Comment by pvnick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pvnick | Hacker News Reader

Wow! I've always had a thing for dystopian literature, and the world this article presents actually seems plausible. Two ideas I particularly found intriguing:

-The idea of using an avatar to mask your true physical appearance. This seems like an appealing idea since changing your avatar on a settings panel is easier than keeping well-groomed and presentable. Perhaps citizens of the Google Glass world no longer feel the need to stay healthy and attractive? Could this level the playing field and take sexual attractiveness out of the picture altogether? Never again would someone be "out of your league." Will all our loving relationships be calculated and planned based on some OkCupid-esque compatibility algorithm? Perhaps a side-effect of this is a higher rate of sustainable marriages and a decreased divorce rate. So not completely bad and creepy.

-The way the author claims "You know you have free will, but don’t feel like you need it." I've felt for a while that the more realistic dystopian future is closer to Brave New World than to 1984, in which people willingly give up their freedom rather than have it snatched away from them. Instead of saying "You know you have free will, but it doesn't really feel like it," Pananberg opts for the phrasing "don't feel like you need it." It seems to suggest that free will in a Google Glass world is a burden, and that giving up that freedom to a benevolent intelligence just feels easier.

Either way, when I finished the article I pressed the "like" button, sending the event to my Facebook Timeline so that all my friends can stay connected with the things I find interesting and so that Facebook's Hadoop clusters can factor it into their advertising algorithms, allowing the company to more intelligently display products I would be interested in buying. I'll tell you one thing, that no longer includes Google Glass.

A Brave New World does seem more modern than 1984 even though it was written nearly 20 years earlier. I suppose it's because international politics right now resemble the early 1932 mood more closely than the mood in 1949.

The audience A Brave New World was written for probably didn't think that their countries faced existential threats or that much could happen that would radically change the world order. Reading texts around the early responses to the Great Depression you get a sense of a great dissatisfaction with the status quo, and that advocates of both fascist and of communist policies thought their biggest threat was the obstinance of the status quo rather than revolutionary change in the "wrong" direction. The dystopia of A Brave New World seems to have come about by a gradual but unstoppable transformation.

The 1984 audience on the other hand would accept a larger domain of world-changing possibilities, but perhaps have been conditioned to war, and have acknowledged that habituation toward a perpetual state of war was a tool for autocratic government, just as much as a government unchallenged by external threats had freedom to become autocratic. Though the 1984 world has war depicted as distant and a routine part of life, it was a key part of the story, and difference between the two stories might be summed up as the difference between a peacetime dystopia and a wartime dystopia.

You can probably find both trends in our own time. The people who dream of "9/12" as a better world, see the spirit surrounding national trauma as amenable to getting their way. Then on the other end, when you hear congressmen discussing regulations on the internet, they get hysterical about the lack of deference people creating new stuff have. I suppose the congressional smugness around how everything would be okay if we didn't have disobedient progress is more an example of what radicals in the 1930s feared, but it does typify the challenges that peacetime societies face.

Anyway, that was a long way to get at the point that I agree with you that A Brave New World is a more plausible scenario than 1984 right now at least. However, what you described as appealing struck me as pretty specifically what made A Brave New World a dystopia.

Sexual attractiveness is a part of sexual attraction. Furthermore it is a source of pleasure and enjoyment for people, not just a way that they are excluded. In A Brave New World sexual relationships were very low effort—and I think that was the problem. Even if the algorithm were good enough not to just link you up with someone who is similar, but also found traits that are good complements, the unpredictable process of meeting someone who may not be perfect for you and the struggle and effort involved is pretty important.

Thank you for taking the time to read my comment and construct a well-thought-out reply.

>Sexual attractiveness is a part of sexual attraction. Furthermore it is a source of pleasure and enjoyment for people, not just a way that they are excluded. In A Brave New World sexual relationships were very low effort—and I think that was the problem. Even if the algorithm were good enough not to just link you up with someone who is similar, but also found traits that are good complements, the unpredictable process of meeting someone who may not be perfect for you and the struggle and effort involved is pretty important.

I completely agree and would prefer it to stay this way (although my dating skills could probably use some improvement). While writing my comment I was trying to avoid too many kneejerk value judgements and instead explore the possible outcomes of the described scenario. But yeah, like you said, all that uncomfortable stuff is really important, and sexual attractiveness is generally an indicator of good health and reproductive viability, so disregarding it would seem unwise.

The avatar idea has been a staple of sci-fi for a long time, at least since Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992). Personally I don't find it creepy at all. Ever used SecondLife?

Nothing about the scenario in the article actually suggests a loss of free will - if anything it suggests a gain of super-free will in which people are more able to have their desires fulfilled by accentuating and enhancing what the real world can offer.

>Nothing about the scenario in the article actually suggests a loss of free will - if anything it suggests a gain of super-free will in which people are more able to have their desires fulfilled by accentuating and enhancing what the real world can offer.

At the end of the article, it depicts the people taking off their Glass only to find the real world bland and uncomfortable, quickly returning to the relative comfort of the virtual reality they've grown dependent on. These people can no longer cope with life on life's terms. If that's not a loss of free will then I don't know what is.

> These people can no longer cope with life on life's terms. If that's not a loss of free will then I don't know what is.

That's probably what creeped me out about Wall-e's distopian future more than anything else. It's the embodiment of what was described in this article, without the happy ending...

"Life on life's terms" is not some divinely ordered happy state; it's just the way things happened to work out through chance and evolution. Why shouldn't we seek to improve the way we interact with each other and the world around us in any way we can? I do have misgivings about augmented reality powered by proprietary software and opaque services running somewhere far away, but I quite like the idea of augmented reality in general.

You evolved from species that lived well for millions of years without the use of sight. Shall we remove your eyes, so that you may experience freedom?

Yeah, and many people from modern society would struggle if plonked into the middle of the African savannah. People come to depend physically and mentally on the support structures of modern society, and that's OK. Life's terms change constantly, and are only meaningful in the contemporary context. In the story, augmented reality is life on life's terms.

How is the end of the article different from wearing makeup and nice clothes and trying to live in nice neighborhoods?

The avatar idea seems like the least likely thing in the article to me. Why would I opt in to allowing people to alter their appearance to me?

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