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Comment by tracerbulletx | Hacker News Reader

I know everyone hates ads or whatever, but why would anyone make content on their own website anymore if google and the browser are doing everything in their power to keep your users from interacting with your own page. Also I don't want to hear the crap about ads being too invasive, its their content, they can do that if they want, and you can not have access to their content. They have to be able to monetize the page to get viewers and its their mistake to make if they make it annoying that doesn't give everyone the right to their work.

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This point naturally leads to a more general discussion.

If AI can do everything and gets everyone out of jobs, who is going to consume the ‘everything’ produced by AI for someone to pay for the AI?

I don’t think UBI is a real solution, it’s too hand wavy.

Where you see a problem, I see an opportunity.

The obvious solution is an AI consumer, duuuuh!

The dollar must flow. The dollar is life.

Thou shalt maximize paperclips

The best game ever written, apart from 3D Monster Maze on the ZX81 and Elite on the BBC Micro.

I don’t know what “too hand wavy” means.

Example:

A: The reason it all works is <waves hands>.

B: I have no idea what <waves hands> means.

A: Exactly.

Thank you

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-waving

By that, I think they meant they don’t want to enumerate the problems with UBI, of which there are many.

>If AI can do everything and gets everyone out of jobs

Same thing that happened when automatic threshing machines replaced 80% of agricultural labour.

> If AI can do everything and gets everyone out of jobs

Not everything - Many things.

Not everyone - Many ones.

The people who cannot compete fade out, and the ones that are left reap the benefit of the machines. Just like one farmer reaps the benefit of a tractor that replaced 20 laborers.

The earth population keeps reducing until it is kinda a vacation resort for 100 billionaires + others who work for them + machines.

Then some politician who promises to be a voice for the people uses force/army to kick the billionaires out, redistribute the wealth, and then the population increases and the cycle continues.

This has been happening and will continue to happen until the heat death of the universe. (and then repeat after it gets created again).

UBI feels like a natural solution to what I assume is a ubiquitous problem in the workforce: A certain percentage of people are absolutely worthless in their job, and everyone would be better off if we just paid those people to stay home.

Even if you’re competent and useful, work is an incredible sacrifice. Perhaps only 10% of workers (the most unattached and lacking in obligations) would voluntarily work. For example for parents there are only a litany of bad choices available. If UBI is offered, why would most people suffer through their work sacrifices.

Because UBI and negative income tax doesn't provide the same lifestyle as working. It's a floor, no-one is proposing UBI at middle class salaries.

Lots of people are proposing UBI as a solution to AI displacing knowledge workers. Which of course is patently ridiculous.

> Perhaps only 10% of workers (the most unattached and lacking in obligations) would voluntarily work.

That's not even close to true. Basically every study on UBI, everywhere, has shown that either more people work, or employment stays about the same, but in each case happiness and health go up vs the control.

Since it's very clear you haven't researched your claim whatsoever - why are you making it? Why would you say something so wrong with so much confidence?

All those studies are flawed because they are always a few years of sub-subsistence income. Of course most people rationally don't drastically change their employment in response to that - as expected per the permanent income hypothesis. A permanent, liveable UBI would be quite another beast.

If humans only work so that they can live, and wouldn't ever work if they didn't have to - then why do so many of our best inventions and advances come from people who didn't give a toss about profit?

If we have the technological means and capability to reduce employment to 10% - why wouldn't we?

Is it so impossible to imagine a world where people only work when they want to? Where the jobs that "no one would do if they weren't desperate" just pay very well instead?

Also, if you really think every UBI study is fundamentally flawed, feel free to design and run your own. Until then, maybe you could do better than waving a hand and invoking a hypothesis to try and invalidate literally every study that speaks against your claim, lol.

Lots of people enjoy working on high skill, fulfilling jobs like inventing things. Few people love working menial labour jobs. AI will probably take the former jobs but leave the latter, which will still need to be done. If everyone gets a decent UBI, how will we allocate these unfulfilling but necessary jobs?

> Also, if you really think every UBI study is fundamentally flawed, feel free to design and run your own.

All temporary studies are fundamentally flawed, because people act based on their permanent lifetime income. It's not like I can design it better, it's just not something that can easily be studied (on any reasonable time scale).

This touches on something I've been thinking about. I'm making an ad blocker that tries to replace native ads with ads that actually add value to the viewer's life. In the public version, I'd like to offer some of the profits to the web hosts even if they haven't heard of it. Do you have any thoughts on how it would be best to go about that?

