We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

My kinese television-set says: "People are digitally often misled by disinformation."

Have you ever "searchengined" a look for a "lesbian sunset"? The search-engine i used had more than 29,000 search-hits for "lesbian sunset", and i clicked on nearly all of them...but there was none "lesbian sunset" no one, no a single one, none. It showed (for example)...

lesbian sunset

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A different scene...

I mean, that's a myth.

There is no lesbian sunset for me!

But typed in a search line... over 29,000 hits for "lesbian sunset" (counts)

They don't exist!

You don't even remotely know, even one

not even a single lesbian sunset...

At this point you may ask: "What he/she/it/div was thinking about?" (using an 'AI' to translate and for some 'chars' i forgot the asci-code for - too often...)

A battle-painting is probably the most accurate, i was thinking about 12 x 4 meters, where you've been able to zoom in, if you are at a computerscreen...

I even looked for fresco painters, nothing...!

Not a single lesbian sunset... not one...

(feeling rude about...)

That is what i call a Myth...

...talked too dumb, free! (explanation: How to set a one topic record for been too relevant OT but still related hahaha?)^^

If you see yourself improving the lives of people around you later in life, which is commendable and the right thing to do, you have to start now, while you are still in your prime years. If you leave it when you are older chances are you'll be just another John waiting in line for the next Black Friday.

I have, from drawing to music, from writing novels to doing programming projects on my free time.

It's not very fun, you aren't good at most of it and it's very frustrating. It's also very rewarding being able to overcome limitations and building up skills. But it's first and foremost very demanding. You can't expect someone that just got retired to suddenly spark in creative energy, even if they intimately wanted to do everything.

I’ve gone through extended periods of unemployment (by choice, not in a stressful way) before, and it’s wonderful but by month 3 I’m always kinda over it.

Retirement for me will probably look pretty much the same as working except I won’t necessarily pick a job that pays well.

I see now. But I still think it's a side effect of what society currently celebrates which is consumerism.

> but that culture is not violently enforced top-down by a handful of people twirling mustaches

That's assuming it's the only way to force a population into a specific behaviour, by force. It's actually the least effective method in my opinion. There is also the digital panopticon.

Blame and victim is just a way to give structure to the world. It's not essential. Not even in violence, in the Roman republic it was very well accepted to put women and children to the sword when pillaging a city.

And sure, all changes start in the private sphere, even if it's a more general movement in society. If people stop buying stuff, there is someone consciously or not choosing not to buy that specific thing.

I just think that it's the same with clothing. If you leave for the people to choose not to buy clothing made by slaving children that's just not going to happen if they cost a fraction of clothing made otherwise. It's also not a matter of prohibition because that goes against people's individual freedom to choose. You just have to give society enough time so that it gravitates towards willing to choose differently, meanwhile advocating for the change you want to see in your immediate community.

And our community routinely clears out encampments every 4-6 months. Makes a big production about it as well.

Sometimes they're on private property, and sometimes they're on public property. Either way, their belongings are confiscated and hailed away to the city garage miles away, with the full intent to destroy. Not like homeless can get transportation there.

The craziest part? 60% of the homeless have actual jobs. These aren't 'lazy' people. In fact, society has slowly priced people out of even living, and criminalized homelessness.

Its bad enough that on sidewalks, they're pitching nylon tents. Its starting to look like LA in some aspects.

There's also state laws felonizing having needles on you. Naturally, they get disposed by being dropped wherever. Bad drug laws created this hazard.

Its just one thing after another. And any community that tries to help gets flooded. Greyhound Therapy is a real thing.

Its bad enough, that sometimes I just want to shut down and just shield myself from the suffering, since I'm damn near powerless in fixing it. Its an abject system failure, and needs systematic changes. And realistically, we're not going to see anything get better for the next 3.5 years at absolute minimum.

Does she not have a phone? Calling someone up and saying "hey, let's hang out" and then driving over to hang out was literally how most of suburban social interactions happened in the 90s.

