I used to think that the community of hackers would be immune to this. The rise of GPT, CoPilot, StableDiffusion, etc has proven me wrong. We're pretty much fucked.
Glad I'm not the only one who thinks these developments are utterly unnerving. So many cautionary tales throughout history about the pitfalls of excess and ceding your autonomy, and the "smartest minds" on the Internet are the first ones salivating for this future.
Whenever there's a tradeoff between wisdom and cleverness, the tech industry tends to favor the latter. And the industry moves at such a pace that people in it have gotten quite used to thinking that anything that happened in the past doesn't matter too much. These aren't exactly a recipe for building a durable civilization, despite many positives that do emerge from this engine of innovation.
Yea, I don't see how the value of human life doesn't keep going down at this point.
We ignore each other when we're face to face by using our phones. We don't value what other people write because it takes too much time and effort to read. Now we're generating content for each person's tastes. I could go on and on about this, but it's horrible how devalued being a person who wants to contribute to society has become.
If people are unable to discuss plot minutiae any more, that doesn't seem like a great loss. When stories don't have official versions, they're far more personal and communal (Where are folk stories today?)
We are just dealing with an individualist Tower of Babel accelerated by technology, consumerism and mass media. It's come to its inevitable conclusion.
"personal" and "communal" seem opposed. Especially since we're talking about entertainment Babel. Society functions better when "norms" are held across enough of the population, when there's shared experience. This just sounds like we're building ourselves Matrix pods and there isn't even a sentient AI at the helm to blame. How bleak.
Sure. They always will be to some extent. I need to think of a better word. A healthy society is made from people being personal, as in expressing themselves, even if it is somewhat awkward or unattractive at times, because it leads to curiosity and life. Now it's all too easy to be a passive consumer, which is not really personal at all.
> Society functions better when "norms" are held across enough of the population, when there's shared experience.
I think it's even stronger than that - how can you have a society without norms? The role of older people is to maintain them, but now everyone has surrogate parents and grandparents.
> I used to think that the community of hackers would be immune to this
I'm not really sure why you would think this. Hackers use tools to amplify their intent/will. Hackers are also human beings, who generally are interested in cutting the drudgery out of their lives. The fascination seems obvious.
> We're pretty much fucked
This opinion strikes me as the classic case of "I don't like how other people are (or are going to be) living their lives. How dare they!". If mostly everyone is comfortable, happy and (within reason) has access to all the things they want, why is this so offensive to you?
As we (hopefully) approach a post-scarcity, AI-supported society, I totally agree that the average level of insularity will increase dramatically. So many of our day-to-day interactions are solely due to us needing to (begrudgingly) cooperate to live our lives, and people will just opt-out of those interactions. But that frees up so much time to spend with the ones we actually want to socialize with.
In such a future, there's nothing stopping you from "maintaining your humanity" with other like-minded individuals. Inflicting hardship on others is not a requirement for that.
I mean arguably hackers are already affected by this. Look at how much less the average software engineer understands the hardware internals of the computers they work with these days, even on a basic level.
Was anyone blown away by any parts of this analysis? It kind of just seems like someone watched the movie and summarized the key messages, which I would hope any given 8 year old, who the movie is targeted to, would be able to do on their own.
I can appreciate that some people like to watch movies just for the flashy lights and silly voices, and might have missed the fact that the movie was trying to make some important points about consumerism. I guess I'm having a hard time understanding who this write-up is targeted to, and I feel like I'm missing some key piece of information that would make everything make sense.
Every YouTube channel has a highest comment where someone describes the obvious message in the video. And everyone piles in and agrees. Many memes have a banner that says: this is funny. We are living in an age where people need signposting of basic meaning.
People don't need the signposts. The signs get put up because we reward doing so. Us lemmings give these low effort comments upvotes and virtue points so the monkey brain of the sign-poster is incentivized to do it more. Even on HN is this behavior rampant.
It’s like that old saying: imagine someone at the 50th percentile of intelligence. Now realize half the people in the (US/other country/world) are less intelligent than they are.
I don’t know how to “imagine someone at the 50th percentile of intelligence”. Is this some second-order joke about how 90% of people consider themselves above average intelligence, including (most likely) the person who is asked to imagine? (This percentage is completely made up.)
I don't think this is a bad thing. Even an "obvious" message will have a large percent of viewers who don't get it. And that doesn't necessarily mean they're idiots, as other comments imply: they might be ESL speakers, not from the same culture as the message, children, distracted, neurodivergent, or just... didn't get it. A top explainer comment is also very helpful for people who don't want to commit to watching / reading yet.
I'm all about being elitist but shaming "signposting of basic meaning" doesn't make sense to me. Signposts are great.
To me the downfall of humanity is wall-e was just there to make the movie about robots. I don’t think it had any deeper meaning. I guess at the end they return to earth but only because it’s the logical end of the robot story.
You don't see the climate narrative? The consumerism narrative? It's a literal "off world colony" of degenerated human blobs all watched over by machines of loving grace, who've never seen a live plant let alone looked away from a screen before. It's the most obvious narrative ever. How did you miss it?
I don't think there is any irony in it. No matter what the underlying themes might have been, Disney nakedly used it to sell crap to people who didn't need it while making those people feel good that they too care about the environment.
Andor was pretty confusing in that way. Pretty on-the-nose anti-corporate messaging from Disney, of all organisations. If I had to nominate a current company to "be" Pre-Mor, it would probably be a toss-up between Amazon and Disney, but Disney has the edge for basically owning a Corporate Sector in Florida¹.
One wonders if, after all these decades of "fight the evil system" media where it's always the plucky brave underdog individualists against the oppressive corporate/technocrat elite, but often underwritten and funded by those exact types, that they're actually deliberately flaring off those public feelings.
