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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't matter. We must keep building more and more technology no matter the cost. Have an idea for a business? Build it. Does your business make the lives of people worse? Doesn't matter, keep pushing. Could some new technology ruin the lives and relationships that people have? Doesn't matter, just build it. We always need more, need to do more. Every experiment is valid, every impulse must be followed. More complexity, more control, more distraction, more outrage, more engagement. Just keep building forever no matter the cost.

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Relevant: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/07/05/are-w...

> You better maximize engagement or you will lose engagement this is a red queen’s race we can’t afford to lose! Burn all the social capital, burn all your values, FEED IT ALL TO MOLOCH!

Wow. A new profile text for my Tinder account!

> Release the hypnodrones

If you are not building the next paperclip optimizer the competition already does!

SamA actually said perhaps data centres should occupy the majority of the earth’s crust.

It’s quite rich coming from this guy, but I’m glad he’s seen the truth nonetheless.

Oooh I recognize this, he’s entering his midlife crisis. Smart guy I wish him well, and hope he comes out the other side groovy.

Turns out the Torment Nexus was just democratizing Venture Capital's desire for infinite growth.

I misread your comment as being about Vulture Capital. I think I like that :)

That's an uncharitable take. Those VCs care very deeply about society, that's why they're funding so much research into the Torment Singularity (and giving so many talks about it) and making sure that the Right People get the Torment Nexus first so "we" can decide how it gets used.

Has any big-tech company every used "Torment Nexus" unironically as some new project name, or any startup used is their company/product name? I feel its close if it hasn't happened already. I mean the unironic use.

Palantir

The paperclip maximizer is us.

Unironically: we worry about the ASI control problem but can't even reign in our billionaires

I look at it more like "the fact that we can't align humans/human institutions strongly suggests we won't be able to align something as alien as AGI is likely to be"

It's capitalism – the true "artificial intelligence" that has been organizing human life for the last ~200 years or so.

It always was.

Seeking VC funding now for OpenTormentNexus: Democratize the nightmare.

Eric Weinstein refers to this as an Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO), whereby organizations and economies at large assume perpetual growth, and that things really start to unravel when that growth inevitably slows. It is pretty mindblowing how we have basically accepted growth as the default state, it is not at all a given that things always grow and get better.

> It is pretty mindblowing how we have basically accepted growth as the default state

It is completely to be expected, exactly because it is not new.

It's been scarcely a generation since the peak in net change of the global human population, and will likely be at least another two generations before that population reaches its maximum value. It rose faster than exponentially for a few centuries before that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File:P...). And across that time, for all our modern complaints, quality of life has improved immensely.

Of all the different experiences of various cultures worldwide and across recent history, "growth" has been quite probably the most stable.

Culture matters. People's actions are informed by how they are socialized, not just by what they can observe in the moment.

The reason people don't accept this is that it fundamentally changes society, it is because of what it means, not because it is or isn't possible.

Net-growth society: new wealth is being created, if you can be part of the creation you get wealth

No-growth society: only way to acquire wealth is to take it from someone else

Oh plus because essentially every society that experienced it legislated it's way into a no-growth situation. The problem was not that growth was not possible, it's that people used state power, for a lot of different excuses, to prevent growth (and of course really to secure the position of the richest and most powerful in society)

The excuses range from religion, morality separate from religion, wars, avoiding losing wars (and putting the entire economy in a usually futile attempt to win or avoid losing a war) and of course the whole thing feeding onto itself: laws protecting the rich at the direct expense of the poor (that can happen even if there is economic growth, though of course, the more growth the less likely)

Btw: "futile attempt to win or avoid losing a war" these attempt were futile not because they lead to a win or a loss, but because the imposed cost of a no-growth society far exceeded any gains or even avoided losses ...

> No-growth society: only way to acquire wealth is to take it from someone else

Wealth is created by work. In any society, be it growth or no-growth, you can create and acquire wealth by working. (Not necessarily for a wage. Working for yourself also creates wealth. Every time you make yourself dinner, or patch a torn pant leg, or change your car's oil, you are creating wealth.)

The problem is that non-working parasites (investors, rent-seekers, warlords) can't acquire wealth in a no-growth society without taking it from someone else.[1] (Because in a no-growth society, investing on the net is ~zero-returns, ~zero-value.)

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[1] They take it from someone else in a growth society, too, but a person who works and loses half their productive surplus to a rent seeker is still getting the benefits of growth. In a no-growth society, the rent-seeker's gain is 100% someone else's net loss.

Why this focus? Rent-seekers aren't anywhere near the biggest group of non-working people. Not in money and certainly not in number. And if you include non-productive then you have to add the whole government too (because the government does work, but not for wealth production, not saying it's not necessary, but in your model, it's not wealth production)

In a no-growth (or even degrowth, which I have recently learned is a thing) society taking what you need from someone else is not the only option: someone can also choose to share it.

A society like that may be quite different in innumerable ways, of course, and the idea of “wealth” in the way we understand it may not make sense.