IMO some activists are exploiting homeless people and drug addicts for power and profit.

Young people don't have space on their houses.

In the eighties I might save up months or even 1-2 years for a nice television set, but my rent/mortgage, food, etc. was relatively inexpensive. Now, I can go buy 15-20 decent televisions a month for the same amount it costs me to pay my rent or mortgage here on a 0-2 bedroom place, and I live in a shithole backwoods state, not San Francisco.

Things were better pre-COVID, I had a spot I could get $2 pitchers of bud and 50 cents an oyster on Monday nights at a local watering hole. Weekends, not so much, you get overcharged. But, COVID did away with that and now my city is almost as expensive as major metros in California while having absolutely none of the benefits those cities offer.

You need to read more carefully and make less assumptions. My state has no minimum wage. We never gave up slavery, instead becoming a prison state with more prisoners per capita than any single country in the world. We only have an effective minimum wage because of the federal minimum wage. You walk into McDonald's here without experience and you're getting paid $7.25. McDonald's does not do twice that much here.

> The entire point I was making, and the which you are trying to deny by your argument (you may have quoted some factual info, but you're putting it together to make a specific argument to back up your opinion), is that it's actually not that hard to go out and entertain yourself, in person, with friends, for cheap or free.

I'm aware you'd like to make that point, and while focusing on this is moving goalposts/ceding parts of your argument, it's still entirely ignoring everything I explained to you.

I barely drink, and my girlfriend and I do all sorts of things that are cheap or free in addition to things that aren't. But that is not the culture in my state. The entire state suffers from alcoholism, and traditional third spaces are harder and harder to come by. The average person simply does not do anything other than go out and drink and eat. Ask anyone who lives here. It's a seriously depressing state of affairs and for most people, there is not another solution waiting. It's self-reinforcing; I just made plans to catch up with an old high school buddy and the only way I'm going to be able to do that is by meeting him somewhere for some drinks and going to see a movie. And all of his friends are the same, and once most of your friends are at the bar, why wouldn't you be? Almost all of us have been bartenders at one point or another. One of my friends even bought a bar in order to provide a third space to our community (we come from a small town and we all know each other).

My girlfriend and I wanted to go swimming two weekends ago. We tried going to the local community center's swimming pool, but it's now closed indefinitely because some black kids broke in just to swim, but one of them had a weapon on them, presumably for protection (my city floats around the top 5 highest homicide rates in the US[0]) and so the racist community center operators took it as an excuse to close the pool indefinitely and temporarily shut down another of the very few third spaces we have.

Instead, my girlfriend and I had to rent a hotel room just to use their pool for the evening.

The bottom line is you are not from here, you have no idea what it's like living in Louisiana, and you frankly have no idea what you are talking about. Instead, you should listen to what I'm trying to explain to you about an extremely dire, worsening situation that is continuing to erode whatever sense of community we have left here. And it's no accident, this is engineered by an owner class interested in squeezing every last nickel and drop of blood out of our citizenry.

The wealth gap here is just frightening, we're running out of places to go, and the average social pipeline for inner-city youth here typically involves committing crimes and putting yourself in danger. Especially when there are purposefully designed prison funnels intended to bring in profit for the private prison industry and businesses that exploit cheap inmate labor instead of providing those jobs to free citizens.

Consider yourself blessed and privileged to not understand what it's like here.

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/murder-ra...

I am in a "top 20" US city and all of these things are in extreme decline.

If you do actually go to a bar or club, you'll even notice nobody is dancing. People don't even dance anymore.

But if you don't want to believe me, we do actually have statistics. Young people are drinking less than ever and having less sex than ever. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, but if people aren't fucking and drinking - why would they be going to bars? To play Scrabble?

