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Comment by camillomiller | Hacker News Reader

For one, I wish some of that caution could have been there when Facebook was in its OpenAI stage 15 years ago. A lot of people don't seem to realize that this mess is exactly what it looks like to slow down something now that could become something else we will all regret in 10 years.

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> I wish some of that caution could have been there when Facebook was in its OpenAI stage 15 years ago.

I think I'm missing a slice of history here, what did Facebook do that could have been slowed down and it's a disaster now?

I guess camillomiller is referring to how Facebook & Instagram played a big part in getting people addicted to shallow dopamine hits that consume their time at the cost of less time spent with friends and family face-to-face. Basically, hurting people's social lives in order to make money from ads. Kind of like "digital cigarettes" I suppose.

That, and all that can be traced back to Facebook, Instagram and social media’s impact on society. Not just the shallow dopamine issue, but also bigger problems such as facilitating genocide. I was a skeptic for a long time, but the more we see what Meta stands for, the more I believe Mark Zuckerberg’s companies have had anything but a massively negative impact on the world.

Facilitating genocide in Myanmar, for one. Poisoning the wells of the Web with the worst kind of profiled advertisement the world has ever seen. Perfecting and optimizing the addiction mechanism of smartphones. Creating a mental health epidemic in younger women. I mean, the body of studies and malfeasances is out there, we just keep ignoring it.

I certainly hope you're right, but as I suspect I have less knowledge of corporate governance and politics than gpt-3.5, I can only hope.

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