Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Right. Also, literally every incremental progression in this arms race is good for maybe a few weeks or months for the people that bother engaging while the rest of us have to trudge through deepening layers of bullshit and counter-bullshit to use our basic services. It’s like the entire tech world knows we’re ruining everything the same way we ruined the job finding/hiring process but target fixation won’t let us correct our course to avoid certain misery. Progress!





Such an arms race probably won't end up anywhere good. Thus my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

LLMs are tools of abundance. Scammers (and apparently even anti-scammers as here) are using these tools from a perspective of scarcity. Rather than help build more wealth for everyone, they burn wealth through competition. Consider instead as just one alternative if, say, the anti-scammer LLM helped the scammer figure out how to get more meaningful work? Maybe that specific alternative won't be effective (dunno), but the alternative at least points in a healthier compassionate direction.

For more on this, see my essay from 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce... "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security [and economic] thinking. Those "security" [and "economic"] agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ... The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure [and economic] are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military [and economic] uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."


I'm not sure we as a collective have any autonomy. At the macro scale humans are very much shaped by environment + incentives. I suppose governance can help.

If you remove the factors of environment and incentives then no living thing does anything, ever. We have no less control of this than any other collective human endeavor, and even if individual responsibility alone can’t practically stop something bad from happening, individuals are still morally responsible for their own contribution. It’s very comforting to absolve yourself of responsibility for something bad because everybody else is doing the same thing. Philosophically, it doesn’t hold water. A looter is no less morally culpable for stealing because they had significant incentives to loot a store, everybody with them was also looting the store, and there’s no way their abstinence could have stopped the store from being looted

Fucking Moloch ruining everything again.



Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: