Wrong quote - "calculators are making people bad at doing maths" was the fear. Truns out, they didn't, but didn't help either [1]
> "Spell checkers are making people dumb"
Well, at this point I assume you use "dumb" as a general stand-in for "worse at the skill in question". here, however, research shows that indeed, spell checkers and auto-correct seem to have a negative influence on learning proper spelling and grammar [2]. The main takeaway here seems to be the fact that handwriting in particular is a major contributor in learning and practicing written language skills. [2]
> "Wikipedia is making people dumb"
Honestly, haven't heard that one before. Did you just make that up? Apart from people like Plato, thousands of years ago, owning and using books, encyclopaedias, and dictionaries has generally been viewed as a sign of a cultured and knowledgeable individual in many cultures... I don't see how an online source is any different in that regard.
The decline of problem solving and analytical skills, short attention spans, lack of foundational knowledge and subsequent loss of valuable training material for our beloved stochastical parrots, though, might prove to become a problem in future.
There's a qualitative difference between relying on spell checkers while still knowing the words and slowly losing the ability to formulate, express, and solve problems in an analytical fashion. Worst case we're moving towards E.M. Forster's dystopian "The Machine Stops"-scenario.
Wrong quote - "calculators are making people bad at doing maths" was the fear. Truns out, they didn't, but didn't help either [1]
> "Spell checkers are making people dumb"
Well, at this point I assume you use "dumb" as a general stand-in for "worse at the skill in question". here, however, research shows that indeed, spell checkers and auto-correct seem to have a negative influence on learning proper spelling and grammar [2]. The main takeaway here seems to be the fact that handwriting in particular is a major contributor in learning and practicing written language skills. [2]
> "Wikipedia is making people dumb"
Honestly, haven't heard that one before. Did you just make that up? Apart from people like Plato, thousands of years ago, owning and using books, encyclopaedias, and dictionaries has generally been viewed as a sign of a cultured and knowledgeable individual in many cultures... I don't see how an online source is any different in that regard.
The decline of problem solving and analytical skills, short attention spans, lack of foundational knowledge and subsequent loss of valuable training material for our beloved stochastical parrots, though, might prove to become a problem in future.
There's a qualitative difference between relying on spell checkers while still knowing the words and slowly losing the ability to formulate, express, and solve problems in an analytical fashion. Worst case we're moving towards E.M. Forster's dystopian "The Machine Stops"-scenario.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/42802150?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362696154_The_Effec...