Ask HN: What's Hacker News's vision for the future?

BUT While the Metaverse could theoretically extend that immersion, historical execution suggests caution: initiatives like Horizon Worlds have struggled with user adoption and technical hurdles, indicating it might not seamlessly evolve from current devices as envisioned.

On the superintelligence front, focusing on empathetic LLMs for companionship taps into real societal issues like rising loneliness (e.g. reports from the WHO highlight it as a global health threat). This approach risks exacerbating dependency rather than alleviating it, potentially creating echo chambers of artificial interaction over genuine human bonds.

So yes, Meta shows some promise in these areas, but success is anything but assured. Their previous massive investments have largely failed to deliver the transformative changes they hyped.

We say "good music gives you goosebumps". Very reductively, you could argue the whole point of a musician's entire career is literally just to get good at making your skin hair wiggle. What if we're overlooking the possibility that the presence of a physically-sensed reaction would make us value something more?

I think the future of communication could involve something kind of like that, for better or for worse. Optimizing communications for physical reactions. The value prop may just be too high, if the causal direction of this effect (on salience) is actually real.

I read a news article about Trump's re-election in Nov 2024, where they interviewed one of his supporters - they said something to the effect of "when I heard the news, my whole nervous system just suddenly relaxed." I wouldn't be surprised if forms of communication get more and more optimized, whether via RLHF or recsys likes or some other means, for their ability to target, for lack of a better term, "embodiment goals"

That would protect more than just the careers of creatives. It would also protect that relationship -- between performers and audiences -- confirming that it's a human-to-human connection, with all of its special validation and honoring of what it is to be human.