[1] https://www.trade.gov/media-entertainment-video-games-sector

I can't link to specific query results from the American Time Use Survey, but from this page [1], you can check "Avg hrs per day - Socializing and communicating", click "Retrieve Data", then adjust the time range using the dropdowns at the top, to be up to 2003 - 2024. In absolute terms (hours, not percent) there are declines both for the whole period, and from from 2003-2019 (i.e. before the pandemic).

And you can look at the series for "Avg hrs per day for participants - Working at home" and confirm that as expected it is relatively stable through 2019 and jumps in 2020, so the decrease in socializing through 2019 is not about WFH.

[1] https://data.bls.gov/toppicks?survey=tu

* Drinking in public is legal

* Drinking in public is illegal (strictly enforced)

* Drinking in public is illegal (give cops discretion to arrest intoxicated troublemakers who are hollering, pestering people, or otherwise engaging in mild antisocial behavior)

https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/justice/criminal-law/c...

Edit: Wikipedia page on drinking in public: "In some countries, such as Norway,[1] Poland,[2] India and Sri Lanka[3][non-tertiary source needed], some states in the United States,[4] as well as Muslim-majority countries where alcohol is legal, public drinking is almost universally condemned or outlawed, while in other countries, such as Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Germany,[5][6] the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Japan, Finland, and China, public drinking is socially acceptable."

I’ve lived in places where it’s basically tolerated so long as everyone is civil and discrete. I’ve also lived in places where they enforce it to the letter and they’re not messing around.

I think people forget how big and messy the US can be.

You can just go where you like, and if you want to go somewhere else, sure it might not be the strictly fastest option, but it sure is convenient. You can go from A to B to C to D to A without having to go back to B to grab your elephant box and bring it to D.

It's a network effect. The same reason it's easy to build a facebook clone yet nearly impossible to get it off the ground.

Thing is, they do it because they can. Because their disposable income is by far the biggest in the world, so their needs in everything else are more than satisified: they already overeat, have full two-car garages filled to the brim with "stuff", have enough of everything that people might want in "multiple" quantities. So what's left to spend money on, is either investments (this is their stock market is so insanely huge), or things one don't really need in more than single units - so they don't have many houses, but single BIG houses, same for cars. Which makes a picture of unaffordability, as natually if people's residual free incomes are so large, so much money is going to be pushed into these, they will indeed become very expensive as a portion of entire income, just because everything else (except healthcare) makes a so much smaller proportion. It's simply that it just means huge houses, a lot bigger than anywhere else except Australia (which is also Anglosphere!).

Want to make housing truly afforable? Make people poor, also make them die off to free up space. Japan does both with great "success".

And especially in the era of the internet the concept of college being a necessity to educate oneself is rather plainly artificial, and it's also highly debatable whether the current GPA inflated profit motivated degree treadmills that colleges have turned into is even providing a meaningful education.

When prices are high anyone who owns has incentive to prevent the supply problem from being fixed.

Their housing prices are being further depressed by the fact that they're now dying off fast enough that even Tokyo's population is starting to significantly decline. And that, in turn, is further compounded by a prevalent superstition in Japan against living in a house where somebody died, which helps to further reduce demand for many housing units that 'become available.'

I see this claim a lot but I don't understand it. Can you give me some examples of common third places in other countries that aren't paid that don't exist in US suburbs?

Safety nets in my mind are what kick in after a person has no way to pay for necessary stuff by themselves.

Disposable income is what gets cut down by the costs of necessary stuff.

Very few people are going to not go to dinner because they are aware that if they become indigent US society will not pay, and thus feel an obligation to save.

