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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

We keep trying to use tech to fix people and community problems, instead of giving people what they need: time and opportunity to connect with other people to build community.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/07/health/surgeon-general-partin...

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Problem here is that loneliness and breakdown of social connection impacts people with plenty of time and money in the heaviest ways. Poor people at least go to work (because their work is not a bullshit work - they actually do shit there - it is not remote). At work, they socialise. Cash or free time probably worsens the problem rather than solves it.

When do you think about it, do you actually like your community?

For me, I increasingly think that I found community tolerable, but only for lack of a better option. In a world of LLMs, I’m gonna have a much more interesting conversation with ChatGPT then I will at dinner with strangers.

Yes, I love the people I have chosen to associate with and build community with. I consciously choose to be where they are, and to share my time with them, because they are good people and I have chosen them. An LLM ain't gonna love you back. They're just fancy ouija boards, tools that will never replace a human connection (although I assume interacting with them can still produce dopamine under certain circumstances).

It's work, it's time, but community is a function of effort and intentionality. If I want interesting conversation, I come here, because mods keep the bots out.

Not really the point. I can read a good book and get more "interesting" information content than I might get out of talking to an average person. But talking to people builds social bonds and is what creates communities in the first place. They serve different purposes. Talking to a chatbot does neither. It might give you reasonably entertaining or even informative text, but of generally lower quality and less factual reliability than real books, and it won't build social bonds or communities because you're not actually talking to any kind of entity with a continuing existence, just an ephemeral process on a server somewhere that will get turned off as soon as your session ends.

Sounds like what an LLM would say. Is this satire?

I haven't read the article (and would prefer not to experience both the site and the writing) but I would guess what the author means is that getting rid of loneliness will remove people's drive to avoid being alone.

Frankly I think it's fine. PR and marketing people have put a lot of effort into making people anxious about this when the reality is that socializing in a late stage imperial society tends to be a net loss for most people and they are actually better off alone.

The reality is that the technology is incidental. People are grabbing whatever they can to solve their problems and the technology just happens to be there. It's certainly better than the last solution (Instagram and friends.)

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