The only good ad is no ad.

To engage with your question, the only way to truly, objectively ‘add value to one’s life’ is to become intimately familiar with them, their habits and everything they do on- and offline to understand what they need. This is the entire modus operandi of the current ad industry.

I agree. Thing is, Google and meta could do that today, if after getting a sense of what people need they actually showed them ads that helped with whatever that is. Instead they show whatever ad will make the most money immediately, which is only very rarely the same ad. The result is an erosion of trust that reduces their long term maximum potential. It's like they're stuck in scarcity mindset even after getting more money than Exxon.

I don't want your product, and I don't want ads. "But ads are what supports XYZ!" I don't care. I don't want it. Whatever you think will crumble away without advertisements, let it all fade away into nothing.

Something I was thinking about was a simple tip jar system. You can add credits to a tipjar system, and if you like a post, site, or whatever you can gift credits.

Completely gets rid of ads that nobody likes anyway.

You could maybe automate it say “if I spend more than 30 seconds on page, pay x credits”

An ad means somebody paid to get my attention. I never want that. Go away with your ads that need even more tracking...

What do you consider to be an ad that actually adds value to the viewer's life in contrast to other ads?

Short answer, any ad that leads to a non regretted purchase the viewer wouldn't have otherwise made.

The instantiation I'm working on is to track the viewer's long term goals and the habits they're trying to form, then only show ads relevant to those. Ads today are shitty because people with products that add no value to anyone's life can somewhat overcome that disadvantage by bidding more on ad space, so that's what we see. But there are plenty of products that would actually add net value which it doesn't occur to us to look for, and insofar as ads exist, they should help us find them.

This project (my working title is eudaimonia) aims to let the user essentially aikido the attention economy arms race by saying "here's what I think would add value in my life, you may pitch your product iff it's actually relevant to that".

To me, that doesn't seem hugely different than current advertising. "non-regret" is a low bar. It's still, of course, treating increased purchasing/consumption as a good thing. And it still has the same characteristic of pushing users toward inferior, more expensive items because it makes someone more money that way. As in, if you have items A and B, and a user gains 1 value from A at a cost of 100, but would gain 10 value from B at a cost of 50, a "good ad" could make the user purchase A instead of B, which is a relative negative impact on their life. Additionally, it doesn't address the harms caused by "track[ing] the viewer"

I have no counterargument to your first point, but to your second, an ad for product A is "good" only for the person selling A, it's bad for the person buying (assuming a and b are in the same product category). Since the person buying a or b presumably has an ongoing relationship with the content creator being paid to show the ad, showing a "bad" ad is also bad for the host because it reduces the odds the customer will follow another ad on their network n the future. The catch is that the person selling A can outspend the person selling B, but there's an obvious solution: don't auction ad spaces. If vendor A and B are paying the same fixed amount per impression, B's superior offer is going to take over the market pretty quickly, and the content creator hosting ads will be naturally incentivised to show B's ads.

To your third point, I don't think all tracking is created equal - if it were, there'd be no instinct to post on social media at all, but in fact privacy and publicity are complex things with overlapping sets of advantages and disadvantages. Tracking probably feels purely disadvantageous because the people doing the tracking are in thrall to "A vendors", but if the tracker is incentivised to work with "B vendors" instead it becomes a much more nuanced issue.

This doesn't exist.

The ads are only good in a context when I'm searching for particular product.

When I'm trying to do my work then any ad that takes my attention has negative value.

Show me the same ad when I'm actually searching for a new vacuum cleaner and we're fine.

That gives me an start of an idea for a feature. It might be useful to have it timing based. The thing I'd disagree with about how you frame it is, if you're searching for e.g. "soccer coaches near me", an ad actually distorts the signal of just searching by price of reviews or what have you. Where an ad can add value is if you're searching for "watch soccer matches online" and it says "you said you want to get in shape, here's a beginner friendly soccer coach in your area".

I agree if you're in production mode, all ads are unwelcome, but most of us spend a lot of time in consumption mode too, and that's where unlooked for opportunities are really welcome. If the system could distinguish between when the user is in production vs consumption mode it would reduce friction even more over the initial vision. Not sure how to distinguish that though, most of us can't even tell it about ourselves, let alone want to tell a browser extension about it. Maybe a 'production time' setting that forces a wait time on social media sites and doesn't show replacement ads at all while on?

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