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Comment by joduplessis | Hacker News Reader

These sorts of (sorry to say, but) dumb articles (+ books) I don't expect to see on HN.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Humans bad. I think it's an ideological off-shoot from environmentalism. If you recognize that humans are the cause of environmental issues then we are the problem. If we are the problem, then we should try to discredit our specialness so that we can motivate there being fewer of us (anti-natalism).

It's such a tired trope.

It's the opposite. "Human special" is an ideological off-shoot from religion and fear of dying. From a scientific point of view, humans are not special in any sense. We are a primate species that evolved through natural selection, just like every other organism.

I assure you if aliens visited or looked for earth they would consider humans exceptional.

Based upon…?

Imagine our response if we went to another planet and the highest life form we found was a dog vs. a humanoid with books, computers, music, films, language...

> Imagine our response

So you are saying that from a human perspective, humans are pretty special. Not hard to believe.

We are also all made of atoms, not sure what you're trying to say here. We are different from the other animals on Earth, we are clearly special. That doesn't mean we're chosen by God or anything like that, but I don't see the sense in downplaying humanity either. We may be the only intelligent species capable of science and space flight in the universe for all we know.

"Humans aren't special" is the current "AI" booster hype. It allows for stealing copyrighted content, devaluing human employees and postulating rights for non-existing AGIs.

The original article is of course by a primatologist, but in the "AI" context it is useful as agitprop.

You see this stuff everyday here in the form of AI hype. The whole ideology behind the powers that drive AI is that humans are dumb and inefficient and need to be replaced by artificial intelligence as the next stage in human evolution.

from an intelligence perspective the human brain is ultra efficient

That's kind of the negative take. The positive take is that work should be automated whenever possible. The endgame is having everyone enjoy life and only working when we want the 120-inch instead of the 90-inch TV, or enjoy working.

It's not that simple due to power imbalances with automation and the eternal pursuit of better living standards, but that's kind of the goal. The world chooching away by itself like a Factorio map and people purely consuming.

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