But you've got to do both. Doubting oneself is "critical thinking". Doubting other sources of authority is "independent thinking".

The thing is, nobody has enough expertise to be an independent thinker in every area. So you essentially MUST delegate your ideas in some areas (variable between people) to external authorities. At which point what you "believe" depends on which authorities you choose.

A related question is "how firm is that belief?". This also tends to vary wildly with little apparent (to me) reason behind it. This is one feature that *can* be related to IQ, but isn't always.

AI has been running at a big loss to get the users hooked. It was inevitable that prices would start climbing. That process is nowhere near done, running AI is expensive as hell.

Once the market starts reflecting the actual costs, you can bet the cost/benefit will not be nearly as rosy as it looks now. But some customers will already have gotten themselves between a rock and a hard place and will be sucked dry, then discarded. Those "expensive" people that are getting dumped will start looking like a bargain, but they will have already been snapped up by smarter companies by the time management that can't see past their own toes figures that out.

All of this makes me remember a short story reading assignment in the 5th grade. It was about kids growing up in a society where machines did all of the intellectual work. To them, writing was 'squiggles'. They managed to disable a filter on their "bard" (a story teller for children) and had it tell them a tale of machines ruling over Man.

Nobody expects prophesy from a 5th grade reading assignment.

It's not just widespread, it's universal. What varies from person to person is the domain that they apply thinking to, and how they validate the authority they choose to trust.

Nobody is an "independent thinker" on every topic. Wherever one is an expert, one tends to be an "independent thinker" in that domain. Where you don't feel knowledgeable, you tend to accept an authoritative source...possibly after doing some amount of checking to see whether others think it reliable.

I don't think it's directly related to IQ. I also don't think it's restricted to chatbots. A lot of people are willing to accept the opinion of any authoritative source that they've accepted. Think religion or political party. Once they accept it, they stop questioning it's proclamations.

Note that this also applied to those who accept the proclamations of scientists or compilers. Once you accept an authoritative source, you pretty much stop questioning it. It's been multiple decades since I really argued with a compiler...unless it was a known bug from a source I trusted. I generally just assumed that I misunderstood what the language meant by that construct. (Of course, the few times I really didn't accept it, I eventually turned out to be wrong. Oh.)

I agree, they are not making anything better, and only driving up the price of computer hardware

Is datamining all user's info from email addresses, credit/debit card info and whatever else they can get, I would not trust putting personal info or ideas that have monetary value or contraversial ideas that can be used for ammunition

There have been 535 brainless clones in Washington, D.C. for a long time.

Really, someday anyone with a decently powerful enough desktop will be able to use AI to clone any Microsoft application that runs nativly on Linux

Unironically, yes. A whiteboard or a blackboard is all you need. No videos in classroom except for special occasions.

The problem is that the people who could afford this and would do it are exactly the people the rest of society is better off without.

This, however, is far from that point. ... But I *do* prefer LibreOffice. However my use case is different.

Not necessarily impossible...but almost always inadvisable. They can be sure that all their actual competitors already have copies before they get the takedown issued.

In this case I don't think a takedown will even limit the damage...it might well exacerbate it.

Well, he did say "for some imaging tasks". That's probably a reasonable goal...but you've got to be *very* selective.