It appears as if Mr Boretti here hasn't realised that there is a life beyond computers.
>As a teenager I tried to install Linux, ran into all kinds of problems, and went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. Today, I would just ask Claude.
It could have been "repair my car" and "car forums" or "learn to knit" and "Reddit"
And further, he's saying that the dependence will diminish that life beyond computers:
>The people in the AI utopia will have no skills, no education, no accomplishments. We’ll be lucky if they are even literate. They will not be worth talking to, and you won’t want to hang out with them.
It says: work goes away (no colleagues), studying goes away (no classmates), showing off to potential mates by doing cool stuff goes away (because why bother, anything you make people can just say "it was AI/robots" and they can prompt it), asking knowledgeable friends how to do X goes away because you just ask LLMs. All things true regardless of whether you're online
And you just trigger on that IRC word like only neckbeards in server dungenons ever used it.
This is gonna be boring as hell, especially if you can download justdance.exe to your brain.
>get laid
It's not possible or desirable for many thanks to the current state of sexual involution. I suspect that the hyperintelligent sex robots might also may make this inviable as a source of human-human connection.
>Grow some vegetables, build a castle, anything
You need land ownership, which, as one of the few limited things in a post-scarcity society might just explode in value. But I admit it would be pretty cool if the post-scarcity world is basicially just like minecraft creative mode do whatever you want type of environment. Still, with some limitations still in place, I imagine it will look more like 2b2t.
A lot of Singularity fiction was babbling about life extension technologies and mind uploads long before LLMs existed. I've always been skeptical - maybe there's just fundamental biological (and in the case of stuff like cheap fusion or FTL travel - physical) constraints that will keep even a superintelligence from inventing magical Clarketech.
On the other hand, If BCI is possible and useful, life will be miserable and we will borg ourselves just to keep up with the cost of living. We will be brains in jars on server racks solving captchas or something. We'll be the solution to AI hardware prices- the paperclip machine will be capitalism and nature itself.
And back in real world, people socialize and talk with others for non-transactional reasons. Not just to get answers. Those non-lonely people and subgroups that is.
The other premise was UBI. It's the article. how much better discussions would be if people read it?
> non-transactional reasons. Not just to get answers
0) i don't know about you but I like asking people about things because I just like hanging out with people, up to a point. how long this will remain true for humanity as a whole is the question, we can't know
1) if you listen to evolutionary biologists then everything we do is transactional for reproductive purposes, it depends on how deep you dig;)
> 0) i don't know about you but I like asking people about things because I just like hanging out with people, up to a point. how long this will remain true for humanity as a whole is the question, we can't know
You can ask people if you like asking people even if AI exists. Chatbot does not make asking people impossible if connection is what you are after.
> 1) if you listen to evolutionary biologists then everything we do is transactional for reproductive purposes, it depends on how deep you dig;)
Anticonception. We do quite a lot to not have kids.
There is evolutionary science and there is ideology using evolution as excuse.
They will do the minimum necessary to keep people from revolting. The minimum will be less and less as time goes by and surveillance/elimination get better/cheaper.
The only way it would be funded is with ‘chains’/conditions.
they tout UBI because it's one more way to control.
It’s essentially nuclear weapons, except for social manipulation and propaganda production.
It’s too tempting/useful for any gov’t or large corporation to really allow to be banned. At least for them.
That guy?
Firstly, it made no mention of showing off to potential mates, to my reading. But have no fear, regardless of scarcity people will have ways to signal fitness to find mates and build hierarchies out of it, we're very good at that. It might come down to fashion choices, leisure activity choices, really anything.
Secondly, every example of how this person connects with others is to do with technology and career advancement. He wasn't asking knowledgable friends for advice, he was asking questions to strangers about linux on IRC. He doesn't talk about social groups or sports clubs, he was talking about communities of practice and his professional work. He values learning only for career advancement.
Those ways of building relationships might disappear, but old ladies will still get together to crochet and natter. Middle aged men will still make and drink beer together, or practice woodworking skills. Younger guys and gals will still form sports teams. And people will still learn for the love of learning.
