Comment by vintagedave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vintagedave | Hacker News Reader

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From the HN guidelines: "be kind." I do not think your comment fits that _at all_.

My converse opinion: Dr Stoll is an extraordinarily humble, kind, and enthusiastic person who I've only ever interacted with online, but found to be one of the best human beings on the planet.

There's extraordinary value in being smart, dedicated, and in the right place at the right time. He was all three. His book, I think, definitely recognises the role both luck and determination played.

As for the web being nirvana... ten years ago, I would have thought he was overly pessimistic. (And many luminaries have written things about the future that were not accurate: even Bill Gates wrote books that have IMO not aged well.) But now, in 2024? I feel he was not a "siren" but a "python": an oracle a quarter century ahead of his time. The web is not nirvana, and I don't think that Google or Facebook have made the world a better place. Wikipedia has. It's not all bad. But I'd side far more towards his article's view this decade than I would have last decade.

> What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. ... Computers and networks isolate us from one another.

Look at Instagram and its effects on teens. Look how smartphones have increased depression. Man oh man was he right.

Back in the 1980s you had plenty of human contact. You would hang out at the newsagent of your town and wait to find out who bought the other two copies of your favorite computing magazine. And teenagers would swap floppy disks and try them out on the display machines of department stores in bigger cities. There were also computer clubs, and people met up to play computer games.

What destroyed a lot of that is that you can play on the network without organizing a co-player to play with; everybody "meets" only online. The worst of this is teenagers call these remote acquaintances "friends".

This is literally one of the best upsides and not even on the list of bad things about computers and networks.

Id put trying to get likes from unknown people all day every day to the top.

Gonna be real with you: this has big “old man shakes fist at cloud” energy.

There is nothing inherently wrong or lesser about online interactions that makes them inferior to “irl” interactions.

Viewing it as black and white as 'inherently wrong' is missing that it's an area that can have both good and bad aspects. (In the context of Dr Stoll's prescient viewpoint, the negative ones are severe.)

I'm about 10,000 kilometers from most of my friends right now and have been for several months. I can stay in touch with them in a way that would never have been possible several decades ago. This is a wonderful thing.

Equally, the negative effect of social media on teens, its impact on depression and suicide rates, is a terrible thing. Let's look at [4] below:

> There have been increases in adolescent depression and suicidal behaviour over the last two decades that coincide with the advent of social media (SM) (platforms that allow communication via digital media), which is widely used among adolescents. This scoping review examined the bi-directional association between the use of SM, specifically social networking sites (SNS), and depression and suicidality among adolescents.

This isn't 'old man shaking fist at cloud'. It's real negative (life and death!) impact on the young, growing, and vulnerable.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245195882...

[2] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/feature-minimize-instagr... -- notes both good and bad effects

[3] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2022/02/right-now-social-med... -- adults, not just kids and teenagers!

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7392374/

Well irl I genuinely have an easier time determining real people from machines...

For now.

I've got no idea how far we are from useful bio-printing, as I've been seeing the same headlines for the last 30 years: here's some cartilage and by the way we're also working on internal organs.

The famous mouse — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacanti_mouse

History from a research lab — https://school.wakehealth.edu/research/institutes-and-center...

TED-Ed: Printing a human kidney - Anthony Atala — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3C201O4MA

The Thought Emporium: This Machine Grows Living Flesh — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_ZGq8Tah0k

Matt Gray is Trying: biomedical research — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DvJauB0KyU

Specifically, think about what The Thought Emporium is trying to do: make a living meat robot. Imagine they succeed. I have no idea how long this will take, so your imagination is all you have for now. Flesh on the outside, robot brain on the inside.

Done right, I doubt we could tell them apart from real humans.

Worse: I'm sure we'll falsely convince ourselves that there is a way distinguish nature from artifice, and many natural humans will be dehumanised and killed as a result. (And that's a separate question to "have we made a machine that has qualia?")

But for now, sure, it's easy to tell humans and robots apart when you get to meet them in person.

Of course, online interactions are inferior to irl interactions as a lot of sensory input just isn't been catered for and/or its use is suppressed. Might at some point change or humans will evolve to no-longer use them but until then there is huge difference.

Also, "kinetic options" generally are not on the table online, so the risk profile of an online interaction is different, too.

Online, humans interact with what are "reduced" versions of humans.

> There is nothing inherently wrong or lesser about online interactions that makes them inferior to “irl” interactions.

They are inherently lesser because they lack full spectrum of senses man has evolved to have. In person we don’t just see and hear our counterparties, but are able to exercise all our senses. We touch when we shake hands; we can smell someone else in the room with us; we can even taste should we kiss, whether as a greeting or romantically. We can sense the heat rising from others, and see all their body language in full resolution, not just the lower-resolution, in-camera subset. In person, your buddies can slap you on the back; you can interact physically; you can enjoy one another’s presence. In comparison, an online interaction is awfully weak sauce.

I suppose there are some things that an in-person meeting lacks than an online one does — a full database of all previous interactions sure would be helpful. And it’s convenient to be able to fully consider one’s response, rather than have to answer immediately (but does convenience equal goodness?).

Or you were somewhere rural and had nothing of that & were isolated. Now you can reach out a communicate with your community, even if niche & if you are somewhere remote or rural.

I grew up rural and luckily at the same time as the internet was sort of gaining pace.

People can shit on the internet and all it enables today all they want, because it’s very easy to do from a position of privilege of having had so many more options available to them. Options not available to all then or now.

Unless experienced, most people will simply never be able to comprehend what the internet brought to people like me, people who would have been effectively cut off from society and culture otherwise (as I was for many, many years during my formative youth.)

I always wondered whether smartphones were the cause or smartphones just exposed the true nature of life, hence bringing depression with that realization.

I doubt there is a true representation of life. Life is a product of the things.

People compare 80’s with now. They are not the same and humans alter around the stimulus.

The view of life through smartphone apps that have automatically adjusting skinner boxes purposely designed to get you addicted ("""engaged""" they call it) and have you churn through rage bait and """content""" is the least authentic depiction of reality that has ever existed, maybe only behind minstrel shows.

It's like when people call video slot machines "video games". No, not even close.

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