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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?

#71

Post by neilv »

One tech horror story would be A Boring Dystopia for tech jobs.

Just this morning, I sifted through dozens of startup job posts (matching a search intended to find appealing ones), and there was only one that didn't have a mission I considered awful.

A high rate of cruddy-sounding startups has always seemed the case on that jobs site (not the YC one), especially during the blockchain bubble. But today it seemed worse than last time I looked.

Maybe the recession panic means fewer startups are getting funding to plausibly try to make the world better.

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

#72

Post by mhuffman »

worldsayshi wrote: post #49
janandonly wrote: post #14

Utopia: “free” money for everybody. In the form of a Basic Income. Dystopia: controls on how we spend our money. No matter if we earned it ourselves or were gifted the money. No buying or selling without it being whitelisted. Maybe in the form of CBDC’s? Utopia: no more spamming because no one can me anonymous. Dystopia: every service, platform and protocol will need KYC options.

While there's increasingly good reasons to introduce basic income there seems to be little substantial movement in that direction. I have a feeling that the reasonableness of basic income will grow at about the same pace as the power of workers will diminish. Not sure if there's a way to change that equation? Introducing a very small basic income that is planned to grow might be a good way to go about this.

I believe that after enough automation, UBI (or at least BI) will have to manifest in "first-world" countries. Starvation will be the alternative. I also believe that when the sample size get big enough, there will be people that just live off of the UBI and do nothing else, and those will be easy to find and easy to politicize. So that the overbearing control of how people spend the money will come into play. You already see this with EBT.

There have not been many large-scale/long-run UBI pilot projects so there is not a lot of real evidence on what will happen. The Canadian experiment (mincome) from around 50 years ago is the main one that people reference and it has plenty of problems regarding scientific rigor and design. There are many other shorter and smaller ones from all over the world and different places within the US with mixed results. Many of them, if you look into them, have the problem where the politics of it will often conflict with (and usually overcome) any scientific rigor.

There are also many UBI alternatives, not just the "send everyone a check every month" varieties. Nearly all of them have some common sense reasonableness to them, but it is very, very expensive to really try and very hard to justify to many people to "just give" their tax money to other people for free without any qualifications.

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

#73

Post by 13of40 »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #47
13of40 wrote: post #30

It might actually already exist, but imagine if on the other side of the internet they aggregate all of your usage information so that a tech can sit down at one console and see that "jimbo123" on Reddit is actually Bob Smith who lives on Sunnydale drive, owns a Subaru Outback, bought dogfood three times this month, and has been talking about the war a bit more this week on his other social media accounts. Anyone who…

Acxiom says hello.

Thank you - that's truly horrifying. I put in a request to get my file from them, but based on their security questions they have my whole public profile. Whether they can map it to social media accounts and purchases isn't clear yet.

Edit: They have pinky-sworn to email me my data some time in the next 45 days.

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

#74

Post by 082349872349872 »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #57
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-…

Do you think we would have to pay anything at all in a utopia?

In a utopia we won't pay to enable consumption, it'll be our moral duty to avoid lack of it.

"So essential when there was under-production; but in an age of machines and the fixation of nitrogen-positively a crime against society."

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

#75

Post by lawn »

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…

I find it difficult to believe that tech people would organize in large scale around a new religion, as tech and religion are opposites in how you see and approach the world.

With religion, everything can be explained with god, but with tech we need to use the scientific approach that rejects god.

But of course, it could just separate us into two camps: the "gods" who create and manage the tech, and all the others who worship it.

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

#76

Post by maxbond »

monero-xmr wrote: post #69
maxbond wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you aren't actually speaking from experience then, this is an allegory for how you feel you would be treated in academia (if you were also a different person)...? Maybe it would more helpful if we spoke about our experiences and not hypotheticals we invent? Because we're surely going to be wrong about the latter.

To claim that you can only speak and debate about lived experiences is erroneous and naïve. Otherwise HN comments would be a desert. I apparently struck a nerve with you - I suggest you pray to your political party and give your weekly tithe.

I'm actually also a registered independent, but I don't see any reason to believe the fable you've invented about the Republican academic. When it comes to matters of lived experience we should prefer to discuss actual experiences, yes.

Please avoid putting words in my mouth (as well as needless swipes like calling me naive and implying I'm some sort of party cultist), as I never said "all debate must be centered around lived experience," I was making a suggestion for this conversation.

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

#78

Post by 13of40 »

andylynch wrote: post #67
13of40 wrote: post #30

It might actually already exist, but imagine if on the other side of the internet they aggregate all of your usage information so that a tech can sit down at one console and see that "jimbo123" on Reddit is actually Bob Smith who lives on Sunnydale drive, owns a Subaru Outback, bought dogfood three times this month, and has been talking about the war a bit more this week on his other social media accounts. Anyone who…

I’m sure this exists in multiple places, not least Cheltenham, Fort Meade, Canberra and Beijing (hi guys!).

Funny story - I had to go to Cheltnam on business a couple of years ago, and while I was there I was getting banner ads trying to recruit me to GCHQ. I'm guessing their staffing people don't have access to the whole file, because they were trying to recruit a foreign national with no security clearance for a job that pays 1/3 of what they're already making.

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

#79

Post by fxtentacle »

AI porn addiction

Both general research and the success of OnlyFans suggest that personalized porn is already quite addictive. AI emotion analysis via webcam and microphone can identify what you like and a reinforcement-learning AI can learn to produce a script for more of what you like. In combination with AI image / video generation, the whole system then creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Maybe add ChatGPT so that you can talk to your virtual lover, a $420 million market [1]

In the animal kingdom, sexual desire appears to be strong enough to override the flight response [2] with beetles getting eaten alive while trying to copulate with beer bottles. So this could become addictive to the point that the "victims" of this AI system do nothing else. As a prison of the mind, I'd consider it a horror scenario, even though the "victims" will probably all enjoy their captivity.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/06/china-online...

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/j.1440...

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

#80

Post by r_klancer »

Chatbot-based dating matchmaker/concierges.

You have an ongoing, lighthearted chat with the bot (maybe it pings you now and then asking for updates.) Every once in a while it asks you more personal questions to switch things up and deepen its model of you.

Now and then it says "may I introduce so-and-so to the chat?" and introduces someone else who (on their side) has been primed to talk about the same topics and, at least according to the bot's internal models, is likely to hit it off with you.

Then the chatbot itself politely leaves the conversation but keeps listening and privately messages the both of you to keep things humming along, for example nudging one of you to ask for an in person date when the moment seems right (or helping you politely wind things down if you ask it to). After a date it asks you to spill the beans so it knows what went well and what didn't.

I think this could almost be made to work with the tech we have now; a fluent-but-shallow ChatGPT style chatbot is probably good enough for the task as long as it is augmented by some additional models to predict dating compatibility, recognize when things are going well or badly, suggest actions (like changing the subject to or away from personal topics, asking for a date, etc). And of course the models would improve over time as the system learns from its own successes and failures.

Whether this is dystopian or utopian is left as an exercise for the reader -- I'm married and 15 years out of the game!

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