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Comment by brightstep | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else not want to cut themselves off from physical reality for hours at a time for productivity purposes? I like looking away from my screen and seeing my dog and cat on the couch. I like looking out my window. I like being distracted by a car driving by. This sounds awful.

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It doesn't just sounds "awful" to me...it sounds absolutely hellish. Reminds somewhat of being "jacked-in" to The Matrix and completely "blue pilled".

As time goes on and technology becomes sufficiently advanced, I can't help but feel all the dystopian nightmare sci-fi created as warnings are instead being used as instruction manuals by power hungry Silicon Valley execs.

Those novels are natural extrapolations, deductions given the way our economy and society are organized. They are warnings, but given the incentives of market capitalism, they are in many ways inevitable. Even if Facebook et al decided not to do such things on moral grounds, it wouldn't be long before someone else appeared to fill the void.

Very few things are "inevitable", and I don't think that the things you cite are an exception. Regulation exists for a reason, and we have many examples of going from worse conditions to better ones e.g. from the 12-hour workdays to 8-hour workdays and banning child labor. Don't give up - these are things that can be legislated around.

The Matrix, according to the lore, was created as the perfect world for humans to happily live in :)

Did you know that the first VR office was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire interns were lost.

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