> AI doesn't add anything to the ability to do mass surveillance
I recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus for a deep discussion around this.
He makes the point that what makes this AI age much more dangerous for mass surveillance isn't just the collection of data, which has indeed been possible for a while, but the new ability to have AI sift through that enormous volume of information, an ability which until recently has not been possible in a meaningful way without a ton of manual work to support it.
Older attempts at mass control of a population already involved mass surveillance, even in a large amount of detail, but even when capturing in detail all citizens' activities, there were just not enough people around to be able to dig through that and analyze it. This has been somewhat true even with the help of computers, though computers have certainly already been making this easier.
But now you can just give all that data to an AI with your instructions, and it'll apply some sort of "judgement" on your behalf, completely autonomously, and even perform actions against those folks it finds, again autonomously, without needing to manually build a whole infrastructure to do that with manual rules. That's a very meaningful upgrade for someone wanting to control a population.
My apologies, internet stranger, for thinking I had different goals than the ones you so cleverly picked up on in my one paragraph comment. Clearly you were more correct about my goals than I was.
It's not meant as a perfect analogy for global warming, but rather an illustration of how a constant state isn't necessary for something to be said to be "changing", which was OP's claim.
It doesn't; that's kind of a first-glance reading of the phrase without really thinking about it.
Something can said to change from a certain standard even if it wasn't perfectly constant to begin with. For example, if I always kept my house at 65-75 degrees for the past year, and now it's 85 degrees inside, I could certainly say that the temperature in my house recently changed and gotten warmer. That might lead me to check whether my AC's working, rather than say "well I guess the temperature has never really been constant, and 85 is within the range of possible non-constant temperatures, so everything's perfectly normal and nothing has changed."
Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year. It's a hard sell to spend a large amount of up-front money (even after rebates, which decreased this year) to convert to a system that will cost you more than you pay today, and may not work as well in cold weather (every heat pump company I talked to suggested keeping my existing gas heating in place and automatically switching to it when it gets cold enough).
I was also told that the electrical grid in my area is having difficulty keeping up with the push towards heat pumps, which increase load exactly on the coldest nights of the year, when you need heating most.
I agree with some aspects, and think the author perhaps misunderstood some others.
> If I collect 100 XP, what does it mean for my language skills? For that matter, why do I collect extra XP when I receive a potion? Can the XP I collect be used in a way to carefully guide me towards the specific language skills I would explore next?
Using XP to guide the user towards a particular path is an idea, but it's just not one that Duolingo uses. The purpose of XP in Duolingo is simpler: people like numbers to go up, so they get XP for using the app. It also enables an ecosystem of rewards; I'm generally not a competitive person, and there have still been days where I took a few more Duolingo lessons because I was close to completing a "daily challenge".
Similarly, friend streaks, leaderboards, etc, all have innately appealing hooks. They won't all appeal to everyone all the time, but one of them will appeal to someone some of the time. If they get you to practice for 5m a day more than you would've otherwise, I think they've served their purpose.
Broadly, I agree with other comments about expectation management and time commitment. Could you get yourself to a solid level of understanding in a new language only by using Duolingo? Possibly, but you'd need a lot of dedication and hard work, and much more than 5m a day. If you really wanted to learn a language, and had the time, there are much more effective ways to get there.
Duolingo isn't really built towards encouraging that kind of intense learning, because they know most people who download the app are looking for a bite-sized learning experience, and are willing to accept bite-sized results in return. For myself, I can say that after a couple of years of leaning Spanish on Duolingo, with no previous experience in the language, and an average effort of probably ~10m a day (many days less, some days more), I can read texts if they aren't too complex, follow a casual conversation, and communicate basic things. That's way more than I would've been able to do if I wasn't using the app.
I recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus for a deep discussion around this.
He makes the point that what makes this AI age much more dangerous for mass surveillance isn't just the collection of data, which has indeed been possible for a while, but the new ability to have AI sift through that enormous volume of information, an ability which until recently has not been possible in a meaningful way without a ton of manual work to support it.
Older attempts at mass control of a population already involved mass surveillance, even in a large amount of detail, but even when capturing in detail all citizens' activities, there were just not enough people around to be able to dig through that and analyze it. This has been somewhat true even with the help of computers, though computers have certainly already been making this easier.
But now you can just give all that data to an AI with your instructions, and it'll apply some sort of "judgement" on your behalf, completely autonomously, and even perform actions against those folks it finds, again autonomously, without needing to manually build a whole infrastructure to do that with manual rules. That's a very meaningful upgrade for someone wanting to control a population.