Hacker News Reader

Comment by skapadia | Hacker News Reader

That's some Black Mirror level dystopia there, and totally within the realm of possibility, if it isn't already happening.

Sync that up with Apple Watch 8's ability to estimate ovulation, and poof, declining birth rate problem solved!

I'm scared.

View on HN

Don't worry, knowing google they would build this just so someone could get their cushy promotion, then the whole thing will be abandoned within 1 to 2 years max. Corporate dystopia falls apart when met with the apathy at google, no problem.

There's no promos in maintaining the dystopian nightmare program so it will be replaced by new dystopian nightmare programs that do the same thing but worse every 2-3 years. Eventually, enough dystopian nightmare programs will be running in parallel that they will actually create a utopia due to unexpected interactions between the dystopian nightmare programs.

Knowing google they'd have 6 competing dystopian nightmare programs running concurrently. All would have similar names.

Dystopio is signing off. Find your favorite features in the new Apocalypse Wow!

And only one of them would work in Singapore for some reason.

Unexpected interactions with the river otters

It gets worse; to keep people in the workforce they can do the opposite, steer compatible people away from each other during the optimal reproductive window.

It gets worse, it only steers over-performers and under-performers away from each other so that the majority middle-tier can be used for reproduction.

"And here is the weirdest part — I never see another employee the entire day. The way it makes me walk, I never run into anyone else. I can go for a full shift and never see another employee. Even our breaks are staggered. Everyone takes their breaks alone. We all arrive at staggered times. It’s like Manna is trying to totally eliminate human interaction on the job." – Marshall Brain, "Manna" (2007) <https://marshallbrain.com/manna1>

This is like maybe the least dystopic use of advertising data Google could go for! It just has the vibe of dystopia, but ultimately if you hit it off with someone Google didn't influence you, they just made a correct prediction. Compared to advertising to influence you to spend money it's nothing.

>declining birth rate problem solved

Or maybe it declines more rapidly? Women could just use the cycle prediction to avoid fun time on “risky” days.

Natural birth control methods, have been a thing, for a long time already.

But they were far more prone to mishaps before a biological monitoring device started to aid in the calculations

Not really, if "it" goes into a non-reproductive location. No fancy technology required. It's not like such things were unknown, even in ancient times.

Or conversely it increases unprotected fun on “non risky” days according to the apps.

It's not much scarier than encouraging fertility via the religious apparatus or just traditional social norms

Exactly. If your entire right hemisphere is permanently shut down from making computers the core of your identity, these are exactly the same thing.

I mean if you pay more attention to results than vibe, yeah they are. But you know, less coercive.

What do you mean by that sentence?

Right hemisphere refers to be brain. HTH to make sense of it now.

I am familiar with that part but the actual sentence is ambiguous to me. Oh well. You win some you lose some.

There was a case where someone was getting ads for pregnancy products before she herself even knew she was pregnant, iirc it was down to search queries but don't quote me on that (or that the story is actually true).

I remember this happening with Target in 2012

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

It was the woman knew she was pregnant, but her father did not, which sounds a lot more reasonable than the algorithm knowing she was pregnant when she did not know.

The author chose to use google tech and let it capture everything. She chose to. She let it happen. If you don't want that, you can choose not to like I do. But the great majority of you will choose (by omission) because it's easier, then complain about it. Every time you'll do what's easy, and encourage the surveillance society you pretend to despise.

> declining birth rate problem solved!

> I'm scared.

That is one dystopia I might be able to live with.

As long as the watches don't default to Harvey Fierstein.

> Sync that up with Apple Watch 8's ability to estimate ovulation, and poof, declining birth rate problem solved!

Will never happen. Children are expensive, and once you have them, you'll never ever again be able to afford most of the Apple products.

Obviously, the incentive for Apple (and Google) is that you don't have children, which can explain the low birth rates in developed (rich) markets.

> I'm scared.

Now I'm also scared.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com