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Comment by littletimmy | Hacker News Reader

In theory, yeah it might be cool.

In practice, parents will push their kinds into learning while asleep. Millions of Chinese and Indian students will cram while sleeping. Sheryl Sandberg will write a book about how women need to sleep learn with more vigor. Corporations will require workers to do overnight sleep-learning in preparation for tomorrow's meetings. People who don't utilize their sleep time effectively will be outcompeted by those who want to succeed at all costs. Human "rest" will be relegated to the books of history.

Is that really the sort of world you want to live in?

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Some nice material for a sci-fi novel you've got there :)

To answer your question: I want to live in a world where humans continue to evolve, yes. I don't want to live in a world where armchair philosophers and do-gooders decide what's best and "proper" for everybody. Their predictions always fall flat in the face of reality's complexity.

Not that there's much risk of them succeeding... nature has built-in ways of bypassing (outcompeting) such regulatory efforts, sooner or later. Still, in my region (eastern Europe, communism) it took a few decades... and their aftermaths are still palpable.

But is this not the way things are almost now?

Kids of all stripes are forced to study once they get home until they go to bed. Go to bed, wake up and go to school (you better get straight A's) then go home and study. Adding in more time for studying? We'd have numerous studies on the pros and cons of this method.

I'm sure one could point to a time period in our past where people would think that the way we live now is 'dystopia'.

There could also be novel ways to use this time.

For instance, it would be kind of cool to study while sleeping, maybe some math or science or art or history. Then during the waking hours, instead of studying more, I'd love to do something with that knowledge, stuff that you can't do while you are asleep. Like experiments, make a software program that does something, draw some art that mimics a particular period. Utilize that knowledge and expand on it but in a more hands on fun way.

My $0.01.

People already take alertness-enhancing drugs to work longer, with more focus. That's fine if it's truly a choice. But if it isn't, that dystopian future is already here.

What we really need is to have control over our lives and environments. That means we need to tune the culture away from valuing success at all costs.

Why Chinese and Indians? Seriously, I'd like to know why your humor presupposes they'll be the ones to do it first.

Nice pitch for the setting of a distopian novel

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