The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here? • Hacker News Board

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#671

Post by lazyasciiart » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 7:52 AM UTC

suburban_strike wrote: post #668

pjc50 wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values. This is really bleak to me. We can do better than primogeniture, and of course the gender discrimination that goes along with it. You might as well write tha…

[flagged]

Have you lived through governmental collapse?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#672

Post by globular-toast » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 7:54 AM UTC

baal80spam wrote: post #36

lukev wrote: post #17

This is a must-read series of articles, and I think Kyle is very much correct. The comparison to the adoption of automobiles is apt, and something I've thought about before as well. Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. That said, I'm more open to using LLMs in constrained scenarios, in cases where they're an appropriate tool for the job and the downsides can b…

> Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.

Not for everyone. If everyone tried to use a personal car at the same time it wouldn't work. It's also worth bearing in mind that when people talk about "the automobile", what they're really talking about is the roads. Automobiles are useless without roads, and there's only so much space.

A lot of this comes down to having too much of a good thing. We are really bad at detecting when we've gone past the point of too much, and we're even worse at undoing it once we have.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#673

Post by munksbeer » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 7:56 AM UTC

the_af wrote: post #495

munksbeer wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we're considering scifi scenarios, imagine this: if full blown automation of everything is achieved, why would the "haves" need the "have-nots" buying anything at all? Why would they need them to exist, at all? Think about it. It's an extreme and we're not near it... yet. So we reach this post scarcity society, where everyone could be living a life of luxury, but this whole group of "haves" as you call them (who…

> So we reach this post scarcity society A full automation society, where the implied post scarcity is not necessarily for everyone. Maybe it needs most of the population not to exist in order for the few to enjoy the lack of scarcity. Resources aren't infinite, but greed is. I mean, resources and wealth could be far better distributed right now , no need for AI, yet most times this is attempted the wealthy fight too…

> It sounds like a failure of imagination.

I see it as the opposite. Doomerism is the easy path. It takes no imagination to repeat doomer memes and sci-fi dystopian tropes, without articulating exactly how we get there. I think what is far more likely is that as these tools proliferate, we continue on the path we've always done, some discomfort, probably negatively impacting some, but ultimately a better life when measured on the median. I don't see a way the billionaires take all power away from 99.999% of the rest of humanity without literally murdering them. And why would they want to murder them? It's much easier to just let everyone benefit.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#674

Post by lazyasciiart » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 7:56 AM UTC

867-5309 wrote: post #503

nonameiguess wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

e-scooters kind of sit in an uncanny valley of shittiness. I'll upfront say it's not at all fair to anyone using them responsibly, but there's a lot of cultural baggage that is going to make them uniquely reviled compared to alternatives. For instance, I've longboarded all around the city of Dallas for years and nobody has ever honked at, cut me off, or spit on me. But temporary rental scooters with no permanent dock…

> drunk partiers using them at least in England, if you use an e-scooter while under the influence of alcohol, that equates to a motoring offence whereby incurring (car) driving licence penalties, driving licence disquaifications (bans), fines, and imprisonment all apply, depending on circumstances and severity. I'm not sure if/why it would be different anywhere else

In most places you don’t need a drivers license to drive one.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#675

Post by Saline9515 » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 7:59 AM UTC

marxisttemp wrote: post #541

sillysaurusx wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although primogeniture has been discriminatory for basically the entire time it's existed, the discrimination isn't inherent. It's an implementation detail. Modern British Royal succession now uses absolute, gender-neutral primogeniture since 2013. In fact, there are few things less discriminatory than a random birth order. You may as well be assigned a random number at birth, and the lower your number, the more you'…

Primogeniture in any form is discriminatory precisely since birth order is an immutable, permanent, unchosen characteristic assigned randomly at birth, just like race or sex.

Primogeniture makes sense in a world where odds that you arrive at the adult age are rather low, due to the high risk of death from illness and injuries.

The oldest child is the most likely to survive. It is a rational and fair rule in such context.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#676

Post by Saline9515 » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 8:01 AM UTC

hackable_sand wrote: post #653

nhod wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gender is mutable. Sex is determined by genetics, though in a handful of creatures, sex could be considered mutable.