We will achieve essentially zero-cost infinite exponential scalability! The cloud has no limits! InfiniDum enterprises will operate in billions of markets across time space and dimensions of probability!

This is ignoring the Marketing to Engineering ratio. For most recent history technology companies have had to spend at least as much on marketing as engineering in order to survive, and two to ten times as much spent on marketing as engineering is common for successful companies. Who is going to buy the thing is the most important question and without solid answers there is nothing, no matter how much technology was engineered.

Now this formula has been complicated by technological engineering taking over aspects of marketing. This may seem to be simplifying and solving problems, but in ways it actually makes everything more difficult. Traditional marketing that focused on convincing people of solutions to problems is being reduced in importance. What is becoming most critical now is convincing people they can trust providers with potential solutions, and this trust is a more slippery fish than belief in the solutions themselves. That is partly because the breakdown of trust in communication channels means discussion of solutions is likely to never be heard.

I want to keep reading your thoughts on this. How can I get more or can you source your influences?

Probably best to start here with the original paper and then search for related material as the idea has been kicked around for a while: http://www.marketingvp.com/download/mer-data.pdf

Thanks for that!

move fast and break things!

nevermind if the things are people or their lives!!

build things """"people"""" want

People want dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle.

If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems.

The problem isn't AI, it's how marketing has eaten everything.

So everyone is always pitching, looking for a competitive advantage, "telling their story", and "building their brand."

You can't "build trust" if your primary motivation is to sell stuff to your contacts.

The SNR was already terrible long before AI arrived. All AI has done is automated an already terrible process, which has - ironically - broken it so badly that it no longer works.

> You can't "build trust" if your primary motivation is to sell stuff to your contacts

That is false. You build a different type of trust: people need to trust that when they buy something from you it is a good product that will do what they want. Maybe someone else is better, but it won't be enough better as to be worth the time they would need to spend to evaluate that. Maybe someone else is cheaper, but you are still reasonably priced for the features you offer. They won't get fired for buying you because you have so often been worthy of the trust we give you that in the rare case you do something wrong it was nobody is perfect not that you are no longer trustworthy (you can only pull this trick off a few times before you become untrustworthy)

The above is very hard to achieve, and even when you have it very easy to lose. If you are not yet there for someone you still need to act like you are and down want to lose it even though they may never buy from you often enough to realize you are worth it.

> All AI has done is automated an already terrible process, which has - ironically - broken it so badly that it no longer works.

Evil contains within itself the seed of its own destruction ;)

Sure, sometimes you should fight the decline. But sometimes... just shrug and let it happen. Let's just take the safety labels off some things and let problems solve themselves. Let everybody run around and do AI and SEO. Good ideas will prevail eventually, focus on those. We have no influence on the "when", but it's a matter of having stamina and hanging in there, I guess

It boggles my mind when, despite my general avoidance of advertising online, I see the language being used. Call me old fashioned, but "viral" is a bad thing to me. "Addictive" is a bad thing. "Tricks" are bad! But this is the language being used to attract customers, and I suppose it works well enough.

If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems.

That assumes people have the ability to choose not to do these things, and that they can't be manipulated or coerced into doing them against their will.

If you believe that advertising, especially data-driven personalised and targeted advertising, is essentially way of hacking someone's mind to do things it doesn't actually want to do, then it becomes fairly obvious that it's not entirely the individual's fault.

If adverts are 'Buy Acme widgets!' they're relatively easy to resist. When the advert is 'onion2k, as a man in his 40s who writes code and enjoys video games, maybe you spend too much time on HN, and you're a bit overweight, so you should buy Acme widgets!' it calls for people to be constantly vigilant, and that's too much to expect. When people get trapped by an advert that's been designed to push all their buttons, the reasonable position is that the advertiser should take some of the responsibility for that.

That’s true…but I do think people need to learn more that avoidance is a strategy too. The odds are too stacked against the average person to engage properly so just don’t. I don’t know. Sure there are certain unavoidable things but for a large part I think you can just choose to zone out of a lot of the consumerist world now

> That assumes people have the ability to choose not to do these things, and that they can't be manipulated or coerced into doing them against their will.

Within the last year I opened an Instagram account just so I could get updates from a few small businesses I like. I have almost no experience with social media. This drove home for me just how much the "this is where their attention goes, so that's revealed preference" thing is bullshit.

You know what I want? The ability to get these updates from the handful of accounts I care about without ever seeing Instagram's algo "feed". Actually, even better would be if I could just have an RSS feed. None of that is an option. Do I sometimes pause and read one of the items in the algo feed that I have to see before I can switch over to the "following" tab? I do, of course, they're tuned to make that happen. Does that mean I want them? NO. I would turn them off if I could. My actual fucking preference is to turn them off and never see them again, no matter that they do sometimes succeed in distracting me.