¹: Actually there's probably a gruesome mining multinational that's more similar but they keep their names carefully out of the public consciousness.
"...that they're actually deliberately flaring off those public feelings."
It doesn't seem necessary. The USSR didn't flare off public sentiment -the CCP doesn't. In the USSR, the leadership saw that the system was a dead-end and took it upon itself to winddown/transform even before the people were ready. There were "subcultures" but they were no threat to the system.
seriously? you think Andrew Stanton sit for days writing a screenplay set with a background of consumerism and ecology with the intention of writing another version of romeo and juliette with two robots as protagonists ? generally when an author writes a simple love story, his purpose is to have a backbone for his own message he wants to convey with other contextual elements of the story
> In the DVD commentary, Stanton said that he has been asked if it was his intention to make a movie about consumerism. His answer was it was not; it was a way to answer the question of how would the Earth get to the state where one robot would be left to continue the cleanup by itself. Nevertheless, some critics have noted an incongruity between the perceived pro-environmental and anti-consumerist messaging of the film, and the environmental impacts in the production and merchandising of the film [1]
Felt like a high school book report. It's well written, but not really anything novel. I don't have context for where this was published though, maybe it's supposed to just be a brief summary of key themes.
One thing I couldn’t understand about the movie was that if humans were relegated to nothing more than bags of flesh to be serviced, why wouldn’t the AI just end the species altogether?
Maybe it’s not a question of sentience but pleasure.
Why do many smart humans use so much of their time devising ways to have more sex? Because fulfilling the instinctive urge is pleasurable on a different level than intellectual work. Maybe for the AI, pursuit of its core directive is similarly pleasurable in an axiomatic way.
Efficiency of what? The system exists solely to care for humans. A farm would have much lower expenses if you didn't grow anything and sold all the land, but then it wouldn't be a farm anymore.
If the AI is properly designed/constructed with the goal of servicing the flesh-bag population, that is what it would do. It's a fundamental error to assume that AIs will just be artificial human minds (with regular human goals, motivations and aversions).
"Properly designing" the AI is still an open problem however, which is known as the "alignment problem".
A slightly more nuanced take from Mark Fisher's brilliant Capitalist Realism:
> A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.
58 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadWe ignore each other when we're face to face by using our phones. We don't value what other people write because it takes too much time and effort to read. Now we're generating content for each person's tastes. I could go on and on about this, but it's horrible how devalued being a person who wants to contribute to society has become.
We are just dealing with an individualist Tower of Babel accelerated by technology, consumerism and mass media. It's come to its inevitable conclusion.
> "personal" and "communal" seem opposed.
Sure. They always will be to some extent. I need to think of a better word. A healthy society is made from people being personal, as in expressing themselves, even if it is somewhat awkward or unattractive at times, because it leads to curiosity and life. Now it's all too easy to be a passive consumer, which is not really personal at all.
> Society functions better when "norms" are held across enough of the population, when there's shared experience.
I think it's even stronger than that - how can you have a society without norms? The role of older people is to maintain them, but now everyone has surrogate parents and grandparents.
I'm not really sure why you would think this. Hackers use tools to amplify their intent/will. Hackers are also human beings, who generally are interested in cutting the drudgery out of their lives. The fascination seems obvious.
> We're pretty much fucked
This opinion strikes me as the classic case of "I don't like how other people are (or are going to be) living their lives. How dare they!". If mostly everyone is comfortable, happy and (within reason) has access to all the things they want, why is this so offensive to you?
As we (hopefully) approach a post-scarcity, AI-supported society, I totally agree that the average level of insularity will increase dramatically. So many of our day-to-day interactions are solely due to us needing to (begrudgingly) cooperate to live our lives, and people will just opt-out of those interactions. But that frees up so much time to spend with the ones we actually want to socialize with.
In such a future, there's nothing stopping you from "maintaining your humanity" with other like-minded individuals. Inflicting hardship on others is not a requirement for that.
I can appreciate that some people like to watch movies just for the flashy lights and silly voices, and might have missed the fact that the movie was trying to make some important points about consumerism. I guess I'm having a hard time understanding who this write-up is targeted to, and I feel like I'm missing some key piece of information that would make everything make sense.
I'm all about being elitist but shaming "signposting of basic meaning" doesn't make sense to me. Signposts are great.
Also, audiences are seemingly so emotionally crippled they can't feel emotion without being played music.
That kind of handholding has been around for a long time.
You don't see the climate narrative? The consumerism narrative? It's a literal "off world colony" of degenerated human blobs all watched over by machines of loving grace, who've never seen a live plant let alone looked away from a screen before. It's the most obvious narrative ever. How did you miss it?
It's just straight up hypocrisy.
One wonders if, after all these decades of "fight the evil system" media where it's always the plucky brave underdog individualists against the oppressive corporate/technocrat elite, but often underwritten and funded by those exact types, that they're actually deliberately flaring off those public feelings.
¹: Actually there's probably a gruesome mining multinational that's more similar but they keep their names carefully out of the public consciousness.
It doesn't seem necessary. The USSR didn't flare off public sentiment -the CCP doesn't. In the USSR, the leadership saw that the system was a dead-end and took it upon itself to winddown/transform even before the people were ready. There were "subcultures" but they were no threat to the system.
Now with a 3 billion dollar hole to make up they may or may not continue that magnanimity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34765426
[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E#Themes)
Why do many smart humans use so much of their time devising ways to have more sex? Because fulfilling the instinctive urge is pleasurable on a different level than intellectual work. Maybe for the AI, pursuit of its core directive is similarly pleasurable in an axiomatic way.
I see what you did there
https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/Axiom
"Properly designing" the AI is still an open problem however, which is known as the "alignment problem".
> A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.
honestly i'll be happy when we collectively get over this lame hype