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Comment by MonkeyMalarky | Hacker News Reader

And phone calls.. not in my contacts? To voicemail with you!

Anyways, thinking more about the topic at hand, things like ChatGPT are just pushing us further towards a world of nepotism and social back-channel connections. Like in the modern art world where it isn't about talent, it's about who you are and who you know. AI means it's not about what you can write or create, it will be about your personal connections. IMO this is a bad thing for society as it leads to entrenched stratification and eventual ossification.

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It's always been like this. For a brief period over the last century, we had the illusion of social mobility, that we were headed towards a more meritocratic society. But it was always that: an illusion. AI is not even a reversion to the mean, just a disillusionment.

>I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Addendum: Drowned out amongst millions of AI augmented voices.

Yes, the industrial revolution made labor competitive enough to bargain. The computer, internet and now AI revolutions have chipped away at this since the 70s. Power and wealth accumulation has never been higher.

See e.g. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

> But it was always that: an illusion.

Only if you view in black/white absolutist terms where if every single person isn't on 100% merit then it doesn't count at all.

But the only thing this argument achieves is making the people actively causing or cheerleading the damage feel better about what they are doing. For everyone else, it's a massive regression.

This right here has probably been the best defense and explanation of nepotism I’ve ever read. And it’s kinda scary.

It's a solid argument, since there's no theoretical upper limit in sophistication for such algorithms.

"Nepotism" also partially exists to keep "the rabble" out of whatever it is someone finds important, out of some misguided belief they are (and always will be) inferior. The last bit is important: AI assisted content generation may be bad now, but what about 5 years from now? 10? Will it then still be bad people generate stuff automatically?

Nepotism doesn't have a defense, because it's defense is essentially "tradition". I've genuinely not heard a compelling argument for that either - it always boils down to something anachronistic (i.e. racism, classism, etc).

We have two different meanings for "nepotism" here. His is "hiring within the family because I know their qualifications better." Yours is "hiring within the family even though someone outside has better qualifications."

Those are close to the same thing, though. _Obviously_ there exist people outside a family who are more qualified for any given thing than any of the people in the family.

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