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Comment by zeruch | Hacker News Reader

I think you are generally correct in where things will likely go (sometimes correct goop) but the problem I think will be far more existential; when people start to feel like they are in a perpetual uncanny valley of noise, what DO they actually do next? I don't think we have even the remotest grasp of what that might look like and how it will impact us.

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That is an interesting thought. Maybe the problem is not the ai generated useless noise, but that it is so easy and cheap to publish it.

One possible future is going back to a medium with higher cost of publication. Books. Handchiseled stone tablets. Offering information costs something.

This was the original use case of bitcoin's Proof of Work system. Initally it was to impose a (nominal) fee on senders of email by mail clients.

If you didn't submit a proof of work of N or greater difficulty the email would be thrown out.

> One possible future is going back to a medium with higher cost of publication. Books.

The grifters are all over that already. No AI necessary to generate and publish drivel.

See “Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins”¹ by Dan Olson² for an informative and entertaining documentary on the matter.

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw

² A.k.a Folding Ideas. A.k.a. the creator of “Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs”.

> One possible future is going back to a medium with higher cost of publication. Books

Honestly I’ve switched to books and papers a few years ago and it has been fantastic. 2 hours of reading a half decent book or paper outweighs a week of reading the best blogposts, twitter threads, or YouTube videos.

Do you have a favorite source for papers?

HN surfaces a lot of good ones. Sometimes friends recommend stuff. Or I search for things I'm interested in.

Then once you have a hook into your topic, it usually cites 30+ other papers that may be worth reading. You will never run out.

I generally go to cited papers in Wikipedia articles

fun thought: its more reliable to store information on stone tablets over very long time periods of time then it is harddrives or other modern data storage devices

I think we have plenty of examples of published “noise”, probably just not on the same scale. (“Noise” is subjective of course: I don’t watch reality television but others do, for example.) For the most part, I just ignore “noise”, so I suspect that the entire World Wide Web will eventually be considered “noise” by many. Instead it seems like it will be necessary to deploy AI to retrieve information as it will be necessary to programmatically evaluate the received content to filter out anything that you’ve trained it to consider “noise”.

"(“Noise” is subjective of course: I don’t watch reality television but others do, for example.)"

This brings up a good sub-topic. "Noise" as I mean it is where it's something you cannot definitely validate the veracity of in short order, or you do and it's useless.

The trash TV thing is a great example: if you are watching Beavis & Butthead because you know its trash and you need to zone out, that's a conscious, active decision, and you are in effect, 'in on the joke'...if you can't discern that it's satire and find yourself relating to the characters, you might be part of the problem :)

Spending less time on the internet in general or perhaps hyper strict closed off walled garden social networks for humans only.

...Leading to the interesting thought-experiment/SF-story-concept of, "how do you prove you're human to a computer?"

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