having someone do the work for you absolutely reduces your learning of the homework material. it also reduces your time spent but your red herring is glowing nice and bright.
He's got a valid point. For example, if you use wolfram alpha after you do a math problem to check the result you came up with you can actually learn MORE than just doing the problem yourself, and may even add to the time the work takes, as if your result is wrong, you'll spend extra time working out where you went wrong and fixing it. And ultimately learning more in the process.
OTOH - If you use wolfram alpha to DO the question for you, you will learn nothing at all.
But further to that, you can even use tools to save time and learn more.
The other day, my daughter and I chatted about docker build scripts while she was doing her homework (which used docker containers), and that conversation clarified a lot of details and subtleties. (I learned a few things in the course of that conversation myself.) Nothing we talked about wasn't in the documentation, strictly speaking, but the conversation was a more natural way to learn and address the specific details we were talking about, with examples, and use cases that we came up with on the flay to make sense of and highlight those specific nuances. She probably could have read and reread the docs and easily spent more time on it, while learning less.
Now, in this case, she was learning 'from me', but you could swap "Dad" out for an "LLM", and get the same benefit.
All that said, I don't think the AI systems we have right now are likely a good idea for homework. The temptation to use it self-destructively is just going to be too high for a large number of students. Probably the majority of them. But it definitely can be used to learn more, and even learn more faster in the hands of someone who uses it for that.
So let me ask you
There's a lot wrong with your question.
Firstly, China's gun laws are among the strictest in the world. Private ownership of firearms is generally prohibited. You'll get better returns on matching China's homicide rates by matching their firearms laws than you will by catching up with them on surveillance.
Are you wiling to do that? I somehow doubt it. And to be a safe as china, you could do both -- give up your guns AND submit to a police surveillance state. What could go wrong?
China has done other things too - absolutely massive government investments in infrastructure and construction, creating jobs and reducing poverty in the process, uplifting people who would otherwise be more desperate and more likely to turn to crime etc.
And speaking of Crime, China is pretty busy with state executions too. And is quite adept at artificially making those numbers look smaller, frequently recording the execution of multiple people as a single execution. That may play a part in the lower homicide rate too.
Secondly, you imply the tradeoff is simple prudishness - we give up peoples lives for the ability to "go to a strip club secretly".
That's not that half of it, and you should know that. It's also the ability to go, for example, to a political party meeting secretly.
Do you really trust your government so much that you'd give them that power over you? That some fuckwit won't get into power and leverage this against the people? The best protection the civilian population has from government abuse is to resist giving them the tools to abuse you in the first place. The government doesn't need to know where every person is at all times, this will inevitably be used against you. The supposed 'safety' gains are not worth living in a police surveillance state.
No one is going to visit a website they can't even pronounce let alone spell.
Its a paid feature. You don't get it for free.
We have had access to this in Canada for a long time but it is ridiculously overpriced so I don't pay for it.
I don't know where you are, but where I am local politicians don't even advertise or make known any party affiliation. They actually seem to actively avoid it.
While I can see how you arrived at that, I don't think they're all the amoral actors you describe.
Zuck has shown some changes in the last couple years, though I agree he's largely amoral.
Musk has a very peculiar set of morals which might be described as pragmatism or amorality, but he's always been very focal in both action and word about both ethics and responsibility.
You could probably accurately describe them all as transhumanists with varying degree of consistency.
If there's a crisis of trust - which there is - it's almost certainly largely provoked by Amodei. The guy has been a regular prophet of doom regarding AI: it's going to take all the jobs, it's dangerous and going to cause all sorts of disasterous side effects socially, economically, and politically. No wonder people are untrusty.
Pair that with the obscene levels of what appears to be state-level anti-AI and anti-datacenter propaganda, and you've got the current situation. The amount of absurd claims I've seen about datacenters and AI, from people who should know better - everything from completely false narratives about water use, land grabs, power use, and so on. The truth is, an AI DC doesn't uses less water than a Cosco and about as much electricity as a comparable industrial facility, or a similarly sized restaurant.
Flock cameras are invariably deployed by local police departments.
Local officials are the most vulnerable class to being voted out, because local elections are dominated by local issues, not national issues or party politics.
Make the surveillance cameras a local election issue. Raise awareness at local community groups. Be loud. You will see them be taken down quickly.
For anyone who thinks it's ridiculous that the US can't reproduce the Apollo missions, consider this: we can't (due to environmental factors) produce wrought iron anymore (because there are no longer any facilities setup to do so), as a species, and therefore, could not build the Bay Bridge in San Francisco (and I'm sure, any number of others, like the Brooklyn bridge).
The same limitations apply here. They have to redesign the vehicle on first principles because the foundational engineering (not scientific understanding) being used no longer exists. Most people simply do not realize how precariously our technological world hangs in the balance. It's why highly advanced ancient cultures collapsed, in large degree: they couldn't just start at the lower level again before working their way back to 'advanced civilization', they had to start all the way at zero again.
Here's a fun one I like playing with my kids, kind of the nerdy science version of the polysci "go back in time to kill Baby Hitler: which one scientific understanding would you bring back in time to Ancient Rome/the American Revolution/the 1950s/etc. and why? Dollars to donuts they'll say something like "the lightbulb" and not consider that it's at least 3 distinct discoveries and inventions, nevermind the engineering.
Mastodon COULD be fine, if it had better discovery systems, and anyone at all used it.
X is now cesspool of alt-right toxic hate, intermixed with silicon valley AI tech bros, and politicians and clueless legacy media folks. Those are the only groups who still use it.
Meanwhile, Threads is just full of people who like to argue about random crap.
BlueSky is like X, but the opposite... it is alt-left toxic hate and mind-numbing social justice warriors who wont just chill out.
Most people who use social media, the 99%, don't want any of this. They just want to relax and chill and talk about fun things. That is what "old twitter" used to be, and it no longer exists, in any of these networks.
"Sometimes insanity is the only alternative" -- button at a Science Fiction convention.
