I think it's critical to stay at least vaguely informed of how (technical) systems we're trying to fight are made and what their lineage is.
Learn how that stuff works, how it's built, not so that you can make it yourself but so you're better equipped to deal with it and aren't stun locked by technical jargon in arguments. I regularly see people that are already trying to conflate neural networks1 and lump them with all of the problematic uses of AI, that's the wrong way to do it!
Machine learning, computer vision and neural networks have had beneficial uses-cases for the general public for more than a decade. Your phone can identify your pictures to easily find those that include your pets, it can find text inside your pictures to let you copy it. That stuff is based on the same base technology that powers ChatGPT/Midjourney! Yet I think we'd all agree one is genuinely useful and good to have while the other not so much.
I remember when crypto was in vogue, while I knew from the get go I despised it I took it at heart to at least read a bit about the tech and what people were trying to do with it. I then decided that A) the tech was dumb (and is also way older than cryptobros make it sound like) that B) the use-cases are frankly stupid, most of them reinventing a wheel that didn't need reinventing and C) the cherry on top was how most of it was made to enable money laundering, stealing people's stuff and a disaster for the environment.
The calculus was easy but at least I had a better way make my case against people trying to pitch that stuff to me so their "you don't know about the tech!! it's revolutionary actually!!" would be ineffective.
"Know your enemy" is something to keep in mind, I feel.
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a discipline of mathematics that started in the 60s!
