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Comment by supportengineer | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if we used all of our resources for humanitarian purposes

Including providing free social networking for everyone on the whole planet?

(Not that I'm a fan of Facebook, and many of their practices are questionable. But if we want to think in a less biased way, it's not correct to leave out the part of the equation where they also do good. We may find that it's nowhere near the bottom of the humanitarian scale.)

on facebook you are the product, though. If facebook were mastodon, and also didn't have ads, maybe.

If anything, this planet would be a better place if we could get rid of Facebook.

Wouldn't the bulk of the activity just find somewhere else to do mostly the same stuff they were doing on Facebook?

Ah yes, the famous "everything new is progress and progress is good". I wish I had such simple views on the world

The polarization of society may show that social media are net negative.

I think that the vast majority of the power usage is actually spent on crunching the data for advertisers so a social network with no need for monetization could be a lot more energy efficient

The better part of Facebook's network traffic is there to serve ads. A utilitarian social network (similar to this site) would probably only use a fraction of the resources.

Given that most of their AI hardware was bought for better feed ranking, probably not unless you reduce the entire company to nothing but "serving ads".

In that case We don't have enough work to do. Automating agriculture and distributing produce for free ( or at low margin ) is the last nail in to the coffin. This all is just dopamine, real work needs bombastic goals.

So turn off the lights and give the planet a respite.

Automating agriculture is a current trend, but there's so many components that it's hard to say when such a project would be considered "completed".

Hunger is a political problem at this point.

We destroy more than enough food to end world hunger, but actually distributing that food to the people that need it would undermine the authority of lots of well-armed organizations.

De-weaponizing food distribution would do a heck of a lot more than further reducing the percentage of the population that works in agriculture.

Put another way, 10% of the US works in agriculture-related fields (including restaurants, food processing and textile manufacturing), but only 1.2% works on farms:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...

Driving farm jobs from 1.2% to 0% isn’t going to move food costs or availability very much, and it’d barely be perceptible to the economy at large.

It's not a political problem if somebody actually has to do the physical work of growing the crops and harvesting them. Somebody has to do them and that somebody wants to get paid for it.

If you could remove the somebody from the chain then the entire cost to produce food at that point would be "fiction", ie it would be possible to make it free. But as long as human labor is involved in the production it cannot be free.

Currently, the labor is so cheap (per pound of food) that we pay one group to produce it, and then pay another group to transport and dispose of it.

I’d argue that production labor is close enough to free for all practical purposes.

Focusing on distribution or environmental impact would have significantly more practical impact.

You mean "artifiacly preserve life on places that would naturally vanish beacuse of unhabitable conditions for it"?

Imagine if we used all of our resources to develop artificial general intelligence which could multiply our prosperity and solve problems across many domains…

…or we could allocate it against economic gradients, to things which don’t actually maximize net impact but instead allow us to feel good

Better yet, we could develop an artificial general intelligence that achieves consciousness, and decides we're a toxic infestation of the planet, and works to wipe us out. The AI wouldn't even be wrong in its assessment of us.

Right now those who have power to develop AI aren't in a hurry to do good for the humanity. They'd rather destroy it if it makes their profits grow. So a more likely future is a corporation like Meta Facebook creates a real AI, asks it how to increase profits and the AI finds a way: a horrible, disgusting way, but a way that works. Other corporations follow and we enter the era of AI dystopia.

The second most likely future is humanity creates a commonwealth AI, under the rule of United Nations or similar organisation, and immediately asks the AI: how can we make humanity better? And AI finds a solution based on a crooked understanding of what we need. So it creates a dead-end utopia where humanity slowly degrades in total comfort.

People use facebook of their own free will.

Assuming they're at least a good a judge of what makes them happy as you are, how is this resource not being used for whatever "humanitarian" purposes are? Or are we only allowed resources as far as FEMA tents?

Sure, maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy, but I put it to you the burden of proof for that's on you.

I'd further put it that the resources used for these data centers, like Meta engineers, would in fact be pretty bloody useless at solving Sudanese famine, even if by some miracle they're actually good at the farming part, so can we please drop this weird argument that the cost of these things is automatically an opportunity cost in humanitarian purposes? Because it isn't.

> People use facebook of their own free will.

75% of the west is obese/overweight thanks to their own free will too. Because A: free will doesn't exist and B: the top mind of the world are all paid $$$ by companies to make sure you consume their shit no matter the social/health cost

> maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy

Is that all there is to life ? Then high fructose corn syrup must be paradise

Facebook has literal psychology experts on staff to make the platform as addictive as possible. Treating it as matter of willpower is uneducated and naive.

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