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Comment by 3beard | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could work myself up into some kind of indignation, but what I really believe is this: if you willingly submit yourself to the cesspits of human banality (i.e. Facebook, Tinder and all the likes), you pretty much deserve all the crap that will be unloaded on you.

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So there's the dystopia. The humans become the nearly identical constantly replaceable consumable that the algorithms steer across a dozen generations, mating them and connecting them together to father the algorithms' own silicon ends whatever those happen to turn out to be.

I hope they don't like paperclips.

>identical constantly replaceable consumable that the algorithms steer across a dozen generations, mating them and connecting them together to father the algorithms' own silicon ends

Surprisingly precise description of life (up to sillicon / carbon substitution)

Oh please. There was never a Divine Plan for your life, and there's never going to be a mash-up sub-intelligent algorithm that overrides your own direction over your own life. It takes other intelligent agents to do that, ie: people.

Crappy classification or regression algorithms being misapplied as cheap, stupid business ideas... are basically nothing like super-intelligent paper-clip maximizers.

Richard Dawkins paints a similar picture in "The Blind Watchmaker".

In some way it's ironic that with all that effort we've spent on AI so far, simple evolution may yet beat us to the punch as far as AGI is concerned. Makes you wonder about how irrelevant humans are in the grand scheme of things.

With all due respect, I think this smacks of elitism.

The bigger problem IMHO is that spending too much time on those things (and perhaps here, or the Internet in general) leads to dopamine tolerance, aka "ADD". Which cannot be good for lasting relationships.

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