alt Hacker NewsWe are entering a dystopia and people are still writing these wonderful essays about how AI will help us.
Microtargeted psychometrics (Cambridge Analytica, AggregateIQ) have already made politics in the West an unending barrage of information warfare. Now we'll have millions of autonomous agents. At some point soon in the future, our entire feed will be AI content or upvoted by AI or AI manipulating the algorithm.
It's like you said - this essay reads like peak AI. We will never have as much hope and optimism about the next 20 years as we seem to have now.
Reminds me of a graffiti I saw in London, while the city's cost of living was exploding and making the place unaffordable to anyone but a few:
"We live in a Utopia. It's just not ours."
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Is such certainty warranted? I don’t think so; it strains credibility.
I’m very concerned about many future scenarios. But I admit the necessity of probabilistic assessments.
When reading the article, the author makes it very clear that AI can cut both ways. See the intro, you may have overlooked it.
“Dystopia is coming.” is just the inverse of “AI/web apps will save us!”
IMO it’s already pretty dystopian to demand people prostrate themselves to flip my burger which I can do myself; we’re living in the memory of the last 70 years rather than let those two adults pick what to do for that day.
If you’d all like to go DIY more rather than rely on overseas sweatshop workers that would help. Despite HN being smarties by education you’re all still just one meat suit out of billions; none of us have defined new axioms of math or linked relativity and quantum mechanics.
None of the philosophy is ever “real”; just lame office workers stroking their human egos in each others faces until we die.
As long as there is money to be made or power to be gained, any technology will be used to get it, especially if the negative effects are externalities that the technology developers and users are not liable for.
Your looking at it from a narrow perspective.
There are millions of middle class households living pretty comfortable lives in Africa, India, China, ASEAN, and Central Asia that were living hand-to-mouth 20 years ago.
And I don’t mean middle class by developing country standards, I mean middle class by London, UK, standards.
So it pretty much is a ‘utopia’ for them, assuming they can keep it.
Of course that’s cold comfort for households in London regressing to the global average, but that’s the inherent nature of rising above and falling towards averages.