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Ask HN: What tech utopia/horror ideas do you see materialising soon?

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Re: Ask HN: What tech utopia/horror ideas do you see materialising soon?

#31

Post by hemmert »

maxbond wrote: post #3

It being necessary to use shibboleths/code words to authenticate to each other over video chat (eg, to ensure that the person you're speaking to is who they appear to be, not someone else using deepfake puppetry). Really this is an implicit biometric authentication mechanism, and biometrics are usernames, not passwords. (Though I'd love to be wrong about this one.)

We'll have to prove ourselves to be human all the time. We're facing a life of many, many Turing tests – with us being the ones trying to prove we're human.

Re: Ask HN: What tech utopia/horror ideas do you see materialising soon?

#35

Post by ermir »

ddulaney wrote: post #23
ermir wrote: post #15

What I see happening soon: The mainstreaming of a new religion. Its tenets are broadly: the worship of technology and "progress", the cyborgization of the population, the proliferation of AI on all spheres of life, and the ultimate creation of the successor of humanity. This is not new, it's been going on for at least 200 years, but finally the technology exists to do it in a decentralized, scalable fashion. Think of…

Hmm... Hard to see where that gets mainstreamed from. If it was coming, you'd expect to see it now in fringe groups. Most of the "fringy" belief systems I'm aware of either go the other way with a radical rejection of technology or just don't really care. Any sense of where something like this is bubbling outside of the mainstream?

It's fundamentally a function of technology, just like Protestantism is only possible when you have a literate population and access to cheap books. The mainstreaming of what some call "Cyborg Theocracy" happens from the bottom-up in cases such as this: https://nypost.com/2022/05/11/madonna-reveals-fully-nude-nft...

and top-down in cases such as Yuval Noah Harari and "Homo Deus", the man becoming God. You also see this in Marxism, where the "liberated" human is finally perfected and has reached a godly state. I could show tons and tons of examples.

Re: Ask HN: What tech utopia/horror ideas do you see materialising soon?

#37

Post by 082349872349872 »

maxbond wrote: post #12
BirAdam wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hadn’t thought of this. Fascinating thought. How would we know for sure that the deepfake didn’t bypass auth somehow… I guess one would need a secondary auth system, like a message over signal or something.

Not to sound like a crank but it wouldn't hurt to establish them with your friends and family before we may need them, while we still have faith in recognizing their voice on the telephone and can just call them up and chat about it.

this is the flip side of KYC — establishing a shared context pool with your banker.

Re: Ask HN: What tech utopia/horror ideas do you see materialising soon?

#38

Post by monero-xmr »

maxbond wrote: post #26
monero-xmr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely see politics as a new religion. Blind faith, ignoring logic, heresy if you disagree, excommunication, various forms of worship. Both sides

Pretty bad faith interpretation of both politics and religion. I'd encourage you to consider looking into political theory & religion to broaden your perspective (speaking as a nonreligious person). Speaking for myself I stopped thinking of religion as being just like kooky nonsense when I got to know some religious people and understood what it was their religion meant to them, and understood that they were using it…

I am religious and a practicing adherent. I am focusing on the negative aspects of faith and institutions which in the current political environment are quite apt. Try and be an academic and be a public supporter of Republicans. The cold shoulders are ice cold

Re: Ask HN: What tech utopia/horror ideas do you see materialising soon?

#39

Post by 082349872349872 »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #28

AI is here - we just haven't noticed it yet. An entire class of problems are fairly solvable with the current tech with good unit economics, the market is still figuring itself out. If you think AI is going to replace your job, it probably is. But that's only true if you consider your job to be the motions you go through day to day and not the problems you solve. We are about to have a seemingly infinite army of mid-…

How soon will this army get effectors? I don't need any mid-skill help in symbol manipulation; I could use it in meatspace.

Re: Ask HN: What tech utopia/horror ideas do you see materialising soon?

#40

Post by rsynnott »

ermir wrote: post #15

What I see happening soon: The mainstreaming of a new religion. Its tenets are broadly: the worship of technology and "progress", the cyborgization of the population, the proliferation of AI on all spheres of life, and the ultimate creation of the successor of humanity. This is not new, it's been going on for at least 200 years, but finally the technology exists to do it in a decentralized, scalable fashion. Think of…

A couple of AI religions already exist (for a particularly extreme version see Roko's Basilisk) but it's hard to see any of them being particularly mainstream. You might perhaps see them hit similar levels of relevance as, say, Scientology, but probably not a major religion.
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