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We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

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Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> For years, i tried to lose weight with gym and dieting. I failed, and now i know i probably never had a chance to, it was a scam all along. In what way is dieting a scam? You literally just eat less, and you will lose weight as long as you're on a calorie deficit.

Americans believe diet and exercise "doesn't work". The reasons are twofold: on one hand, this is coming from the fat acceptance / body positivity movement, which needs people to believe that diet and exercise are futile, and being fat is just a fact of life, like being tall or short. They want people to believe that being fat is a disability, or even an attribute of diversity that we ought to accept and celebrate. On the other hand, American food products make it unnecessarily hard to consistently meet your caloric deficit, which makes people wrongly conclude that diet and exercise just doesn't work.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#142
post #97

> Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates, muddle through real life. They actually don't. Everything from dating and fitness to manufacturing and politics is in decline in activities, and more so in effect and understanding. You can't convince (enough) people anymore that it is even important as many…

I’d like to offer an alternative explanation than AI to this. Shit is just too damn expensive. If you want to go hang out with friends it will cost you $4-8 for a cup of coffee. A dinner starts at $50/person. A trip to an amusement park is over $100 easily. The median individual income in the US currently is just over $65k/year or about $32.50/hour. That means half the workforce makes less than that. When an 8oz cocktail costs you an hour of your life because you work for minimum wage, you’d rather stay home and watch TikTok.

But it’s not about the price of going out. It is about the crushing stress of surviving in this economic climate that is leaving people absolutely no energy to go and socialize. Whenever the average personal economy swings back towards “can afford to live in this country” again, people will socialize again. Until then everything will be in decline except stock trading and investment in AI projects.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#144
post #56

Maybe AI can help socialize the anti social so they can make progress towards real human interaction?

I don't see it. Chatbots are designed to be agreeable so they won't give you feedback on your antisocial behaviors. And businesses running chatbots are financially incentivized to keep them agreeable to avoid turning off customers.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#145
post #97

> Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates, muddle through real life. They actually don't. Everything from dating and fitness to manufacturing and politics is in decline in activities, and more so in effect and understanding. You can't convince (enough) people anymore that it is even important as many…

[flagged]

Your body is a machine that burns calories. Give it less calories and it will burn its calorie stores.

You are right that there are a lot of scams that complicate this fact as much as possible to get money from you.

But rest assured, if you calculate your TDEE (many simple calcs online), and food scale your calories (everything you eat) to a diet -500 under your TDEE, you will lose weight (or you are a perpetual motion machine).

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#146

I wouldn't worry about AI solving loneliness any time soon. AI right now feels empty, like a facade with no depth. AI will tell you what it thinks you want to hear, but it can't remember a conversation you had last week (and even if it sticks a summary of your conversations into the pre-prompt, it has no sense of importance and will probably overwrite your darkest secret with your favorite cocktail recipe if it runs…

I don't really agree. Correctly prompted, you can get Sesame AI to sound very human like and push back/argue against ideas it "disagrees" with. The memory is also fairly decent.

Other LLM's can also do this pretty well (again, given the right prompts), but you're limited to text or somewhat mediocre speech.

And this is without the big companies putting much effort into companions. Once they do, things can be pushed much further.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#147
post #97

> Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates, muddle through real life. They actually don't. Everything from dating and fitness to manufacturing and politics is in decline in activities, and more so in effect and understanding. You can't convince (enough) people anymore that it is even important as many…

[flagged]

None of what you described is a scam. Time and again, I’ve found the people who are critical of dieting aren’t doing it right… Which is hard for me to wrap my head around since weight loss boils down to one factor, caloric restriction.

You burn more calories than you eat and you lose weight. It’s that simple. All these tricks people use like glp-1 inhibitors and keto all serve the same goal of caloric restriction. GLP-1 reduces appetite which reduces calories, keto removes food groups from your diet and decreases hunger which reduces calories.

I’ve been dieting recently and lost 20 pounds just by diligently tracking and restricting my calories. 10 pounds lost in just the past month. In that time I’ve eaten bowls of pasta, pizza, gone out drinking, etc. All I do is accurately track everything I eat (everything), and if I have a less-strict day (like going drinking), I just eat less the next day to make up for it.

It’s simple, but it requires some discipline. That’s the real reason people have trouble dieting.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#148
post #97

> Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates, muddle through real life. They actually don't. Everything from dating and fitness to manufacturing and politics is in decline in activities, and more so in effect and understanding. You can't convince (enough) people anymore that it is even important as many…

I’d like to offer an alternative explanation than AI to this. Shit is just too damn expensive. If you want to go hang out with friends it will cost you $4-8 for a cup of coffee. A dinner starts at $50/person. A trip to an amusement park is over $100 easily. The median individual income in the US currently is just over $65k/year or about $32.50/hour. That means half the workforce makes less than that. When an 8oz cock…

I honestly just think it’s that before there was so little to do at home that you were just bored as hell if you didn’t go out. Now there’s just infinite entertainment of all kinds

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#149
post #97

> Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates, muddle through real life. They actually don't. Everything from dating and fitness to manufacturing and politics is in decline in activities, and more so in effect and understanding. You can't convince (enough) people anymore that it is even important as many…

[flagged]

I’m glad you lost the weight either way :)

Just want to throw this out there for you and everyone’s benefit. Regular physical activity helps you age gracefully and has a lot of physical and emotional benefits besides weight loss.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

In what way was the gym a scam?

Losing weight is done in the kitchen, not the gym.

In fact exercise makes you crazy hungry, which sabotages tons of people's weight loss efforts.

It's better to lose weight, learn how your body and calories work, and then start implementing gym work.

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