Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

harpers.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 284 posts

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#231

Post by lanfeust6 »

syndacks wrote: post #211

A lot of people here like this guys writing. For a longer and more biting critique of SF one should read Private Citizens (2016) by Tony Tulathimutte “ Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire.”

I picked up Rejection, he has a keen sense of observation and understanding of people. Still, I found the variations-on-a-theme stories to be a downer, or at least repetitive. By the 3rd story I was hoping for another direction.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#232

Post by munificent »

lanfeust6 wrote: post #230
munificent wrote: post #52

Beautiful article. I think the "agency" the article talks about is really just "willingness to take risks". And the reason some people are high outliers on that scale is a combination of: * Coming from such a level of privilege that they will be completely fine even if they lose over and over again. * Willingness to push any losses onto other undeserving people without experiencing guilt. * A psychological compulsion…

It occurs to me a highly-automated UBI future should increase risk tolerance for average people. We (probably) won't have to work to survive with a baseline level of comfort, but it would be meagre. If there's nothing but upside to enterprising, and less opportunity-cost (vs subsistence), we might see some innovative or very strange things.

Yes, one of the most well-known arguments in favor of a social safety net is that it can help spur innovation.

Unsurprisingly, people are more willing to try starting a business if doing so and having it fail doesn't mean you might lose access to healthcare and die from an easily curable malady.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#233

Post by mayhemducks »

bitwize wrote: post #177
mayhemducks wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the most valuable and important thing you can learn will be to think critically and communicate well." I have heard some form this advice for over 30 years. Not one single penny I have earned in my career came from my critical thinking. It came from someone taking a big financial risk with the hope that they will come out ahead. In fact, I've had jobs that actively discouraged critical thinking. I have also been tol…

Critical thinking is slave mentality, man. Master mentality, the mentality of the guys who FUCK, is knowing that what you want to happen WILL happen and doing everything you can to make it happen. /s if not obvious

Thanks Timmy.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#234

Post by relaxing »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #184

The author managed to find the strangest people & phenomena in San Francisco and make it sound like they’re a complete picture of life there. But there are packed brunch spots and parks on sunny weekends that would disagree very strongly. San Francisco is a tolerant place. Tolerance is how you get Juicero or Theranos and whatever Cluely seems to have pivoted to, but it’s also how you get Twitter, Uber, Dropbox.. and…

Where do you see money going to the good?

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#235

Post by z7 »

"As Alexander predicted in 'AI 2027,' OpenAI did release a major new model in 2025; unlike in his forecast, it’s been a damp squib. Advances seem to be plateauing; the conversation in tech circles is now less about superintelligence and more about the possibility of an AI bubble."

I'm not sure how many AI researchers would find this accurate. It seems to me that under conditions of ambiguity people often default to describing their preferred version of reality.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#236

Post by dyauspitr »

FloorEgg wrote: post #214
dyauspitr wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion there is a correlation there. I think individualistic societies are better at thinking of new paradigm shifting ideas.

Hmm. I'll think more about this. It makes sense to me that a culture that values collectivistic cohesion would shy away from paradigm shifting ideas (disruption). I also see the correlation between disruptive ideas driven by principled critical thinking over conventional thinking. I guess on some level my assumption is that they are adjacent. Those embedded in a collectivistic culture can think critically but can run…

Collectivist societies have a lot of thought terminating mechanisms. Having spent half of my life in both types of societies it’s very apparent. The thought termination is so intrinsically built into systems in the society most people are blind to them even existing. Exposing or pointing them out doesn’t work either because there are thought terminating mechanisms for anti-thought terminating strategies.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#237

Post by coldtea »

piperswe wrote: post #107
MagicMoonlight wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just look at current software. Windows is maintained by morons, and gets shitter every year. Linux is still written by a couple of people. Once people like that die, nobody will know how to write operating systems. I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush. All software is just shit piled on top of shit. Backends in JavaScript, interfaces which use an entire…

Young people's brains have always been mush, according to the older generation. Your brain is mush according to those older than you. The term for this is juvenoia, and it's as old as humanity.

