alt Hacker NewsThere's not nearly enough mention in these discussions of the real villain behind most of the negative cultural, social, and cognitive effects of things like social media: addiction engineering.
AI will be a net positive unless companies start optimizing it for "time in app" or "time on site" or other "engagement" (addiction) metrics.
Every time that's been done, the result has been a nightmare for everything but those KPIs (of course). Service degrades, discourse degrades, everything becomes toxic and addictive and destructive.
I assumed it was a given in such discussions that companies will optimizing for the worst outcomes for their users. It’s a fairly straightforward incentive from our capitalist system, which is why capitalism needs regulation to re-align the incentives with humans needs