alt Hacker NewsA huge chunk of humans are sedated with infinite supply of cortex-disabling short form video and games.
Another huge chunk are too distracted by having to scrape by for a living and work multiple jobs or raise kids and survive financially until exhausted. That second group will keep increasing as the first flows into it.
The rest are aging, disabled, or too young and pegging themselves majorly in the first category until they hit the second.
The people aware enough to hold on to their brain and do something with it in their time available are trying to figure out AI and how to make money with it. The variable rewards of promoting AI are turning into an addiction with some of them, especially if grasping for straws with little inherent insights into the problems prompted.
So if you are able to fly above the AI-generated addictions and have the privilege of time to do it, see what you can do.
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This is not the first time this has happened. In the 1800 as industrialization led to an infrastructure boom, the workers from China would work their bodies off and pay half their wage to opium dealers who were making the opium on the hills of British Singapore and selling it to workers who couldn’t sleep without it from all the pain. (source: Singapore Airlines in-flight documentary). Today the sedation comes from Chinese TikTok, Meta, YouTube and the gaming companies.
The government wants to encourage it too. If you look up the brand new 2027 California sales tax rules on software, “content” and “infrastructure (clouds and ai)” and “advertising/placement” among others are exempt but the rest of software makers who make tools people actually use (tools, subscriptions, saas) and pay for have to pay sales taxes. Way to encourage waste of brain power and time at the expense of useful. Sedation is the goal.
Everything is poison, and everything is medicine. It’s all about the dose. This fits perfectly here.
This seems to prove too much. It's as though there is some objective meaning of life and we are all to be chastised for failing to recognize it.
It's disturbing how many arrogant elitists comment on HN essentially claiming that most other humans are NPCs. Do you ever actually talk to regular people outside the tech industry bubble? They're not as stupid or unaware as you seem to think.
The unbridled arrogance of thinking that the only smart people left in this world are working on AI. That is some pure SV techno cult thinking, 100% concentrate.
This is among the weirdest ai propaganda post I've read. "There are 2 classes of people the stupid and the poor. Don't be like them make AI do something to make money if you are smart. Don't get addicted to it though, good luck."
What the hell lol. Lots of people and companies are doing just fine without it. Infact, I haven't seen much money come from AI at all. Most reasonable people are still waiting for it to pop and viewing it for the risk it is. Trillions in debt, total vendor lock in, data theft, unsustainable workflows, deskilling, skeleton crews at the mercy of a subscription, etc.
What an embarrassment of a comment.
> The people aware enough to hold on to their brain and do something with it in their time available are trying to figure out AI and how to make money with it.
I know this is HN and thus this will need to repeated until the end of time but not everyone is a money hungry asshole who places their personal profit above everything else. “The people aware enough to hold on to their brain and do something with it in their time available” understand there are significantly better things to do with one’s life, like having a little empathy and experiencing what other people have to offer instead of talking about them like braindead cattle.
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One of the dilemmas of trying to communicate the full spectrum of AI Risk, is trying not to insult the intelligence of the human animal in the process. And don't get me wrong: what human wetware can accomplish with 20 watts is the most miraculous thing in the known universe. And yet how many of us can have our cognitive sovereignty one-shotted by engagement algos, Skinner boxes, gameplay loops, propaganda, advertising, flattery, social conformity, bias, fantasy, charismatic demagoguery, or straight-up bullshit?
If we grant that we are on track to make something smarter than humans (I think so): it's almost a face-saving white lie to spin yarns about a Skynet nuclear apocalypse, or a 7D chess move to mass-assemble a nanovirus with 100% lethality without anybody noticing. I do think those scenarios are worth taking seriously; but what's harder to communicate, is just how effectively a superhuman AI (or a diverse ecology of agent swarms) might be able to manipulate human behavior. It's something few of us are able or willing to truly process (not least because how many of us live in denial of how much our nervous systems are already hacked by technomodernity).
The appropriate analogy for what's to come may look less like the anthill carelessly demolished to make room for a highway, than the domesticated worker ants from Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time".