Regardless of what old people say for young people, which are after all still developing and not so bright or word-wise, there's also actual turning to mush going on. TV, social media, now AI all contributing to further mush-ying.

There's also some specific measurable "turning to mush" going on, like reduced literacy rates, and lowering of IQs (slowing/reversing of the Flynn effect)

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#238

Post by coldtea »

oytis wrote: post #119
MagicMoonlight wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just look at current software. Windows is maintained by morons, and gets shitter every year. Linux is still written by a couple of people. Once people like that die, nobody will know how to write operating systems. I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush. All software is just shit piled on top of shit. Backends in JavaScript, interfaces which use an entire…

> Linux is still written by a couple of people. How is that? It's easily the software project with the largest number of contributors ever (I don't know if it's true, but it could be true).

Most of them work in drivers for devices, not Linux proper.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#239

Post by com2kid »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #219
com2kid wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was once one of the mush brained morons hired to work at Microsoft. I think I did ok. Would I compare myself to the greats? No. But plenty of my coworkers stacked up to the best who'd ever worked at the company. Do I think MS has given up on pure technical excellence? Yes, they used to be one of the hardest tech companies to get a job at, with one of the most grueling interview gauntlets and an incredibly high reje…

> Do I think MS has given up on pure technical excellence? I was there in the DOS days. I was there when Windows 3.1 came out (others too but I didn't use them). I was there when Windows 95 came out. Microsoft has never been about "pure technical excellence". We had wonderful machines (Un x ones and then stuff like the Atari ST / Commodore Amiga / Archimedes) and amazing OSes (including Un x on workstations) and Micr…

> Microsoft has never been about "pure technical excellence". We had wonderful machines (Unx ones and then stuff like the Atari ST / Commodore Amiga / Archimedes) and amazing OSes (including Unx on workstations) and Microsoft nearly destroyed everything with the endless turds

Microsoft's goal was to make machines everyone could afford. Their mission statement was a desktop in every home and they pulled it off.

They didn't pull it off by making an OS that needed a boat load custom chips (Amiga), or that required a huge beefy system to run (OS2, Unix).

They did it by making compromises that kept costs down and made computers accessible. They pushed for multimedia standards when the technology was appropriately matured, and their consumer OSes evolved in maturity as Moore's law progressed. Even then everyone complained about "ever growing" system requirements, especially when the move to XP happened, and then again when Vista came out with its improved security model.

Those fancy slick Sun OS boxes cost a fortune compared to a Windows box of the same time. Sure the Windows box crashed, but as a kid growing up in a working poor family in the 90s I was able to afford Microsoft's imperfect OS, because they had purposefully built an entire ecosystem that was designed to be affordable.

Microsoft pitted every PC OEM against each other in a race to the bottom, until margins approached and then fell below 0 for a new PC.

I've used tons of different systems. Thanks to the efforts of Valve desktop Linux is now usable, but it still has a thousand stupid bugs, many of which I wouldn't have tolerated on Windows 20 years ago. MacOS is very black box-ish and despite daily driving it for 6 or so years now the machine doesn't feel like it is "mine" in the same way a Windows 7 or Windows 2000 machine did. The old 16bit graphic power house machines were sexy but those custom chips don't age well and there was no way they could compete with an open standard like the PC.

Perfect is the enemy of the good. Microsoft very much made software that was good enough, but the truth is good enough is also admirable. Good enough is affordable, it is quick to market, it is adaptable, it is usable by the masses in a way that perfect isn't.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#240

Post by coldtea »

FloorEgg wrote: post #53

I was enjoying the article until I got to this paragraph: > Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or th…

>No AI can take it away from you, and the more powerful AI will get the more you will be able to harness it's potential.

The author is describing it, not necessarily ensorsing it.

But whether they really believe this or not, the point is that most wouldn't be given any opportunity to "harness is potential", whether they're "obscenely talented giga-nerds" or not, because they'd be economically redundant.

Post reply on HN