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Comment by DavidPiper | Hacker News Reader

I'm seeing a lot of comments like this lately:

"Oh well, we were in an anomalous time of social growth, time to go backwards! We won't even need to read or write or think! It's all just too bad, but that's just the way the world works, like it did in 1800." [or pick your date before any current person was alive]

Lots of people have started considering a time of significant "progress" as "an anomaly", as if the world should always just be the way it was in, say, 1800, like that was actually the realistic pinnacle of human society. You also seem to be loosely basing this argument on the availability of "rich nerds", which seems like a bizarre non-sequitur. Computing once didn't exist, and we still valued reading, writing and thinking.

I'm kind of baffled by how regularly I see comments like this. Like, come on. This is basically the AI black pill, no?

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I have a good friend who doesn’t pay attention to any of this stuff. Nothing gets them down for long, they do pretty well with work, and just enjoy living life simply. They have amassed a reasonable amount of wealth, are moving up at their job, and just don’t pay any attention to all this stuff we here on the Internet talk about all the time. There is no AI black pill because they aren’t caught up in all the headlines and propaganda and bullshit. there are plenty of people out there like that. They are just living their lives. In some ways, we might be the ones who are the anomaly and getting hurt by the Internet.

I think, in a way, the Internet itself is the virus. It has infiltrated us and our minds. Rage and suffering are what get clicks and engagement. The Internet has become a suffering engine, which spins angst into gold.

But ... they are only able to live their lives and amass wealth (good on them btw) because modern western society is arranged like it is - Maritime trade, international rules based order (mostly) with compatible legal systems, free and fair elections and half decent government accountability, individual rights and property systems.

Basically England Circa 1851, plus democracy.

And because it was all put together more or less accidentally, it can all fall apart. So worrying about that and trying to do something about it is like discovering that under the deck of the ship are engine rooms, rudders, riveted steel plates and navigation maps.

Its not a slight on your friend, but one would expect him to have a mental model of a rudder, even if he does not know about the impact of cavitation.

More Black pills flying around are just an indication that the rudder is hanging off or the rivets are leaking a bit. It can be fixed, as long as no one tells the passengers the ship is actually flat or the engine room is how elites maintain power.

None of modern society and economics was put together accidentally, IMO. It was purposeful, a mix of success & failures, serendipitous, and filled with mixed motives... but that's not quite the same as an accident.

A mix of political scientists, politicians, investors, entrepreneurs, lawyers, judges, scientists, technologists, and economists have tried to mold society to their own theoretical vision for at least 150+ years. Society then reacts to that in both good and bad ways. This distorts the vision, as society changes it to its concerns. And the cycle repeats.

I think of Karl Polyani's The Great Transformation has a great way of looking at the attempts to force "market society" on England in the 1700 and 1800s, and the reaction that all societies exhibit in the face of unconstrained technological or economic change. Both the imposition of change and reaction to it can be violent, it's hard to predict. We've had such a relatively steady state since WW2 in the developed nations that we're not used to this cycle.

Accidentally is the wrong word, but considering it was never done before and had some very unusual constraints (large coal supply and coal industry, sufficient centralised state that could provide peace within its borders but had been neutered into compromise with parliamentary middle class, finance centres, maritime trade etc etc) that it was done at all does feel … unplanned?

The image that sticks in my mind the most is the Meiji Emperor in a 1870s photo dressed in a saville row suit and bowler hat. For Japan the most incredible social card to play that says “we are going to be like these foreigners and their secrets to wealth”

Nothing accidental there, but that still leaves visible joins on the Japanese soul.

In the short term they may be living their life unaffected but if we're right then they will eventually become affected. Maybe this is enough reason for us to talk about this issue and try and get ahead of it. I dont think its futile or wasted.

They’ll still lose their job to AI, whether they’re paying attention or not.

I am not saying you are wrong, just that your comment reads as "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you".

Haha. I meant it as more like… people who say “I don’t pay attention to politics at all it never actually affects me”. Well, that’s true until it suddenly isn’t. You might get away with sticking your head in the sand, you might not, hard to say it’s a wiser choice.

I don't get this take. Once a modern corporation starts making money, all the people in it diligently work to expand their influence by starting new projects and hiring as many people as possible. That seems to be human nature. Why will AI tools change that? Nobody is feeling important because they manage 50 AI agents. They feel important because they manage 50 people.

What percentage of the jobs in a modern office are truly necessary? If automation had the ability to kill jobs over the long term, we'd all have been idle since the industrial revolution. But instead we keep inventing new things that we need.

There is a possibility that the agents become better at managing the company than the people and businesses become as automated as farms did during the industrial revolution.

Yeah and you’re doing a lot of heavy lifting with the term agents.

Billions have been poured into agents and there’s no sign that they will get to a place where they on the path toward generating returns to justify more good money being invested into chasing bad.

If AI actually becomes good enough to replace intelligent people. Which, outside the online world of AI hype, is not at all a commonly accepted fact.

You don't have any idea what job they have, how good they are at it, what their company does, what industry they work in, whether their income is backed by labour, knowledge work, emotional connection, government relationships, capital investments, ...

See above.

I’m assuming their job is one at least somewhat in the firing line for AI, otherwise it’s a pointless anecdote. “My friend is a plumber and doesn’t worry about AI” isn’t particularly interesting because of course.

Your point is understandable but not knowing makes it worse for purposes of discussion since we have to assume the most likely case rather than an exceptional one.

Who said AI taking your job is "the most likely" case? Even by those extreme estimates of 30% unemployment or whatever - that still leaves ~65% of jobs not lost to AI.

I was referring to the job

A proto Torment Matrix so to speak.

I believe many here are having an identity crisis and some feel so doomed, they want to others down with them.

I feel bad for them, I really do. The posts I see here are madness and so disconnected from reality it’s actually disturbing.

It's the influence of Curtis Yarvin who basically argues that the world went bad with the French Revolution in typical, boring reactionary fashion.

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