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Comment by butwhywhyoh | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else find this mildly dystopian? I mean, it's a cool and really fun project, but it doesn't take much imagination to envision a service like this actually taking off.

"We monitor your mood 24/7 and automatically send you 'happy thoughts' on demand! Contemplating your feelings? Why bother! Here's a cute cat video! Never feel uncomfortable, pensive, or existential again!"

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This was a scene in the movie Don't Look Up. A cellphone company CEO (a Zukerburg type character) introduces the 9.5 update, which includes emotion sensors. When you are sad, it automatically shows you pictures of cats.

So yes, I do.

Edit: Here is the video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jTHBBkillM&t=96s

(My bad it was the 14.3 update and dogs riding chickens)

Another exploration of this theme was in an episode of Doctor Who (Smile) which features a colony with nanobots that are optimized for happiness, with disastrous results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile_(Doctor_Who) - "The Vardy were programmed to help construct and operate the colony and make the colonists happy, monitoring the emotional state of the colonists through the emotion badges and avatars. When one of the flight crew died of natural causes, it created grief among the crew, something the avatars were not programmed to register. The Vardy took this as a sign of disease and killed those who displayed unhappiness. This created a "grief tsunami" which rapidly wiped out the flight crew, and will likely wipe out the waking colonists when they discover what happened."

Huh, I was going to wonder if this inspired the AI safety concept about how you shouldn't program a superintelligent AI to optimize the number of things it can see that look like human smiles, since unfortunately there are many ways to maximize that other than making real people genuinely happy.

But it seems like the Doctor Who episode is from 2017 and so it could potentially have been inspired the other way around.

> Zukerburg type character

I was trying to put my finger on who he was emulating (besides the same actor’s character in Ready Player One), I was very pleased to hear Duncan Trussel’s take in his last podcast (493), he thinks the character is lifted from the head of the suicide cult “Heavens Gate”, note the pauses in speech and the ever-lifted eyebrows [0]. Basically framing the geo-engineering/tech-will-save-us crowd as a suicide cult.

[0] https://youtu.be/AqSZhwu1Rwo

Ohhhhh yeah! I couldn't quite put my finger on that but it's definitely there.

I agree that this could absolutely be an awful service. However, if someone is just now hacking this for fun, then odds are someone else is already hacking it for profit.

I'm always glad to see people experimenting with technology at a human level and writing about it. That feels like the best that we can do, as opposed to not writing about it or pretending that it doesn't exist.

An awful service, but an amazing concept for a novel.

Maybe a Black Mirror episode.

The dystopia is already upon us. Facial recognition was apparently deployed in a school in China to track students' emotions and actions. [0].

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-school-facial-recognit...

China has been dystopian for decades.

The real bummer is that even free countries are starting to embrace the same methodologies. When Australia, Canada and the US start heading toward the abyss of surveillance/lock-down states you know things are not looking good for the planet.

Settler-colonial states were never symbols of peace and egalitarianism.

Was done in (NZ) Auckland University too if I recall correctly.

I really want a machine that monitors me and tells me "yo dude, you're Hella depressed. Don't take any of your thoughts too seriously" or "you're super happy. Don't make any big choices without asking your Wife about them".

It's a fun story, but yeah continuing the thought it is a little dark.

But the truth is any dystopian future we create ... it's not Evil Google taking over, it's us accepting it happily in exchange for instant cat messaging and Marilyn Monroe bots.

I'd rather have it above-board and open than be part of some giant machine learning algorithm at Meta somewhere - "we want our customers to be a bit depressed but not too much or they stop spending ..."

I would gladly accept the insane intrusion and surveillance if the service sent actual cats, as the headline led me to believe for a moment.

In a year, on a Show HN thread there will be a comment referencing this news entry as another "Dropbox" moment.

Only half joking, wouldn't be surprised at all

Oh, just got why: in western cultures it's considered dystopian, but I can imagine Japanese market being open to that (just like with robot dogs that are getting their own cemetery spots)

I did. Not that hard to move from injecting cats to inject chemicals or newest novel research chemical to formulate happiness. Imagine if a business can jump on that as a subscription service.

"Sign up Today, never be sad again." Sort of a opposite to the dopamine feedback addiction loop that powers social media and cell phones.

Actually, wait, ycombinator is open for startups...

Can just replace a timed morphine drip with a non-scheduled analog, make it an inhalant that ties into the HVAC and measures ppm so it's non-invasive.

It does have potential.

My personal machine has a python script in the bacground and in addition to a host of other things (un-tarring downloaded files etc) it tries to take a photo of my face once an hour. I use some CV to detect the face & take 10 frames of video, throwing them out if there is noticeable jitter. The closest 6 face fragment frames then get merged together and saved with a timestamp, for my future use doing dumb projects (face authentication, I've created fun timelapses by sorting ~6 months of photos by similarity).

If I were doing this to someone else without their knowledge it would be dystopian, if I'm doing it to myself or with a group of friends also interested in it then it becomes no wierder than taking your temperature every hour for dumb project reasons (biological clock fourier nonsense? whee~!)

To me, it only sounds dystopian if a distant, all-powerful big brother is running it. Not everything has to be like that.

If it's under your control, like it is here, it doesn't sound dystopian at all.

This person has noticed something in their life that they don't like, they get too sucked in into work and need to snap out of it a bit.

In the future, they could notice themselves watching too many memes, and they could add a new feature that sends them a though-provoking quote when their face is very relaxed for a long time in front of the computer.

There is already a product for employers that automatically monitors if and how long employee smiles while talking with customers (although masks probably slowed it down). Don’t remember the name though.

People trying to make themselves happy isn't something new or dystopian. A better description if you don't mind being slightly rude is that it's a bit pathetic.

After the protests in Canada I started seeing a bunch of recommended videos on YT themed around random acts of kindness. I mainly watch technical videos, nothing else.

I am convinced that someone did something to pump those videos up and get eyeballs on them. If my hypothesis is correct I would find it to be creepy and insulting. I do not want to be manipulated.

Sometimes the truth is hard, and that's ok. Pain is healthy in the right doses.

Bash Liif: https://youtu.be/1jTHBBkillM?t=85

I don't know... on one hand... it will probably just be used to sell ads... but what if it actually worked? like, maybe some small dent in the rate of suicide?

Assuming that it works (and I don't think I'm emotive enough that it would) I don't think cat pictures (no mater how efficiently they're distributed) can put a meaningful dent in the kind of depression that would lead to an act of suicide or even genuine sadness.

You just described the dopamine microdosing that is social media and their algorithm backbones lol

Well thats the point of the tweet that is quoted right at the start of the article

yes lol, the title made me think "I'm bored, lets make my life more black-mirror-esque"

Why is cheering people up dystopian?

It can be. It isn't necessarily, but it can be.

Imagine a scenario in which you walk into an ER with a venomous demon chomping on your leg. The doctors give you pain killers and send you cat pics and a list of sitcoms to watch.

No one does anything to solve the real problem that has you in agony and is threatening to kill you. They just make sure you feel fine and that's it.

Now that you feel fine, the feedback loop is broken and you no longer realize you have a really dire problem that needs to be resolved or you will be maimed for life and/or soon dead. You feel fine! though the demon continues to gnaw on your leg.

It's the premise of Brave New World. It tells of a society subjugated through genetic-engineering and hedonistic entertainment. I think a quick dose of happiness is pretty akin to "soma", a drug the characters use to avoid bad feelings.

I actually tried launching that last year lol, I had a similar code to OP(except I was more thinking about sending jokes or meditation videos)

The conversion rate of the landing page were very low so I didn't go further

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