Lots of people will not go to dinner because they've already had to pay for (... you name it ...)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252882200Q

https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker

Click "age"

Then compare to price levels. Wages have outpaced price levels for this age group significantly

Here's men 16-24 showing 20% increase after CPI adjustment

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252882200Q

EDIT: the data you shared is not specific to "young people", that's why it's different. While everyone's wages are up over the last 10 years relative to prices (according to the data you shared), young people have gained much more

Drinks in some places are more, other places have not increased as much. You basically couldn't find a $5 drink in SF in 2015. You can still find $2 drinks in Austin today

The drinking started much earlier. Typically you'd drink at home first so that you were already drunk on cheap liquor. Sure, if you had a place nearby that had specials that could compete with the cost of drinking at home, you might opt for that instead, but there is no material difference found in that. What is key here is that people did everything they could to keep the cost down, limiting the high cost experience associated with going out to just a couple of hours before everything closed down.

The "YOLO youth" of today don't care. Some researchers have suggested that because they feel they have no future they have no qualms about spending today, but whatever the exact mechanics of are it is clear that they aren't trying to pinch pennies like previous generations did. They are almost certainly spending 5x more, but that is buying them an entirely different night out as compared to what people were accustomed to in the past. The same night out isn't 5x more expensive. Not in any way, shape, or form.

Other related things like concert attendance have gone up.

My take is that the main reason young people don't go out is not price, they often seem to be making choices that cost more when they avoid going out

In that vein, doesn’t “competition for relationships” necessarily breed egocentrism above all else? The winning relationship will give you what you want, but not what is necessarily true…

In that vein, you might also consider that the commenters you’re replying to may be worth engaging intellectually with more deeply purely based on the fact that they’re presenting divergent views that are uncomfortable.

Based on how we’ve designed AI to date and how you describe it in terms of optimizing for self enjoyment for each individual (and difficult to argue most will choose that for themselves), it’s hard to see a world where AI can push productive conflict the way humans can.

Then again, I might just be a flawed human who doesn’t fully understand the point you are trying to make and is extrapolating from my own biases, flaws, experiences, and the limited sample size I have of your point of view.

When do you think soon is ? It could easily be 20-30 years imo till there are humanoid robots intelligent enough to carry a long term relationship, e.g substitute other humans altogether. Not to mention most people still want intimate relationship ...yeah that thing called sex, while I'm sure someone is working on it somewhere this is gonna take a while to automate. So for us here on this threat I wouldn't bet on this thing as a cure for loneliness anytime soon.

As in, if I just met someone and I know nothing about them other than they don’t like unions then we probably won’t be friends but if that came up later I’m not going to blow up a year of friendship over something like that.

OTOH if a friend started preaching white supremacy that would do it but I’d give a good shot to talking them out of it first.

It's the equivalent of cutting off your legs so you can't enter the race so you don't lose the race. Well... mission accomplished, you won't lose the race. But at what cost?

Bonus points if you can believe it's everyone else's fault and none your own. Now you can't lose AND it's not your fault. Great! But you're not even playing.

Contradictorally though - I am near certain we will declare victory on AGI much sooner than 10 years from now. OpenAI’s contract with Microsoft nearly requires it, and Sam Altman recently said that by reasonable measures of 5 years ago, ChatGPT 4 is AGI. In some sense that may best evidence things are stalling.

But really 10 years from now, either one of us could declare victory, and we’d probably be right.

Funny you should say that: business and profit are actually way undertaxed in the US, compared to (for instance) salaries and pensions. But, you're still talking about the on-paper accounting (and choosing an arbitrary point in a cyclic economy as the "original source", but let's ignore that for now).

Let's consider how progress actually occurs, on the ground. People learn how things work, whether through study, experience, original thought, or (more often) a mix of the three. They then attempt to find improvements: new methods, new machines, new buildings. They then verify these improvements, through experiment, theory, or a mix of the three. We call this "innovation". They then put these into practice: building, manufacturing, distributing, teaching, or performing; which improves the efficiency of some resource manipulation activity, or enables people to accomplish or experience things they couldn't otherwise. We call this "progress".

