from Hacker News

Dude, you broke the future (transcript)

by nod on 1/2/18, 9:51 PM with 14 comments

• by nod on 1/2/18, 9:56 PM

  Corporations are optimization processes. Advertising is an optimization process. Social networks are. Smartphone addiction. Political polarization. Television, mobile games, and most forms of entertainment.

  This prevalence, and the fact that it's not EVIL doing it but just amoral goal-directed processes, seems to me to be the key to recognizing, fighting back, and fixing society.

  We have to figure out some way to fight for our human values, against these optimization processes. I don't think Stross has (or claims to have) a strong answer there... any ideas?

• by nod on 1/2/18, 9:53 PM

  Meta note: I'm submitting this again, and don't think of this as a dupe, because I think the transcript/blog form is much more engaging than a video (and by accounts on the video thread, the transcript may be the better form here even if one likes videos).

  Previous discussion on video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16032643

• by Rhapso on 1/2/18, 10:54 PM

  I think a way to look at it is this: The singularity happened, likely sometime in the 90s. It was, what any singularity is, the point where what came before it is not useful to predict what came after.

  It is no surprise that the event defined by our inability to predict past it did not work out in the way we imagined.