Comment by schleck8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schleck8 | Hacker News Reader

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I get that someone wanted to let steam off but this just sounds like they don't have any arguments so they went for the good old "in the future, you won't have free will and social media companies force you to be online" fable. An addicting algorithm isn't the same thing as fentanyl, you can uninstall the app in 5 seconds and getting it back with signing in takes atleast two minutes, enough to reconsider whether you actually want to spend time on it.

The toxicity of apps like Tiktok comes from muscle memory, not the quality of the content. Your thumb knows where the app icon is and opening the app happens quicker than you can think (literally). So offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively. The only thing that would still keep you on the platform is social connections. If somebody gets upset over you uninstalling Instagram or Snapchat, they aren't a good friend.

I don't think this goes far enough -- its a best case scenario.

There is no Utopia for mankind at the end of an AGI that is the labor force because people need a purpose; without that, degenerate behaviours and vice are easy to fall into and the spiral is not big. The state of the human race - particularly the internet-native generations - is a testament to that.

The only way the AGI Utopia works is with a massive reduction in the human population with a Spartan/Helot relationship between those remaining.

Let's face it, the people who want AGI so badly aren't the wam cuddly people who want to feed the poor, house the homeless, and cure the sick. Their motives here are not pure...

You don’t need pure motives to do good. In fact they often are detrimental to that (see e.g. Mother Teresa, Mao, Stalin, etc.)

> offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively

For you, maybe. You can't assume that applies to everyone.

N=2 but deleting my Facebook account (~4 years ago) has effectively stopped me from arguing online about things I don’t really care about with people who I don’t know.

I mean I still do it here to some extent but much less frequently

I think the post is full of pleasantly-detailed arguments, and was a joy to read. It’s grim, but necessary to have someone write this up without the LLM assistant du jour.

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