We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.
We pretend we're the victims, but none of these platforms would have been built without an army of willing, enthusiastic, highly-paid engineers who made small "ethical compromises" every day.
And now that there's money made in something else, many of us would accept a seven-digit offer from OpenAI in a heartbeat, leaving the task of figuring out the downstream effects to other people.
That really is a strong statement of the ethics here - they're happy to let "those" kids get addicted to it, have it help ruin their mental health and generally create an unhappy generation of narcissists. All sold under the tagline of "Connecting the world". But when it comes to their kids? No way.
I wonder if we'll treat the folks that worked on these things the way we treat the folks that worked at Phillip Morris?
Only a subset. HN is not a monolith.
Don't fool yourself into thinking you could have avoided this. If you didn't, any one of the other ten million people would. You didn't choose for it to happen, you chose to be the one who got the money from it happening.
We need a national conversation (which we seem to be having) about the corrosive nature of these algos.
I personally think they should be liable for much more than they are under section 230.
But the same people decrying corporate social media declare mastodon a "failure" because it hasn't captured literally 100% of Facebook users and doesn't male thirty billion dollars. Shrug.
Meanwhile on Facebook people get angry every day on something they see on the feed yet come back in hour "just in case the are is something interesting this time"
This is a good start for brainstorming:
You are asking all the later gen engineers at major tech firms to blow their salaries up.
There used to be an ethos to do the right thing, however the people who came to tech later aren’t driven by the same values. They (understandably) would like to get paid rather than go on a crusade.
Incentives make the world go round.
We also, thankfully, don’t need a clique of very smart people to save us. We’re all in this together. (Except the psychopaths wanting to enslave us.)