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Comment by codeduck | Hacker News Reader

Advertising is an irritation. AI is a threat.

Advertising has the appearance of representing an on-going revenue source for an increasing number of devices used in our daily lives by way of surveillance and creation of a picture of an individuals habits and psychology in order to manipulate said psychology to induce the individual to spend more money on literally worthless shit.

That is a threat to the fundamental stability of society.

Advertising is surveillance, and surveillance is a threat.

Are you inferring that AI is not a surveillance tool?

I don’t think that’s what he meant. They both are surveillance tools. He’s just upset only one of those is making people advertise their leave in protest.

fair

Only if you are cognitively challenged.

Correct, but advertising was a better disguise for surveillance. AI goes well beyond surveillance and many evil use cases are now obvious to more people.

The dire state most western democracies have found themselves in is a direct consequence of the work big tech did over the last 15+ years.

AI is concerning in some aspects, yes, but the loss of a shared reality has nothing to do with that, and is even more scary.

It’s funny how the [very real] thing that normalizes the exploitation of user data, enables “reel casinos,” suffocates creators and replaces them with “influencers,” etc. is compared with the [still very abstract] danger of AI.

Even before big money was on the table, people didn’t blink an eye at starting to work for Google/Facebook, “solving fun tasks.”

(OP here) FWIW I despise the addictiveness, er engagement optimization that Google and others do. I have said so inside and outside the company many, many times. I would never have agreed to work on that stuff myself. One of the hobby projects I would like to work on is exploring how to use personal AI to beat those algorithms.

I respect the argument for not working for a company that does addictiveness work anywhere, even if you don't work on it yourself. But that's not where I drew the line.

Also FWIW I disagree the danger of AI is abstract. A lot is happening right now, in education for example.

> how to use personal AI to beat those algorithms

+1000

So it is ok to believe (even despise) it is bad but as long as I don't work directly on it but my super big paycheck gets funded by it, all good! Cheers!!

Google (unlike Meta say) makes a lot of money from a lot of things that have nothing to do with the addictiveness optimization.

Thanks for sharing this.

I actually work in education and can share the following first-hand: the things we now build, the ways we now educate, and all the opportunities for reaching out to students are beautiful. I foresee that _many_ people will cut corners now, but I believe that, in the end, we will get a new generation of education that is personal and humane.

I don't mean this as preaching some shiny future that I hope will magically arrive. I already see these things happening. And I also see all the ways people misuse the tools or take shortcuts.

Educators with good intentions, skills, and powerful tools will always beat ignorance and laziness relying on those same tools.

To a guy who knows nothing about nuclear physics, an atomic bomb is very abstract until it blows up and becomes very concrete. Should we wait until it explodes to consider the risk?

Comparison between LLMs and atomic weapons just mystifies the issue.

I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685036

Is there anything specific you, as an LLM equivalent of a nuclear physicist (if that’s a fair comparison), can highlight in terms of these imminent dangers?

There's no "imminent" danger, but right now we are on a course where ASI will be developed. There are many reasons to believe that ASI will be dangerous. There are some books you could read...

> Advertising is an irritation

I think it's worse than that. Or at least, the products that have been built because of advertising are worse than that. Instagram/TikTok/Facebook are all ultimately just surfaces to serve ads, but they've wormed their way into their users' consciousness in fairly insidious ways

Advertising turned brains of entire generation (or maybe a few) into mush.

All intellectual, psych and social scores are in free fall since introduction of ad-supported attention grabbing internet.

AI is theorethical threat. Advertising is a constant detriment to our brains, societies and culture.

If AI can mitigate a fraction of the damage that ads do it will have massive positive impact.

We live in times where everyone can pick their own flavor of apocalypse to be scared of. Ads are leading us into Idiocracy since ~2004 and made huge progress towards it.

Google and Meta's wealth came at the cost of civilization getting sucked dry of its attention and mental capacity.

AI is a threat if you're a messy codebase, an unsolved math problem, or cancer. Otherwise you only have an improved quality of living to look forward to IMO.

Please let me know when it starts

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