You can change sex And people can be born intersex Your data is wrong

The fact that some people can be born with 6 fingers doesn't mean that saying "a human hand has 5 fingers" is generally false.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#677

Post by jimnotgym » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 8:16 AM UTC

Saline9515 wrote: post #670

Animats wrote: post #445

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

There are plenty of occupations that benefit from being "smart". Construction is one of them, and if you study a bit medieval or renaissance architecture, you'll be amazed by what our ancestors were able to do with just a few analog tools. The same goes for other occupations, and...farming. Breeding cattle is a complex science, so is growing crops consistently and valuing the production.

I used to be in construction. My family were the ones you would call when the average builders couldn't do the job. We were very busy, but it didn't translate into making more money. If we charged more we would get hired for the hard bit only, and let the cave men do the rest.

When nail guns and cheap power tools came in, every other yokel was suddenly a builder. That is when I got out

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#678

Post by minajevs » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 8:22 AM UTC

dalyons wrote: post #631

dripdry45 wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a good friend who doesn’t pay attention to any of this stuff. Nothing gets them down for long, they do pretty well with work, and just enjoy living life simply. They have amassed a reasonable amount of wealth, are moving up at their job, and just don’t pay any attention to all this stuff we here on the Internet talk about all the time. There is no AI black pill because they aren’t caught up in all the headline…

They’ll still lose their job to AI, whether they’re paying attention or not.

I am not saying you are wrong, just that your comment reads as "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you".

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#679

Post by simoncion » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 8:27 AM UTC

keeda wrote: post #657

simoncion wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All articles are mostly a regurgitation of all the negativity that gets aired here all the time (a lot of it already fixed or debunked) and 0 discussion of utility. There are multiple sections that talk directly about utility. Here's one of them: [0] But, sure. I'll bite. Here's the third paragraph of the first part of the essay [1]: This is *bullshit* about *bullshit machines*, and I mean it. It is neither balance…

[0] is a throwaway paragraph that handwaves at second-hand accounts of generic things LLMs can do, with no further discussion, apparently because he (surprisingly!) has almost no first-hand experience with them. Then there are 10 pages of negativity with dozens of links to stuff that has been discussed to death here and in media. The "negative spaces" he's filling are already overflowing. His lack of personal experie…

> His lack of personal experience with LLMs...

You missed the part where he is consistently unimpressed by the failure of LLMs to do the task he hands to them, it seems. Go re-read Section 1.5 "Models are Idiots". Make sure to read the footnotes. They're sure to address most of the counterarguments you might make.

> Is that "breathless boosterism?"

How you phrased it? Yes. It ignores the "infinite nuances involved" such as maintainability, infosec soundness of the work product, the completely untested legality of "license washing" to name a few. Also, you missed the part where I said

  Due to their nearly-universally breathless nature, I know that's how I classify the overwhelming majority of such discussions.

> Hadn't come across this one before, but there's not much in there I hadn't seen and even discussed in past comments. ... It does mention (and then gloss over) the real finding of the DORA and related reports...

Yeah, I figured that you would be unable (or unwilling) to understand this one. Here's the summary, straight from the author's keyboard:

* Fred Brooks' No Silver Bullet was correct.

* No Silver Bullet applies to LLMs the way it applied to other things, and empirical evidence on LLM coding impact sure seems to agree.

* You'll get better returns from working on strong software development fundamentals than from forcing all your programmers to use Claude for everything, and that's a repeated message in basically all the major literature.

* If LLMs do turn into a revolutionary world-changing silver bullet giving everyone coding superpowers, you'll be able to just adopt them fully when that happens.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#680

Post by ahartmetz » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 8:30 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #591

ahartmetz wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money was useful - not as much as today, sure. But traders and tradespeople existed in the middle ages, so you could buy some goods and services. Metal tools and farming implements, harnesses for horses or oxen, pots, clothes / fabrics, maybe woodwork for a house... Some of these things you could make yourself or were commonly self-made instead of buying, but that, too, requires planning and discipline. I'm a bit sho…

> you could buy some goods and services. Metal tools and farming implements, harnesses for horses or oxen, pots, clothes / fabrics, maybe woodwork for a house You could buy some temporary luxuries to enjoy, or save yourself a bit of labour on something you'd normally do yourself. But you couldn't really invest in your future the way we would today - everything you depended on had to be something you could make yourse…

No disagreement about that. A peasant couldn't even properly own farmland in the feudal system.