Been reading my youngest Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (which is a very good story, and masterfully executed) and we came across this passage that resonated.
In the story, a bunch of repulsive children are invited to tour Willy Wonka's famous chocolate factory and the repulsive children each get themselves into terrible trouble through greed, disobedience, or just being snotty. When they transgress, the factory disposes of them in what today would be considered a most gruesome manner[1] and the factory workers sing a delightful little song about the horrible child.
There is one particular song, not especially insightful or anything, but interesting to think about in the context of this book's first publication date: 1964. Keep that date roughly in mind as you read the following:
The most important thing we've learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, Never, NEVER let
Them near your television set --
Or better still, just don't install
The idiotic thing at all.
In almost every house we've been,
We've watched them gaping at the screen.
They loll and slop and lounge about,
And stare until their eyes pop out.
(Last week in someone's place we saw
A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)
They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they're hypnotized by it,
Until they're absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
Oh yes, we know it keeps them still,
They don't climb out the window sill,
They never fight or kick or punch,
They leave you free to cook the lunch
And wash the dishes in the sink --
But did you ever stop to think,
To wonder just exactly what
This does to your beloved tot?
IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND
HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND
A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!
HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
HE CANNOT THINK -- HE ONLY SEES!
There's more, but you get the idea. This sort of thing used to be pretty common: moralizing about the woes of television. Dahl was doing it in the '60s (and of course, he was a writer of books, so perhaps it was all just a bit of marketing warfare), but I can say as a parent: I see this everywhere.
It is incredibly easy to let your children be entertained by screens. They do indeed fight and punch and climb on windowsills, and the glowing screen is like a beautiful sedative that stops them from doing all these horrible things.
One of the things that really got me about the Oompa Loompa song here is that parents were using the TV as a way to not have to deal with children even back in 1960s. I assumed that this was some symptom of our much more portable screens in the 2020s.
There is also a connection to AI here. We seemed to have recognized at some point that when entertainment is easy and incredibly engaging (eg television) it requires less of our mental capacity to engage with it, and (as you would see if you read the rest of the song) something like reading a book is a cooler form of entertainment that isn't quite so engaging and therefore requires more work on our part.[2]
Even though we don't necessarily think of using AI as "entertainment," it's worth asking whether answers provided by bots follow a similar pattern: the easy stuff requires less of us, and so if we aren't careful to use AI for difficult things, we'll end up with minds as soft as cheese.
Dahl is almost always worth the time, even as an adult.
Some of what makes the story so good is that it almost feels like a horror story. It's clear that Wonka knows that the brats will come to disastrous end and enjoys tempting them. The way Dahl wrote it, Wonka has not a little of an evil mastermind to him. But the story manages to stay light-hearted and not obviously scary. It's amazing. ↩
I realize that this argument ventures terribly close to what might be called a labor theory of value for thought -- the more work you do to arrive at some conclusion or produce some piece of work, the more valuable it is -- and obviously this is a bad idea. As much as eschewing the use of a calculator in doing advanced math is a bad idea. I don't think calculators degraded human minds. But, I do think that there is something different about the use of LLMs that leads us to get intellectually lazy. ↩
Interesting. This part reminded me of something I read from Marshall Mcluhan[1]
It's a bit of a dense read, but segments always have resonated with me. Especially this one. I can't remember what he means here by "the inclusive form of the icon," but it has the flavour of prophesy.
I take his observation to be that film marks an evolution from "sequence and connections" to "creative configuration and structure." The "moving picture" fills in the blanks for the viewer. Film no longer required the viewers to sequence a story in their brains, like a story board or book did, but mechanized this on the film reel. I think this meant a significant change in the way we perceive reality.
As i've argued before (#1510433), I'm not sure AI does that, at least not in any way I've seen. It renders a lot of our communication redundant, but only because of over-reliance on it. I don't think it plays a big role in altering the way we engage with our environment like how innovations in communication media, like the printing press, telegraph, film or microprocessing did. At best it has become a useful tool, and at worst, an accelerant toward what these other things already made possible. Just my 2 sats.
[1]: The Medium is the Message
I haven't read the book, and I should, but the movie with Gene Wilder is probably my favorite movie.
Great way to summarize the knee jerk.
The book, incredibly, is better than the Gene Wilder film. Perhaps I have simply read Dahl too many times, but I am quite a groupie at this point. He just nails it! (Also it's a quick read.)