mastelsa
mastelsa t1_isznibr wrote
Reply to comment by AnakinMalfoy in TIL Critical Periods: Periods of time where an organism's brain is extremely malleable and sensitive to stimuli. If the organism doesn't receive the appropriate stimulus during this critical period to learn a given skill- it maybe difficult or even impossible to develop certain associated functions by electroctopus
There's some evidence that this is what makes learning a language with a very different set of phonemes more difficult as an adult. Babies have a developmental stage where they babble all sorts of sounds--pretty much anything our mouths/voices can make--then those sounds quickly get whittled down to the phonemes and tones we hear being spoken around us. The distinctions between certain sounds get washed out, and the barriers between others are established, and you continue the practice and muscle memory of making the sounds in your native language. If you're a baby in an English speaking country, a front-of-the-mouth "oo" sound is the same as a back-of-the-mouth "oo" sound (e.g. "duuuuude" vs "cooooool"). If you're a baby in a French speaking country, those are two distinct sounds that matter to your ability to understand words. That sound difference is as ingrained to someone raised speaking French as the difference between the "i" sound in "ship" and the "ee" sound in "sheep" is to an English-speaker--a sound difference that doesn't exist in the French language because it only has one close front vowel. Obviously it's not impossible to learn new phonemes as an adult, but babies who are raised bilingual are almost always going to have an ingrained level of phonetic fluency in the other language that's difficult for an adult to achieve.
If the topic is something you're interested in, there's a podcast episode by linguists Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch that covers this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l-73oOgbmo
mastelsa t1_ivsh77m wrote
Reply to comment by Scrumbled_Uggs in A study found that people perceive that robots are replacing human jobs at a greater rate than they actually are. Only 14% of workers say they’ve had their job replaced by a robot. Workers who had been supplanted by a robot estimated that 47% of all jobs have been lost to robots. by Brave_Cycle_8745
That's what happened during the industrial revolution and there were many worker revolts about it. I'm extremely pessimistic about our ability to learn from the past--we're going to go forward with automation and we can expect a lot of civil unrest and probably violence until we come out the other side either having settled on some solution like a UBI/vastly increased social safety nets, or having descended fully into corporate feudalism.