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

AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

eyeofthesquid.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 195 posts

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#71

Post by rekrsiv »

renewiltord wrote: post #58
weaksauce wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same as the story about how groups shouldn’t go out during COVID but BLM protests are fine. i don't think you have a good grasp of why that it was ok for outdoor protests to happen but people should not go out into crowded buildings. the chance of you getting sick from a protest is much less than the chance of you getting sick from going to an indoor gathering at say a club. getting sick is not a binary on or off.…

I don't think you have a good grasp of modeling disease spread and are repeating things you read online without comprehension. Repeated exposure from multi-day protests in large groups of 3 person / sq. m. with multiple tent structures shared by people is not the same as 10,000 people climbing K2 one day at a time.

You're ignoring the fact that going outside to protest wasn't something you could just decide not to do, just like buying groceries. BLM protests and gathering indoors for fun are not equal.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#72

Post by js8 »

zwnow wrote: post #44
raincole wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable It's called utopia. But my issue with AI hype is that it's not clear how it will lead to "everyone can do anything." Like how is it going to free up lands so everyone can afford a house with yard if they want?

Sorry, but its quite the opposite. Its dystopia considering only the already rich really benefit from it.

Unironically, shouldn't the purpose of the human life be turning dystopias into utopias?

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#73

Post by arjie »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #55
jmathai wrote: post #10

I feel a lot less pride in my creative work knowing it can be done much too easily with modern AI. It makes me less eager to create which is quite unfortunate. I haven’t felt to bad about my creative works being fed into training models. Taken by itself, my creations are minuscule. But it’s very apparent when I look at AI as a whole, having taken from everyone in aggregate. I feel that.

> It makes me less eager to create which is quite unfortunate. It's been the exact opposite for me. Coding assistance is a great boon towards productivity simply because otherwise I wouldn't work on any of my old ideas stashed in numerous note taking apps. It's way easier today to go from 0 to something like an MVP, and see if there's something there. If there isn't, not much is lost. But without these tools it would…

I feel the same way. Things used to take so long just to do all the boilerplate. I would frequently get overwhelmed by the fact that I had to write each of the uninteresting parts to get to the interesting parts.

I've recently started using a Chrome extension of my own making[0] that allows me to block and highlight users on Hacker News. I remember trying to do this once a long time ago and it was so much work. I had to learn about the Chrome manifest's possible permissions and I had to format my options page nicely with CSS and I had to learn how to make the extension connect to a web page.

Same with these tools I've built for our family. My wife wanted to be able to give an AI some rough notes and have it polish things up using the notes she already had. She wanted to use ChatGPT. I know the theory about the thing:

* ChatGPT has custom GPTs

* Custom GPTs have Actions that call APIs

* If you have an OpenAPI spec, custom GPTs can understand how to call them

* If you have the HTTPS server, custom GPTs can access the endpoints

Previously, I'd slog through each step one by one. This time, on a day when I was watching my infant daughter, I managed to finish the whole thing fully functioning during a short period that she slept! Eufy Baby iOS app up in the corner of the screen, claude code on the left, ChatGPT in Chrome on the right. Knocked it out in an hour and my wife uses it every day.

Astounding tool. Then yesterday I wanted to print an alternative mount for our baby monitor so I can place it in a specific place. I couldn't find the camera mount STL files anywhere. 15 minutes for my wife to find my calipers, 5 minutes measuring, then untold GPU hours but zero of my time as codex built me a test mount[2] while verifying it against a mesh-contiguity script.

And my wife is a graphic designer, so she iterated on our wedding clothes by using Dall-E to design the ideas she had, polished it up in Adobe CS, and then we got an embroiderer we know to put it on my sherwani[3]. At first I thought that perhaps it was just us engineers who get a lot of value out of these tools, but my wife uses them to design things to make on the Cricut, or to help with stuff to 3d-print on our Bambu, and both of us have used it to come up with modifications to recipes which have had surprisingly decent effect!

Dude, my life is like 10x better, maybe 100x better. Everything I dreamed of is no longer gated by my lack of specific skill. I am only gated out by my taste.

0: https://overmod.org/

1: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-17/Custom_GPTs

2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-12-01/Grounding_Yo...

3: https://x.com/arjie/status/1855328068883353665?s=20

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#74

Post by neilwilson »

I’m going to disagree with the premise. The value in AI won’t come from providing AI but from using it.

The “knowledge cut off date” is 12 to 18 months ago for models, which essentially means that copyright has, in some ways, shrunk to that period since designing around is now very easy.

