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Comment by not_a_moth | Hacker News Reader

Being watched and served recommendations is not the revolutionary paradigm for computers imo.

It would be revolutionary if "recommendations" wasn't a modern synonym for "advertisements"

This exactly. The recommendations are, at best, a win win for you and some 3rd party that paid to be part of the win (but sometimes tries very hard to not make it seem so). It can be different, but only for the tech-savy (open source) and rich people (pay the tech-savy).

I care to disagree, millions of people working from home and huge digital economy is there.

There is already a lot of real value in ubiquitous computing, automated warehouses, supply chain optimizations, digital entertainment, digital government services in many countries, I could go on for couple of pages now.

Recommendations and tracking are just a side effect. FB and Google ads are not whole "digital economy" on their own.

> There is already a lot of real value in ubiquitous computing, automated warehouses, supply chain optimizations, digital entertainment, digital government services in many countries, I could go on for couple of pages now.

Is technology about, or only about optimizing value in supply chains?

I don't understand the question since I pointed out other areas as well like digital entertainment which has nothing to do with optimizing value in supply chains.

Maybe you thought about optimizing content delivery, but I was thinking about computer games, VR, music production, which are digital entertainment and have nothing to do with supply chain optimizations.

It's more like a Gattaca-like dystopia.

Why not?

What is the purpose of a human life? If my phone is recommending a course of action that is “best practice” for my life, surely the answer to this philosophical and political question has been answered rather than just assumed by engineers based on the perception of current societal norms of a subset of the global population.

Imagine the power you’d have if you had people literally following orders based on a system of life that you’ve designed. And follow it they might if the perception of outcomes is positive.

You just described China with it's Social Credit System, pervasive internet monitoring and central control of public discourse.

Social credit is different. Social credit imposes penalties for deviating from the norm or even associating with those who do. This is more like feeding apple health and google for data into IBM watson and getting personalized recommendations out.

For the most part, china’s Social Credit System is the same as the credit scores in U.S.

That's how it started, but nowadays Credit Score type data is a tiny fraction of what goes into SCS. The SCS is affected by things like playing loud music, eating on public transport, traffic violations, not showing up to restaurant or hotel bookings, not sorting your domestic waste, and loads more. You can gain SCS by donating blood, volunteering, etc. It is widely believed social media posting heavily affects SCS, and there are many example of people's scores diving after they had posts blocked, but the authorities won't come clean about it.

As of mid 2019 26 million air tickets and over 4 million high speed rail tickets were refused based on SCS. Also some personal information is openly published about people with low SCS.

The computer revolution is more subtle than that. Just look at chess history and play. the chess abilities of humans has vastly increased and you can thank computers for 95% of that. ELO rankings is a modern invention to play highly competitive games from literally any place in the world. Chess opening theory is no longer a human endeavour, want the best practice in the opening? Ask the computer. Puzzles are being auto-generated and ranked to improve your recognition at record pace. The internet and the computers that run this world have sped up almost every conceivable industry. Computers have led to the creation of new concepts entirely. If you want best practices for your life, google it. ( no, really) Asking a search engine to point you to the person to solve your problem is the feature creep this article is about.

> Just look at chess history and play. the chess abilities of humans has vastly increased and you can thank computers for 95% of that. ELO rankings is a modern invention to play highly competitive games from literally any place in the world.

Elo rankings (not ELO) was first adopted in 1960, which while technically overlapping with computing's timeframe, the two are unrelated. Certainly Elo was not invented to play online chess or for the sake of computer-aided chess by any stretch.

Yeah bit of misphrasing. Point being is that fair rating systems and our computer's ability to keep track of everything has given rise to highly competitive games and very efficient progression.

> What is the purpose of a human life?

There isn't one. We're simply the result of a bunch of lucky events and evolutionary forces.

We can create our own goal though. For instance maybe we want to maximize happiness. So this means we should attack the core root of the problem. Our chemicals. We either need to find a drug like heroin that does not have tolerance and withdrawal or find a way to reset chemicals after drugging yourself or thirdly we just must find a way to be able to easily alter this chemical state. Then we will have solved all suffering issues. Right now we are just trying to treat symptoms.

What if brains aren't wired like that, and you become numb? That sounds like an aweful goal to have. Maybe a better one is to minimize misery & unhappiness (ideally, global minimization, not local)

Yeah I think what I proposed is an example of what an AI could come up with if it's given a goal of maximising human happiness and reducing misery.

This reeks of scientific hubris, to speak as if we know this to be fact.

I think the point is that a greater amount of more-granular and empirical data could provide the basis for learning more about "the human condition".

Ah, an experiment in the eugenics of human behaviour. One must be careful where one treads.

One of my purposes is to keep living. To that end I exercise, get my heart rate elevated, try to eat better and brush my teeth. I also try (though less successfully and without much attempt) to limit my time watching TV.

I know some of my habits are awful (brushing teeth, exercise as of late, going on any walk outside) so I setup my phone to remind me every date at a specific time.

Can some of these be predetermined by an engineer? Yes! Can all of them? No.

Are not notifications intended by engineers to dictate a behavior? "To use my product" to what end various products are a means (Facebook, reddit, HN etc). I'd argue any product/system to which we join encourages us to follow it if we find it rewarding, regardless of positive outcomes (though surely the short term just look positive else what incentive exists to start?)

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