You know, things which already happen away from the screen. Ordinary, everyday human stuff.
tl;dr - touch grass, the article says a lot more about the author's life than our future prospects as humans.
A stranger is a friend you haven't made yet. Asking strangers is one good way to make friends.
Really on top of the particularly narrow viewpoint the OP has on life and human relations, I find the core notion itself absurd - "In the future because of X, Y and Z, why will people bother to socialise?"
Because ... people like socialising.
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-death-of-the-american-ho...
All that and the author of this article still needs to get out and touch grass.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sees-loneliness-epidemic-among...
Telling people to touch grass doesn't magically invert trends.
Nor does it change the fact that the author, who clearly does want to socialise, would benefit from doing something outside of their tech bubble and widening their horizons beyond "things that could conceivably further my career".
I am not in SV and i don't have a single irl tech friend. OK, maybe just one.
Most of my friends would agree with me and with article author. One of them goes further and doesn't even have a smartphone.
IME techies very rarely have these concerns.
So I'm not sure who is in a tech bubble between me and all those people in this thread saying how the logic is illegitimate because the author doesn't go out (which I guess is a "fact" because they all know him personally lol)
Then you are not at all like the author, who is specifically decrying the loss of tech-related avenues to meet people, and calls them out as his only ways of meeting people.
You've done some sort of mental back-flip by this point in the thread, and are ignoring what the author wrote about themselves and how they meet people.
You can try to make friends outside of the internet, but all of those friends will use the internet, or their friends-of-friends will use the internet. Eventually you realize that the social group is centered on the internet, and by trying to avoid the internet you separate yourself from reality more than you connect with others IRL more by avoiding it.
Not to mention people have their social needs met by the internet that would otherwise force them to go out and form IRL friendships. So people who would otherwise be friends with you aren't available in the real world. So it's this social involution.
Before the internet was this sort of escape from reality for nerds, but now it IS reality. It is super-real. You are a dork if you don't use it.
who cares? As long as the number of dorks is larger than zero, and it is, you can build your own community. People used to settle towns in the dirt when they scarcely had anything to eat and what, we now can't open a community center, or a maker space?
The very place you're living in right now was created likely by some complete nutjob who thought reality was too boring. There's always a 'life outside' because that's quite literally the nature of life. There's no box tight enough life can't get out of.
Not cyberspace or VR as we know it, but maybe something more real than that. Something that is limited in the way reality is limited.
>People used to settle towns in the dirt when they scarcely had anything to eat and what, we now can't open a community center, or a maker space?
The problem, which i have been grappling with for the past decade, is precisely that there is too much opportunity. there are too many options. Things are too interconnected. Human connection is devalued. I don't think you can merely solve it with more interconnection (although I will try).
When the founders of this country got here, they similarly did it to embrace the problems of a dynamic, dangerous, unsolved world, and to leave the glacial solved world behind them. They went from an old occupied world into a new virgin world.
And I agree with you that we need to be like them, founders of a new world, but I disagree with you about what that new world entails because we don't know of virgin lands that would free us from the grip of the old world anymore.
It used to be that if you wanted to go to a virgin land you would sail out into a remote island or rainforest something. But now that remote island also has sattelite internet and we have airplanes and boats and we realize it's not really that remote. We could go to mars and the technological arm of the old world would reach us. Maybe the virgin, disconnected world I seek could be an underworld or something, so that there is justification for it to be close and meaningful and disconnected from the overworld. I don't know.
We need to discover an unsolved world. Up and out!
This is a bizarre thought for me to entertain. I understand the idea of "up and out" but I don't think the next rung to escape technology can be built with technology then. That would not be "out", it would be trapped more than ever before
I find this wider reactionary "touch grass" movement boring and interesting simultaneously. It is boring, because nobody interested in internet-as-community health asked for many of the abuses that have happened to it and obviously you'd want to flee those. It is interesting because... I never would have expected that 20 years ago.
I'm not entirely sure what this even means, but I belong to several communities that get together in person and talk about very non-online things. They use email to coordinate, that's about as online as they get. And it's not hard, or a big deal. They aren't neo-luddite revolutionaries or anything, the internet just doesn't come up.