Individuals cannot efficiently acquire all resources (respectively: accomplish all tasks, experience all experiences, etc) alone. Specialised tools and skillsets allow certain people to accomplish certain tasks more efficiently than others: we call this "expertise" and "economies of scale" and "virtuoso", among other names. Working together, people can accomplish more than they can apart: we call this "collaboration" when it is direct, and "trade" when it is indirect. To make trade (locally) more efficient in large groups, we abstract large trade networks by valuing more-or-less everything along one axis, which we call "currency", or "money". Money represents resources, because it can be exchanged for goods and services. (Therefore, money is fungible.) Money also represents debt, for much the same reason. (Therefore, money is not fungible.) What money represents depends quite a lot on your metaphysics, because it is an abstract concept.

A trade where each party to the trade receives more value than they spend (according to the "money's worth" metric) is considered a "profitable trade": the "more value" is called the "profit", and trades can be profitable for all parties despite a variety of different choices of profit allocation. (Various factors constrain profit allocation in practice; we will not discuss them here.) Some trades are mediated by intermediaries (traders, employers), who take some portion of the profit: in some cases, these intermediaries are providing value (e.g. by transporting goods, or organising a team); but in other cases, they are not. One example of an intermediary that does not provide any value is a corporate person qua employer: by virtue of not actually existing, a corporation cannot by any clever argument be said to actually contribute to boots-on-the-ground labour activity.

So we see that profit is, except on the balance sheets of a sole trader / worker-owned coöp, actually the removal of resources from the people doing the actual work, making the actual progress. If the removed resources are pooled and used for R&D – as in the cases you describe as "side quests" – and we further propose that this R&D would not have been performed by those the resources were removed from, we can say that profit contributes towards progress. (Certain investment schemes provide another example.) However, in many cases, profit goes towards things like "build us a moat to keep the competitors out!" or "bribe the regulators" or "outspend our competitors' advertising budget" or "buy the C-suite even bigger yachts": we cannot say this contributes towards progress, unless we define the ultimate end of human progress narrowly: in the field of yacht manufacturing, or perhaps the field of cheating at sports.

Business, likewise, is sometimes related to progress, but sometimes unrelated to it, and in any case not in any way essential to progress (except in the field of business studies). Saying the word "actuality" doesn't make what you say true.

I notice you didn't address the example of Wikipedia.

Where does the common education system and legal system system underpins the business world come from? Government. Who puts dollar bills into the hands of people and tells them "come next tax season, we're going to ask you for a bunch of dollars at gunpoint, which will make them valuable, so you better have some", which creates the demand for dollars which stimulates the economy? Government.

"Business and profit" are not possible without government, which will do stuff like "fund research into the internet so we don't lose the Cold War if the Russians nuke us", which leads to Google and Meta having great "business and profit", "spend billions on aircraft carriers patrolling the oceans to make sure that shipment of shoes Nike spend 3 dollars per pair to make in Cambodia gets to California where it will be resold for 100 dollars a pair", and "fund a school system and research institutions to ensure a steady stream of educated workers to build the miracle of modern capitalism".

So if you believe all progress comes from business and profit, you believe all progress comes from the government, because business and profit is a side effect of governement.

I encourage you to read Debt and Dawn of Everything by Graeber for more information on this subject :)

In the past, women who didn't really want children didn't have a great deal of choice, particularly if they wanted to follow any kind of socially acceptable life. It was considered a failure to many if they didn't get a husband and children.

Therefore there was no particular evolutionary pressure to select for women who actually had a strong biological urge to have children.

But there is now, so after a few generations you end up with mostly those women having children, that genetically passed on desire becomes more prominent, and birth rates increase again. Until overpopulation becomes a new version of the problem people thought it would be previously.

Society has a lot of feedback systems in place which make a total collapse sort of unusual. A slow down of technological progress while society re-allocates labor towards other ends seems like a much more reasonable outcome.

The reason for it might not have been made explicit but we both understand what they were driving at and why they weren't "merely" asking the question of what effect a social media ban might have on chocolate sales or something equally arbitrary.