AI may cost us our ability to listen, oral historian warns in the Guardian
Much of the worry about AI is that it will erode how well we write. Australian oral historian Shirleene Robinson thinks the bigger loss may be our ability to listen.
She made the case in an opinion column for The Guardian.
“Listening to different views and entering into different worlds is integral to our humanity,” she wrote.
Fewer words every year
Robinson argues that people are already talking less, even as AI chatbots promise faster replies and so-called empathetic listening.
She points to research by psychologists at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and the University of Arizona. They found people spoke about 338 fewer words a day for each year between 2005 and 2019, the University of Arizona said.
Daily speech fell from about 16,000 words to around 12,700. Those under 25 saw the steepest drop.
The data comes mostly from the US and Europe, and ends in 2019....
Copyright of this story solely belongs to thenextweb.com. To see the full text click HERE
