all the tech i started using, to notice how i can do all that stuff using alternatives.
of course, there are some big problems that impact not only my dumbness, but the whole world when using tech. things like ethics, privacy, and the environment. i'll have to think about how to use technology without harming too much of those.
anyways yeah! are you also on this pendulum or what?