I'm saying this unironically, but I wish there were courses on looking at information critically and more in how to have a healthy and safe life in the modern day world (including things like data security, how to deal with social media etc.) that would be taught to everyone in schools/colleges/universities.
In my country, there are still public announcements about not trusting random people calling you, never giving your bank details to strangers (every bank homepage says that, that the employees will never ask for that stuff) and people regularly get scammed anyways, the only thing sort of saving them is that scamming is only scalable so far... until you throw automation in the mix, in addition to just plainly spreading misinformation about any topic, or even just allowing people to be confidently incorrect and eliminating the need for them to even think that much (e.g. students just asking ChatGPT to do their homework).
Any step at least in the direction of educating people feels like a good thing.
That said, I don't hate LLMs or anything, I use them for development more or less daily (lovely for boilerplate in your average enterprise Java codebase, for example) and recently saw this project, which made me happy: https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm/home
Most scam prevention fails though because the world is full of exceptions.
Like it's mind-blowing to me that charities still call you and ask for credit card details over the phone and this is like...a legitimate way to go about things.
Or that any government agency calls you and doesn't just leave a verifiable number to call the operator back on.
> Like it's mind-blowing to me that charities still call you and ask for credit card details over the phone and this is like...a legitimate way to go about things.
> Or that any government agency calls you and doesn't just leave a verifiable number to call the operator back on.
That's rather unfortunate! I wonder if in those cases it'd be better to tell them that you'll get in contact through e-mail or something, because then at least it's you going to their actual homepage, looking up contact details and communicating through that.
In my country, we also have a bunch of governmental e-services, one of which is a web based communication platform with most institutionns (translated description, because they haven't bothered to translate it themselves, and also sometimes block connections from outside the country):
> An e-address, or official electronic address, is a personalized mailbox on the Latvija.gov.lv portal for unified and secure communication with state and local government institutions.
The e-address system organizes secure, efficient and high-quality e-communication and e-document circulation between state institutions and private individuals, ensuring data confidentiality and protection of personal data from unauthorized access, unlawful processing or disclosure, accidental loss, alteration or destruction.
An e-address is not e-mail, but its use is similar. Communication in an e-address is confidential, and the data is guaranteed to be available only to you and the institution you contacted.
The main purpose of an e-address is to replace registered paper letters with electronic ones in cases where a state administration institution needs to send information and documents to a specific resident or entrepreneur. Citizens and entrepreneurs can also contact more than 3,000 institutions at any time and from any location via E-address. These include not only state and local government institutions, such as the Food and Veterinary Service, the State Labor Inspectorate, the Competition Council, etc., but also judicial institutions, sworn bailiffs and insolvency administrators, as well as private individuals to whom state administration tasks have been delegated.
That seems like a pretty good common sense idea for organizing trusted 2 way communication.
We do that, and have been doing it since 2013. I organised a schools
outreach visit just last Friday for 12-14 yo. It's called "digital
self defence". We even have public money from our NCSC (UK whitehat
intelligence outreach).
As with TFA (Bergstrom and West) teaching sceptical inquiry and
critical thinking is a major part. We have to undo a lot of nonsense
that they've already been exposed to... much of which is marketing
bullshit and misinformation for social control.
I'm saying this unironically, but I wish there were courses on looking at information critically and more in how to have a healthy and safe life in the modern day world (including things like data security, how to deal with social media etc.) that would be taught to everyone in schools/colleges/universities.
In my country, there are still public announcements about not trusting random people calling you, never giving your bank details to strangers (every bank homepage says that, that the employees will never ask for that stuff) and people regularly get scammed anyways, the only thing sort of saving them is that scamming is only scalable so far... until you throw automation in the mix, in addition to just plainly spreading misinformation about any topic, or even just allowing people to be confidently incorrect and eliminating the need for them to even think that much (e.g. students just asking ChatGPT to do their homework).
Any step at least in the direction of educating people feels like a good thing.
That said, I don't hate LLMs or anything, I use them for development more or less daily (lovely for boilerplate in your average enterprise Java codebase, for example) and recently saw this project, which made me happy: https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm/home