111–120 of 145 posts
Absolutely fantastic, well done! I wish I encountered more scifi like this on HN or elsewhere. If anyone has any good general resource or reading recommendations please share them!
I’m surprised to find it was written in 2006. Seems oddly precient with Teslas roaming around everywhere now.
I witnessed the dystopian future where humans are slaves to machines at my favorite local Mexican restaurant. It was about an hour before close. The kids and I were the only customers there. Before we ordered our food we had to wait for the staff to explain to a very annoyed door dasher that the meal they were here for had already been picked up by someone else. As we ate dinner over the next half hour, a new door da…
If it was japanese workers in japan at a japanese store you wouldnt see it as slavery. It would be just a funny bug that would needs fixing. There is probably a racial component to your perception that doesnt need to be there.
To my mind, when gp said “Mexican restaurant,” that conjured a familiar image of a particular type of informal, moderately sized, sit-in-and-delivery kind of establishment that’s probably a small business rather than managed as a corporate chain. And I wouldn’t assume that a Mexican restaurant is necessarily staffed by people of Mexican ancestry.
I do feel like, in my limited exposure to Japanese culture, I hear less worry than I do from Americans about problems on this spectrum of individual economic freedom/empowerment enslavement. But that’s an observation in which I’m very far from confident—I’d be curious to hear how it fits (or doesn’t) with the broader point you’re making.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
...doesn't tinder probably produce more babies than no tinder? I can see you making some point about dating culture or whatever, but at the end of the day more sex must still resolve down to more happy accidents!
> ...doesn't tinder probably produce more babies than no tinder? That's not in evidence, and while I lack empirical evidence to prove this, there are logical mechanisms by which Tinder might result in fewer babies. Namely: 1. A lot of people seem to get an attention fix by talking to people and then ghosting them when meeting in person is suggested. 2. The siloing of the dating pool to different sites (Tinder, Bumble…
I think that if we remove physical limitations like locks, banks, safes, RSA encryption or even a warm bath every day, bored apes would destroy itself instantly. There are people who constantly want to destroy or hack someone and if you gather them all in one place there would be a lot of them, and HN (Hacker News) would come from such places. Everywhere, there are limitations to ensure the system continues to live,…
Small nitpick: the Doomsday Clock is now at 89 seconds. I still don't get how this clock works.
One important milestone was the switch from humans programming the computer (for eg UNIX) to the computer programming humans. This probably happened around Web 2.0 when the algos got unleashed on us: - advanced search algorithms, - advanced ads targeting, - Amazon suggestions, - social media algorithmic timeline, - next generation dating apps like Tinder, and of course the infinite scroll (hypnosis).
You can tell this was written by a human because they wrote that skynet still used violence in the end. When there’s a large enough intelligence differential, the lower intelligence cannot even tell they are at war (let alone determine who’s winning) Like the ants, unaware of the impending doom of 100 ways their colony is going to be destroyed by humanity - they couldn’t understand it even if we had the means to comm…
Ridley Scott seems to be more on the fence.
Someone once pointed out that for physics reasons an alien civilization might 'invade' us by simply stealing our entire Oort Cloud while we watch helplessly from the ends of telescopes, and then leave us stranded, unable to throw rocks and ships high enough and far enough to get revenge, because we need the Oort cloud to build a proper galactic civilization to fight back.
Absolutely fantastic, well done! I wish I encountered more scifi like this on HN or elsewhere. If anyone has any good general resource or reading recommendations please share them!
For another, more detailed take on the same topic, but with a more competent "villain", check this out: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KFJ2LFogYqzfGB3uX/how-ai-tak...
Turning off the 10x human capability AI is pretty much a given. Turning off the 10x human AI that pretends to be 0.5x, not so much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it was japanese workers in japan at a japanese store you wouldnt see it as slavery. It would be just a funny bug that would needs fixing. There is probably a racial component to your perception that doesnt need to be there.
If this were set in Japan as you propose, and we substituted “onigiri stall” or “izakaya” for “Mexican restaurant,” would that affect the substance of the gp’s observation? To my mind, when gp said “Mexican restaurant,” that conjured a familiar image of a particular type of informal, moderately sized, sit-in-and-delivery kind of establishment that’s probably a small business rather than managed as a corporate chain.…
I think thoughts do not follow formal logic and words function as embeddings. My suspicion is the word "slave" in english has other encodings in it that arent strictly the general definition of slave, and that the high magnitude of those signals within the slave embedding will ellicit unreasonable responses. A bug in uber software is no more enslaving the deliverers than a distribution error made by a human on paper in the 1950s resulting in a truck driver driving a shipment of vegetables to the wrong grocery store is enslaving them to drive. The procedure does not commit the immoral act of enslaving. It is an emergent error in logic with complicit actors.
Unrelated side point, lived in Texas for almost 30 years, and every mexican restraunt is owned and operated by mexicans except the rare one that is run by chinese/vietnamese (which generally are not very good).
On japanese culture: Japanese frequently discusses "black companies", and poor boss worker relationships. My wife complains to me about her work every day, and so do all of her coworkers, and their friends when they get togethor. This sort of human to human mistreatment topic is an extremely common point of discussion in Japan. However it isnt framed with the term slavery. That seems to be a western fetish, and its due to the relationship the US has to slavery and it pulls in emotive racial bias, and an image of conflict between groups. Software isnt a tribe to go to combat with for sovereignty. Its just code.
I witnessed the dystopian future where humans are slaves to machines at my favorite local Mexican restaurant. It was about an hour before close. The kids and I were the only customers there. Before we ordered our food we had to wait for the staff to explain to a very annoyed door dasher that the meal they were here for had already been picked up by someone else. As we ate dinner over the next half hour, a new door da…
I think theres a weird tribal alignment angle in your interpretation of the scenario.
You consider computers and machines to be an other, and so in this circumstance youre mind is framing it as subjugation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An incompetent manager would also do the job )
Why does someone always have to chime in “But humans can be bad, too!” We shouldn’t advertise for these companies by denigrating other people. The app economy sucks.
the same executives that push the manager to be bad are the ones pushing for the apps to be bad.
the apps arent bad in and of themselves. couch surfing and warm showers arent putting in exhorbitant cleaning fees.