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Comment by jader201 | Hacker News Reader

While I get the spirit of your message, advertising has been around for over a century, and I don’t believe it has done near the damage to society over that timespan that AI will likely do in a decade (if we’re not careful and responsible).

I also don’t believe addiction and other psychological exploits are used for the sole purpose of ad revenue. There are other more direct forms of monetization involved, such as microtransactions and subscriptions.

If you really want to blame something, it really all comes down to one word:

Greed.

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> I also don’t believe addiction and other psychological exploits are used for the sole purpose of ad revenue

Instagram? Tiktok? Facebook?

Social media feeds off addiction to generate ad revenue.

And how much damage has social media done to political and social institutions and to collective mental health?

Ads on other web properties are not weaponised in the same way.

Social media feeds off addiction to popularity, a human thing. Remove the ads and it will not stop.

It won't stop but it will slow down to a crawl.

Eating too much fruits has never been healthy, but gorging oneself on raw sugar is worse. Perfect is the enemy of the good.

It will not slow to a crawl because popularity = power. Even if the the platforms themselves stop ads, the users will not, either for other or for themselves.

Ads are what allow these products to exist. Take away ads, and the platform cannot sustain its own server requirements. People won't pay for stuff like this; it's only mainstream because it's ad-supported.

Agree that greed is the core reason.

Advertising has become 'active', very recently in the overall lifespan of advertising. For most of it's lifespan it was passive, it blared out at you from the TV or radio or bus stop. Now, however, it's reaching out and taking pieces of you back for analysis and reconstruction, and on-selling to any other entity interested in doing the same.

The reason is greed, yes.

We can't regulate human greed, but we can regulate the manifestation of its symptoms.

We can also choose not to work towards expanding the capacity of said symptoms.

> We can also choose not to work towards expanding the capacity of said symptoms.

Not if we need to eat and raise our kids. Then we need careers, which depend on what everyone else is doing, so we can't stop, our own future depends on how competitive we remain in the new context. I see an idealist streak here, some kind of naive platonism that ignores everything runs at a cost and nothing executes for free like platonic heaven. We can't take decisions that contradict our own needs.

Despite what the media leads you to think, there are still jobs that provide a living without contributing much to current social problems. You can do ok in medium tier cities with an average job, and still live in a safe neighborhood. If you pick a state with a good university system, the kids can get a good education without any debt. They won’t automatically get the connections of a top-tier school, but if you teach them the importance of connections early then they will do well (these schools often have strong alumni networks).

Continuing to work for evil people is a choice. Don’t brush it off.

To think greed is some innate human trait seems to not be greatly substantiated by evidence on early human behavior. To see what we call greed all around us in market economy is only proof how we're all drilled from early childhood onwards to exhibit this behavior of greed, in accumulating money to survive, to archieve social status and approval etc. Drastic changes the economic system, and the very behavior set we are all programmed into, would more than likely regulate the behavior of greed. Though obviously that is extremely unlikely to happen.

Well said.

One hand you have proven damage. And if we are honest, the damage is way more than what has been proven; especially 2nd/3rd order which are easy to reason but hard to prove.

On the other hand you have pure speculation.

Not only that, AI has been immensely liberating/empowering for many ordinary people (That's why these AI companies have millions of users).

It's a shame so many people only resigned for ethical reasons once their employer's threat level progressed from exploitative to existential. Better late than never, but that does not excuse their tardiness.

Sure, that's a fair point. Advertising is just a mechanism cost wise that enables the platforms which contain addictive qualities.

I suppose yeah... It's just greed and corruption.

The incentive structures are wrong/poor/malignant

Joe Camel would like a word.

Fentanyl: what's the pressing issue? Coffee has been around for centuries.

If you really want to blame something, it really all comes down to one word: substance use disorder.

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