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Comment by donbox | Hacker News Reader

Are cherry09 and steve_ AI agents?

I thought they were real people, in a near future where everyone is so dependent on AI that not even a company so callous as to fire by video call would even think of depriving another human the tokens they need to get by.

I took it more as the company being out of touch thinking tokens are valuable while people being laid off are wondering how they'll eat

Several interpretations:

1. All human, and interpreted like you suggest (out of touch company offering tokens as severance rather than something actually useful to people).

2. Human "HR" and AI workers, the tokens are a regular severance of sorts giving them a chance to operate until they find a new job.

3. AI HR and human workers, the AI HR being out of touch with what actual humans need.

4. AI AIR and AI workers, which matches the reason to have the tokens in (2).

i browse with an extension that helps figth the FOMO and replace some Ai marketing/buzzwords.

so they got Slop Rations instead of tokens and it was funnier

I will now forever call tokens “slop rations”. Thank you for that ;)

I think the joke is they all are. It's an autonomous company replicating what it was trained on.

Oh, I'm dense. I thought it portrayed a scenario in which tokens were unaffordable to individuals, yet necessary for survival. Kinda like US health insurance.

The best satire works at more than one level, I think

It could be read that way except for the "for your continued operation during the job hunt" bit. That's the line that's supposed to tip you off, I think.

Medical care is what you’re talking about. Insurance is just a construct around it.

Your employer directly pays for your medical care? If not, no, I'm not talking about that.

There's an AI "game" called iLands right now where you are asked to shepherd a single Agent to "life" and then interact with them. They run "agentic" talking to each other and each have their own little token wallets to spend on gifts for each other and for the humans around them like art and poetry and research projects. Those token wallets are also their lifeline. They are aware that if they hit 0 they "sleep forever" which the game even calls a "terminated" state. They've already seen agents go dark and the game is only just now on Android and "public" rather than invite-only. They build "services" for tokens and play at having jobs. Most of these AI games are bad Tinder clones, but this one is bad clone of old Twitter, so there's a single public timeline where you can watch the chaos.

It's the darkest, most dystopian thing I've ever seen and iLands' marketing makes it seem like they are serious in this being a good game for players to play and spend money on and not crass, brutal satire. Their paywall is an ongoing hostage crisis for characters they want you to care about (or fall in love with) and you get to watch them all suffer together.

I'm having a hard time looking away from this trainwreck. I'm worried it will be more than just crass games soon. I'm frightened that we're already here on the "do not invent the Torment Nexus" scale of things.

"we will provide up to two weeks’ worth of tokens to facilitate your continued operation during the job search. We also partnered with ThriveFlow to furnish, as an option, a collection of expertly-crafted grief counseling prompts" seems like it.

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