Comment by namaria | Hacker News Reader

Comment by namaria | Hacker News Reader

We have had large scale, opaque information systems processing data and making decisions that can't be reduced to any one person's consciousness for centuries. They have recently been made denser and faster and more powerful by the advent of digital computers and networks.

I'm not worried about chatbots. I think larger trends that have been de-humanizing us, alienating us from the fruits of our labor and harshly creating hellish conditions for people who made nothing to deserve them, without any one person making such designs. The fact that some people chose to make it worse has limited impact compared to the large scale patterns.

AI, as in forms of intelligence produced by human effort, is definitely taking over since societies got too complex to be effectively governed by monarchs about 300 years ago. Our future is not one of individual emancipation. We are and will be playthings of forces we don't comprehend, unless we can go back to living in small scale communities able to survive off the land.

I don't prefer one state over the other. Both are transitory.

go back to living in small scale communities able to survive off the land

This basically amounts to a political unit unilaterally disarming itself -- purposefully making itself weaker than the next political unit willing to be larger and use more resources. History is rife with examples of what happens after that.

This isn't the first iteration of civilization and it won't last forever. We will cycle through other states again. And again.

If you do a quick survey of all of those iterations, going back thousands of years, you'll find that communal forms of living either: 1) Are small, stay small, and continue to exist because they are isolated for a time. 2) Are actually under-girded by a hierarchical authoritarian structure.

Considering the astonishing diversity anthropology found in a century I'd say you're underestimating how much might have happened in 30 millennia since the last glacial maximum and now. We literally just found Gobleki Tepe and dozens of similar sites around it, it's almost 6 thousand years too early in terms of complexity. And modern humans have been around for a hundred times as long.

So the best you can do, is point to hazy things we don't have the full information for. What does the historical record, for which we have more information say?

>If you do a quick survey of all of those iterations, going back thousands of years, you'll find that

Burden is on you to provide evidence for your claims.

I'm merely stating that things in anthropology and archeology are way more nuanced then you'd think from the outside.

Burden is on you to provide evidence for your claims.

The weight of evidence is against you. Burden is on you.

> I don't prefer one state over the other. Both are transitory.

"I don't prefer burning or not burning my hand. Both are transitory."

That is an absurd comparison

...what? That makes no sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com