Hacker News Reader

Comment by id34 | Hacker News Reader

I would recommend the work of Sherry Turkle, specifically her new book "Artifical Intimacy" - she is quite opinionated on this, in the sense that the role that AI play as a conversation partner is so frictionless, so controlled, that we get none of the rough edges of human interaction that form us into a functional social being. No real quick solution outside of deep, fearful caution when using these things - and we're not going to see that from John Q Public

View on HN

> the role that AI play as a conversation partner is so frictionless, so controlled, that we get none of the rough edges of human interaction that form us into a functional social being.

I wonder if there's a tangent with social media here, at least some of it, where in my experience "a perfect life lived by influencers" is portrayed to us.

IMO, I think that frictionless experience comes at us from a bunch of angles - finding yourself in an echo chamber (by choice or not) online means that you may find yourself less comfortable talking with people you don't agree with, things like that. I grew up in a small town pre-social media, and that meant I didn't have much of a choice about who I was surrounded by. If I was growing up today, what would stop me from retreating to a comfy social media-mediated environment without any challenge or friction? If I was growing up 5 years from now, what would stop me from retreating even further to the comfort of my LLM "friends" who can be shaped to me perfectly? That world sounds terrifying to me.

Hopefully your parents would have enough sense to recognize the negative effects and give you a healthy dose of playing outside in the woods and whatnot. My kids enjoy technology, but they were cognitively trained from a young age to get outside and enjoy themselves.

I think with Millennials in particular we were kind of the experimental generation with tech and social media, which has obviously had some negative effects. I like to think we have smartened up enough to recognize there is a healthy balance, but this might be wishful thinking. Anecdotally (and sadly) when going out in public, I see a lot of parents more into their phones than their children.

> finding yourself in an echo chamber (by choice or not) online means that you may find yourself less comfortable talking with people you don't agree with, things like that. I grew up in a small town pre-social media, and that meant I didn't have much of a choice about who I was surrounded by. If I was growing up today, what would stop me from retreating to a comfy social media-mediated environment without any challenge or friction? [...] That world sounds terrifying to me.

One advantage of the new situation is that you collect less hate for people whose opinion you disagree with because you can mostly ignore them instead of having to get along with them - and with each interaction collecting another dose of hate for them and their opinion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com