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Comment by FLT8 | Hacker News Reader

And a dystopian vision for the future that can make profitable use of the above ...

On the plus side, people make up the organization and when they eventually grow fed up with the dystopia, they leave with their acquired knowledge and make their own thing. So dystopias aren't stable in the long term.

The Ones Who Walk Away From O-Meta-s

A very apt reference to the story

The ones who walk away from Omelas

Dunno how pasting a link works but here it is:

https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

I feel vaguely annoyed, I think it's because it took a lot of time to read through that, and it amounts to "bad to put child in solitary confinement to keep whole society happy."

What does a simplistic moral set piece about the abhorrence of sacrificing the good of one for the good of many have to do with (check notes) Facebook? Even as vague hand-wavey criticism, wouldn't Facebook would be the inverse?

You have every right to take what you like from it, but I'd suggest that perhaps you're not seeing what others are if all you get is a morality play. As one example, maybe spend some time thinking about why you apparently missed that it's intentionally left ambiguous as to whether the child is even real in the story's world.

A condescending lecture starting with "you just don't get it" ending with "I read your mind and know you missed the 'but was it even real?'" part isnt imparting anything useful.

Re: "actually you should just ponder why you are a simpleton who doesn't get it, given other people derived value from how it relates to Facebook": There arent people here running around praising it. The comment 4 up was, and still is downvoted well below 0, there's barely anyone reading all the way down here. Only one other person even bothered replying.

I don't think me mentioning this is useful or fair, but I don't know how to drive home how little contribution there is from a condescending "think harder, didn't you notice the crowd loves it and understands how it's just like Facebook"

You misread my comment, I wasn't trying to be condescending; a primary theme of the story (in my and many others' readings) is the limits of our ability to imagine different, better worlds than the one we exist in. We struggle to read the story as purely utopian, even when we are explicitly told to do so. It has more impact when you find this on your own, and I was trying to avoid spoilers.

For some people this is a stable dystopia.

That seems to rely on the assumption that human input is required to keep the dystopia going. Maybe I watched too much sci-fi, but the more pessimistic view is that the AI dystopia will be self-sustaining and couldn't be overcome without the concerted use of force by humans. But we humans aren't that good in even agreeing on common goals, let alone exerting continuous effort to achieve them. And most likely, by the time we start to even think of organizing, the AI dystopia will be conducting effective psychological warfare (using social media bots etc.) to pit us against each other even more.

So the dystopia spreads out... Metastasis

> So dystopias aren't stable in the long term.

Unless they think to hire new people.

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