Given most people live on what they produced recently and not 20 years ago there’s an argument this makes access to knowledge and techniques fairer. Constant new creation is required to obtain a markup and that drives forward productivity

In other words it’s the copyright/patent argument all over again. And it’s perhaps a debate we need to have again as a service society.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#75

Post by blargey »

sneak wrote: post #27
palmotea wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An idea that has been living rent free in my head is that "AI is ultimately nothing but a pure destruction of value". It's promise is unlimited value to everyone on demand; but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable. Value and scarcity go hand in hand. 1) I think it's the destruction of our value, as workers. Without an unthinkable change in society, we'll be discarded. 2) I thin…

There is a very strong argument that if your work output can be discarded effectively in favor of a firehose of mediocre slop, then it is a moral imperative that we stop employing human beings in those roles as it’s a terrible waste of a human life. The only people I see handwringing over AI slop replacing their jobs are people who produce things of quality on the level of AI slop. Nobody truly creative seems to feel…

Counting on:

- AI never advancing past a "firehose of mediocre slop"

- Consumers as an aggregate "choosing" quality over cost and availability

is a good way to never worry about AI, yes. But that's not the assumptions this article or thread is written on.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#76

Post by wildpeaks »

shrubby wrote: post #7
dyauspitr wrote: post #3

What philosophical foundations are left? Even at the very top the president is corrupt and morally depraved.

The moral comes from the grassroots as power corrupts. As long as we wait for a godlike leader for rescue the end result is same as with Stalin, Hitler, Trump, Thiel, Epstein, Musk, ... The godlikeness can come though in many forms, political (Trump), propaganda (Musk/Zuck7Thiel) or via extortion material and money like Epstein. A good litmus test for a decision maker is the universal ethical principle mentioned in t…

Power reveals rather than corrupt: it's easy to act moral when there are consequences (real or imagined) when you don't, but you see someone's true self when they know they could get away with it.

For example, this is why the way someone treats service workers is a good indicator of someone's character.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#77

Post by zwnow »

js8 wrote: post #72
zwnow wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but its quite the opposite. Its dystopia considering only the already rich really benefit from it.

Unironically, shouldn't the purpose of the human life be turning dystopias into utopias?

Yes. The exact opposite is happening though. We turned from capitalism into late stage capitalism. We feed into the AI hype that's built upon the thievery of creative work while promising corporate leaders to let go off their employees at some point. Not being able to purchase food for your kids is not utopia to me.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#78

Post by Aperocky »

If the moral foundation is that majority of people must perform economically valuable work in order to exchange for their survival, then perhaps it should be broken.

I'm cautiously optimistic because perhaps AGI will find a way to implement it - if it is sentient at that level, then it would be rather difficult to be owned by some person or corporation. Obviously LLMs are very far from there and remains just a tool for now.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#79

Post by conartist6 »

sneak wrote: post #27
palmotea wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An idea that has been living rent free in my head is that "AI is ultimately nothing but a pure destruction of value". It's promise is unlimited value to everyone on demand; but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable. Value and scarcity go hand in hand. 1) I think it's the destruction of our value, as workers. Without an unthinkable change in society, we'll be discarded. 2) I thin…

There is a very strong argument that if your work output can be discarded effectively in favor of a firehose of mediocre slop, then it is a moral imperative that we stop employing human beings in those roles as it’s a terrible waste of a human life. The only people I see handwringing over AI slop replacing their jobs are people who produce things of quality on the level of AI slop. Nobody truly creative seems to feel…

But this is just the full-on race to the bottom. Stated simply this philosophy would be "there is only power those to weak to be effective at wielding it".

I think exactly the opposite of you because to me consuming from a firehose of slop is the most terrible way you could waste a human life.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#80

Post by js8 »

Human-Cabbage wrote: post #30
RobinL wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price and scarcity go hand in hand, not value and scarcity. Diamonds are pretty worthless but expensive because they're scarce (putting aside industrial applications), water is extremely valuable but cheap. No doubt there are some goods where the value is related to price, but these are probably mostly status related goods. e.g. to many buyers, the whole point in a Rolex is that it's expensive.

This conflates use-value and exchange-value. Water to someone dying of thirst has extremely high use-value, while a diamond would in that same moment have nearly no use-value, except for the fact that, as a commodity, the diamond has an exchange-value, and so can be sold to help acquire a source of water.

In a sane world we would just give the poor guy some water and let him keep his precious diamond. And in the sane world, the guy would donate the precious diamond to a museum so that everyone could enjoy its beauty.

What are you describing happens if you follow the mathematical rules of your models too much and ignore the real world.

Post reply on HN