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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

Maybe trying to engineer addiction is what should be illegal, and if you want to question "how do you define whether something is addictive" you don't need an objective measure: you determine whether it seems like the people making the product seem to think that's their goal.

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I would argue that intent should not even matter. Whatever punishment/consequences are deemed appropriate, they should apply based on the system's actual exploitation of addictive tendencies in humans. Otherwise you're just incentivizing people to get better at covering their tracks.

This applies to any business that wants a repeat customer.

You are right! We should regulate all businesses the same way.

You’re implying there’s no distinction between addiction and use. And I think you’re excessive cynicism is just wrong in practical ways,

I always buy my nails from Home Depot. I’m not addicted to nails. Home Depot does not reasonably think they can get me addicted to nails.

> I always buy my nails from Home Depot.

It's probably not the nails, but there's a reason people always stick with a particular hardware store.

(Also, I know that's a flip example, but there are absolutely brands of nails and screws I always get).

But do you go out and buy nails and screws just for fun when you’re not working on a hardware project? Do you think Home Depot’s marketing suggests you should be building day in and day out? That the average person should have five projects going at the same time and compulsively start a new project even when they’re not feeling like it?

Addiction is a real thing with a real definition and real consequences and it’s not the same as love or admiration or even fanaticism.

If you look up the medical definition of addiction I think you'll be surprised to see that in order for it to be considered a disorder the key is that is has to be past the point of self-abuse or adverse consequences.

You can say something is "addictive" without implying it's a substance abuse disorder.

When people at Microsoft say the goal of AI is to be addictive, they're clearly implying that they want their product to be habit forming in the same way that video games or food delivery is. And it's silly to imply Microsoft is trying to create physiological dependence.

> And it's silly to imply Microsoft is trying to create physiological dependence.

I really truly, madly, deeply, in the big picture of this, think that you’re wrong. They could choose a different word and they don’t. We could debate the nuances and their are multitudes, but I think the actions of the industry align themselves much more with the accurate definition of addiction then something else.

"you know it when you see it"

More demonstrating intent

I guess I worded that poorly; it isn't merely that we don't need an objective measure: we literally don't need a measure at all, as the crime would be attempting to cause it, whether or not it was even possible to do, and so we simply do not care if the activity was addictive. If you are going out of your way to exploit the psychology or physiology of other humans in an attempt to use that to sell your product, maybe that is what should be illegal.

This would then mean that "our expert witness has strong evidence that my client's product area is not 'addictive', so my client could not ever be said to be engineering addiction" would not be a defense any more than "the plan my client came up with to kill their alleged victim could not possibly have worked, so my client can not be charged with attempted murder" is (at least generally, afaik) not a defense.

This just shifts the question to: what counts as attempt to cause an addiction?

Does writing a book aims to make people read addictive? Try to design a gym class that makes you feel good about yourself so you will come again?

You still need to define what is addictive

The above phrasing, an attempt to "exploit the psychology or physiology of others", works fine. It's a form of fraud, or scamming. Is an attempted scam a crime? I guess probably not, oh well.

I don't believe devices are addictive, but that's irrelevant to Satya Nadella believing it and trying to exploit it and thus being a scammer.

It's going to get fuzzy around whether entertaining somebody counts as exploiting their psychology. Obviously it doesn't, but that would rest on reasonably assumed consent.

※ People do get sentenced for attempted fraud, but that's for more blatant things like trying to extract money from an unwitting victim's bank account, rather than just saying "we must figure out how to commit some fraud".

Ok, fair, so, to try to apply this to my analogous crime: I would agree that attempted murder does need a definition of "murder"; but, the crime does not care whether your specific plan would have led to an act of murder, only whether or not the defendant was trying to murder.

We thereby do not necessarily need a way to know whether reading--either your book or any book--is addictive or not, but only the extent to which you were going out of your way to make it addictive, for which I think it might then be OK to have some specific-yet-contrived definition that is difficult to apply to any specific product but feels like a wrong thing to do (maybe my "exploit human psychology or physiology")?

Shockingly, a huge amount of human behavior cannot be strictly defined and is best evaluated with situational, subjective judgement. Crazy.

This why have the "reasonable person", a legal fiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person

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