Like, if you fill my house with junk food I'll get fatter from eating more junk food, but that doesn't mean I want junk food. If I did, I'd fill my house with it myself. But that's often the claim with social media, "oh, it's just showing people more of what they actually want, and it turns out that's outrage-bait crap". But that's a fucking lie bolstered by a system that removes people's ability to avoid even being presented with shit while still getting what they want.

I do think that in general people are just conditioned by advertising in a general sense. I have family (by marriage) where most conversations just boil down to "I bought [product] and it was _so_ good." or "I encountered a minor problem, and solved it by buying [product]." It's pretty unbearable.

There are times I need a widget but I don't know it exists and so someone needs to inform me. Other times I know I need a widget, but I don't know about Acme and I will want to check them out too before buying.

Most ads are just manipulating me, but there are times I need the thing advertised if only I knew it was an option.

The core of this issue is a power imbalance. Advertisers have the full power of American capital at their disposal, and as many PhDs who know exactly how to exploit human psychology as need. Asking people to "vote with their wallet", or talking about "revealed preferences", or expecting people to be able to cope with this system is nonsense in the face of the amount of power available to the marketers.

It's fundamentally exploitation on a population scale, and I believe it's immoral. But because it's also massively lucrative, capitalism allows us to ignore all moral questions and place the blame on the victims, who again, are on the wrong side of a massive power imbalance.

Who else can and will stop the infernal machine other than the people? Can't see anyone. I hope you're wrong and expecting people to cope is not nonsense, because expecting the FDA or UN or Trump or Xi to do it is even more nonsense.

What authority are you going to complain to to "correct the massive power imbalance"? Other than God or Martians I can't see anything working, and those do not exist.

> People want dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle.

The people yearn for the casino. Gambling economy NOW! Vote kitku for president :)

PS. Please don't look at the stock market.

Tired: "Build things people want"

Wired: "Build things society needs"

Fixed it for you: People are most easily manipulated into dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle.

That is only true as long as people are the only entities who can spend money. As soon as people give AI the power to spend money, we will see companies designing products to appeal to AI:s. A new form of SEO spam, if you will.

> move fast and break things!

> nevermind if the things are people or their lives!!

Breaking things is ok. If people are things then it's ok to break them, right? Got it. Gotta get back to my startup to apply that insight.

The world will be a soulless hell, but Dario Amodei promises we'll live forever in it.

And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

Yours truly,

Larry Fink and The Money Owners.

It sounds like the "The City" in "Blame!"

This is what you get for not reading the writings of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Virilio

But the difference this time is now is that AI is heading in the direction where it can do ALL of WHAT you mentioned FOR you and everyone else.

Quote may be cliched, but still it's valid.

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

One of the potential upsides to this as that people just might start taking time to engage in a bit of critical thinking before reacting. Is this real? How likely is this AI nonsense? What is the source? Is this the full picture? etc.

Perhaps I am too optimistic...

Neil deGrasse Tyson said a quote expressing a concern about the future impact of AI on information credibility.

The exact quote is: "I foresee the day where AI become so good at making a deep fake that the people who believed fake news as true will no longer think their fake news is true because they'll think their fake news was faked by AI."

I wish people who believed that kind of fake news had this piece of critical thinking. I don't think they do though, they'll take whatever confirms their views and reject everything else as faked by AI with no logic or proof whatsoever.

Almost everyone believes they're thinking critically, that's just how it feels to think at all. As an aside, I wonder about the average person who extols critical thinking, and how proficient he actually is himself; in my experience they're often conformist and susceptible to uncritically accepting consensus positions.

The truth is, for those of us with lower IQ, it doesn't matter how critically we think, we lack the knowledge and mental dexterity to reliably arrive at a nuanced and deep understanding of the world.

You have to stop dreaming of a world where everyone can sort everything out for themselves, and instead build a world where people can reliably trust expert opinion. It's about having a high-trust society. That requires people in privileged positions to not abuse their advantage in a short term way, at the cost of alienating, and losing the trust of the unwashed masses.

Because that's what has happened, the experts have been exploited as a social cudgel, by the psychopathic and malignant managerial class, in such an obvious and blunt way, that even those of us who are self-aware of our limitations, figure we're as likely to get it right ourselves, as to get honest and correct information from our social institutions.

There's always someone willing to outthink you. That's the whole premise of a magic show: there are people willing to dedicate irrational amounts of time to trick you in to believing something that isn't true.

But if you accept my premise, it suggests a different course of action than most people are focused on today. That is, if you're a good person, and want to build a healthier society, then rather than focusing on the stupidity of the masses, and trying to suppress every errant idea that emerges from them, you should instead create an incentive structure that engenders their trust. You would focus on stern, even corporal, punishments for those at the pinnacle of society, more than those at the bottom. Politicians should not emerge from their time in government with hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains; which is a non-partisan problem today. And any "scientist" that fakes research data, should be treated very harshly, as a criminal. Undermining public trust in expert opinion causes more death and hardship than a typical street-thug murderer.

There is zero chance of making everyone smart enough to navigate the world adroitly. But there is a slightly better than zero chance we could organize our society to earn their trust.

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