alt Hacker NewsA lot of these takes saying we're doomed to a Wall-E future seriously underestimate the human spirit I think. The tykes I volunteer teaching code to still want to write the challenging parts themselves, because they like doing hard things and expressing themselves. It doesn't matter that the robots have supposedly taken over that job.
Same as how the tykes I coach wrestling for do it because it's hard and it gives them a way to grow and express themselves. They know they're never going to see a cent from that pursuit.
If an AI singularity starts trying to feed our kids digital heroin I like to think the majority of us will be more inspired than to tell them to quit trying, tie off, and let humanity go gentle into that good night.
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I think we're going to have a much weirder and more conflicted future than people realise, given that at some point all the world's democracies are going to be populated mostly by the descendants of groups which have a lot of kids.
Yeah, sure, maybe some of us will Wall-E into oblivion. People already do that with opiates and video games and it's reasonable to expect more might do the same.
Do we really think the Amish are going to do that, though? They might even ban AI from providing goods and services to them. And then consider the kids of the Amish, who are not all going to be Amish but who might learn a thing or two and pass it along to mainstream culture. Then do that for every group that's still reproducing.
A depressingly percentage of the population doesn't even want to acquire the basic literacy and arithmetic skills provided by a high school education. Their aspirations means nothing because they don't want to put in the work to build any of the foundation needed to reach for them.
Title of the post should be be I Won’t “Just Hang Out”, or maybe We Won’t Just “Hang Out”, but then it’d be a different post.
Agree to a point, but I don't think it would be the majority. It would be a minority of people who subscribe to philosophies that provide meaning and motivation to life beyond hedonism and material gain. The rest will be happy, or at least resigned, to vegetate in endless endorphin loops.
It's already visible today, with people of all ages spouting all sorts of hedonistic nihilism to justify not making an effort to improve their condition. Some sort of technological singularly would simply be an amplifier of our current dysfunctions.
To some extent it would be the apocalypse. The motivated people would band together and live in physically secure communities, while the nihilists form what amount to a vast expanse of homeless encampments and wallow in their addictions, occasionally making poorly coordinated attacks on the gated communities to dry and drag the motivated people down to their level out of spite.
Picture drug addicts who win the lottery. It won't be pretty
My children were always "anything but STEAM" - we don't want to be nerds / code geeks.. Sure, they did some basic "coding for girls" and such as kids, but it never stuck.
Now, the oldest is realizing that tech skills are incredibly useful in every undergrad degree and taking SQL, Python, etc, and the youngest is studying CS and just told me the other day: "I had trouble following the lecture in physics because I kept thinking about what my prof said, that there was a way to do this O(log N), and I was constantly trying to figure out how". Wow, was that a cool moment as a geek dad who started with BASIC in the 80s..