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Comment by reval | Hacker News Reader

The counter-counter-argument is that the messy part of human interaction is necessary for social cohesion. I’ve already witnessed this erosion prior to LLMs in the rise of SMS over phone calls (personal) and automated menu systems for customer service (institutional).

It is sad to me that the skill required to navigate everyday life are being delegated to technology. Pretty soon it won’t matter what you think or feel about your neighbors because you will only ever know their tech-mediated facade.

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> It is sad to me that the skill required to navigate everyday life are being delegated to technology.

Isn’t this basically what technology does? I suppose there is also technology to do things that weren’t possible at all before, but the application is often automation of something in someone’s everyday life that is considered burdensome.

That’s right- technology does replace pieces of our everyday life. I fear what happens when social ties are what are replaced. For example, technology allows us to travel long distances while keeping in touch with our loved ones. What happen when the keeping in touch part is what gets replaced?

I'm not sure I'd agree with characterizing heavily asymmetric social interactions, such as customer service folks assisting tens or hundreds of people on the same issues every week and similar, a "necessarily messy part of human interaction for social cohesion".

It is well noted that it is very hard to get in contact with a human at Google when you have a problem. And then we wonder why Google never seems to understand its user base.

I don't think these two are actually related, and the automated contact options Google and other megacorporations provide were significantly behind on these developments the last time I tried interacting with them. Namely, e.g. Meta has basically no support line. There was even a thread here a few days ago chronicling that.

Talking to a human doesn't imply that management necessarily cares about you or your usercase. Automated help used to be categorically bad due to lack of technology. Now it has the potential to be good. The ability of the tech and the alignment of the process are entirely orthogonal.

> the messy part of human interaction is necessary for social cohesion

Also, efficiency.

I think everyone in tech consulting can tell you that inserting another party (outsourcing) in a previously two-party transaction rarely produces better outcomes.

Human-agent-agent-human communication doesn't fill me with hope, beyond basic well-defined use cases.

It is, in fact, all insulation. The technology, that is. It cuts out face-to-face, vid-to-vid, voice-to-voice, and even direct text as in sms or email. To the point that agents will be advocating for users instead of people even typing back to one another. Until and unless it affects the reproduction cycle, and I think it already has, people will fail to socialize since there is also zero customary expectation to do so (that was the surprisingly good thing about old world customs), so only the overtly gregarious will end up doing it. Kind of a long tailed hyperbolic endgame but, well, there it is.

Edit: one point i forgot to make is that it has already become absurd how different someones online persona or confidence level is when they are AFK, its as if theyve been reduce to an infantile state.

> how different someones online persona or confidence level is when they are AFK

It's an interesting thing I've noticed as well. At least in some cases it's due to constraints. Written communication invariably affords the opportunity to step back and think before sending. Many social contexts do not, making them almost entirely different skillets.

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