alt Hacker NewsHey! Bit of an unusual question maybe: if this stuff further exarcerbates the loneliness epidemic and atomization of society, will you be able to live with yourself you think? If you hear about teenagers only spending time with your chatbot in 5 years, will you feel some amount of personal responsibility or not? Always curious to hear you guys' perspective on that kind of stuff!
Replies
> if this stuff further exarcerbates the loneliness epidemic and atomization of society, will you be able to live with yourself you think?
Looking at the 30,000-foot view of how society is set up: laws, economic system, employee incentives, etc, do you suppose it matters what the individual contributors think? I say this not to absolve anyone of responsibility, but to point out the obvious outcomes of our incentives across the strata (polity -> shareholders -> boards -> C-suite -> employees)
I will bet you dollars to donuts, somewhere inside OpenAI is a frequently-used revenue dashboard, but not for loneliness - if anything, OpenAI will make horny models and tout itself as a solution to loneliness, a la character.ai - if that earns them more money.
That's not really a fair question, especially given the audience here on HN. Most here have blood on their hands from the previous 25 years of tech-eats-the-world.
Technology is what you make of it. If you want to make it your best friend and your only friend, that's your choice. But I would guess more people would use it as a personal tutor. If it works as well as the demo, this already crushes most language learning apps. Actually the only apps for learning language that it would fail to replace would still be Tandem and HelloTalk because it still can't replicate the nuance of real human interaction.
People who do this kind of stuff are very irritating. You clearly have some problem with the work they do. Instead of saying and approaching that outright, you pass it in some passive aggressive fake bullshit. Makes you sound like the kind of person I would much rather not be speaking to, which is kind of ironic given your comment.
"Hey Leibniz, how do you live with yourself knowing that your binary system helped eventually replace human conversations?"
I would say no if the question was asked of me. It’s like asking if you’d feel bad about marriage if you ended up divorced with a child. Or if you’d feel bad about commenting if it made someone feel like they lost brain cells.
The morality of an action isn’t based on actual consequences because the future isn’t known in advanced. All we can do is act on the perceived consequences of our actions, and if we think those are good, pursue them.