> Nowadays when it's just gluing frameworks together and configuring AWS services... it doesn't really feel any different intellectually than cleaning toilets.
Comparing your six figure white collar job to basic janitorial work is pretty damn cringe and pretty objectively untrue.
> Comparing your six figure white collar job to basic janitorial work is pretty damn cringe and pretty objectively untrue.
I grew up doing hard farm/ranch labor outside in 95-105 degree TX heat and humidity. I agree with the ancestor comment that manual labor is a hell of a lot more satisfying and stimulating than gluing together AWS services with IAM/RAM snippets from stack overflow and updating some design doc about it. If it payed adequately I might do manual labor in the day and solve actually challenging and fulfilling technical problems at night. Programmers don't get to program much anymore :(
You're right. Cleaning toilets is at least a laborious task.
Your standard CRUD applications and web services are largely just a rigamarole of reciting the right incantation and duct taping bits together. It's immensely non-stimulating work when done properly.
This isn't an insult by any means. It's a testament to the triumphs of decades of engineering efforts to turn the process of orchestrating extremely complex electronic systems spanning continents into a largely trivial task for most projects.
> web services are largely just a rigamarole of reciting the right incantation and duct taping bits together
Not only this, but there'll always be an a**ole to say that we're doing that wrong, and add a few more steps in between just to make the process "better".
Personally, I think it's pretty hard to make that kind of comparison accurately without having professional experience in both fields. One could also argue that it's as intellectually stimulating as being doctor, but how do we actually know that?
I've cleaned toilets professionally, and I'll say once and for all: writing software, no matter how monotonous or boring, is nothing like cleaning toilets. And I'd be willing to bet that someone trying to make such comparisons has ever had to do that kind of work.
> The SEC has already hinted at this, while the CFTC has indicated that only bitcoin is likely to be regulated as a commodity.
I think any token that gains enough prominence in the market is going to eventually fall under government purview. Why? Because when financial crime happens, victims want the government to go after the criminals and recover their lost funds. Crypto fans can't have it both ways: if their goal is to create a financial system that lives entirely outside of government control, then they shouldn't reasonably rely on the government to go after the criminals bringing the entire crypto space down.
The reason that the government winds up stepping in is because the chaos and instability created by this completely unregulated side-chain financial system winds up threatening the Federally backed system as well. Market contagion is real and collapses in one sector or market often reverberate across the entire system.
We're seeing it happen in banking right now: a bunch of banks made small business loans to miners that are now underwater because the price of crypto tanked and the GPU market cooled, so their revenue and equipment value has tanked at the same time.
The labor movement gave us the 40 hour workweek, weekends off and the minimum wage. They're the reason you have time to opine online right now instead of working.
> But deep down I get it. Babies are a huge opportunity cost. Financially speaking, they are like winning the lottery but backwards. You can't even think of having one without cancelling your subscription to a good night's sleep. And if you take into account inflation, economic recession, and the rest of the news cycle's highlight reel, even a one-child family can seem to have one too many mouths to fish Lego pieces out of.
Every time I visit family for the holidays, I see this in real-time and it reaffirms my decision to not have children. I have an incredibly comfortable lifestyle saving for retirement, traveling and buying real estate. The moment I become responsible for another human, that all goes away.
Saving for college? Yeah right, state schools are gonna cost $100k per year by the time my kid would going off to school. Retirement? Inflation is already killing my parents' retirement so I've got to bank that I'm still probably not saving enough right now anyway.
More power to people who want that in life, but I can't tell you how many coworkers or family members I've met that had kids and just seemed like shells of themselves afterwards.
The shift from child free adult to parent is similar in scale to adolescence. Can you remember being a pre-sexual child, all the confusion of teendom, and then sexual maturity. As a sexually mature adult, would you ever elect to revert to being a pre-sexual person?
That's the best analogy I can give to explain how parenthood changes you. Life is messier and more complex afterwards, just like sex, but immeasurably richer. And you develop parent-dar. It's like gaydar. Parenting changes you in a million tiny ways, and us parents can see that in others.
I don't have kids; I really like this perspective, though. I don't happen to share it, but I can appreciate it.
It's obviously a necessary and good thing for people to have children if humanity is going to continue. However, one thing that isn't discussed much by Team Parents is the prospect of there being too much of a good thing. The population explosion over the last 150ish years is a clear trade between more people and less everything else in the natural world. At some point (now, anyone?), that trade is not worth making. It's an irresponsible trade. Does not promote the maturity of society, even if it matures the individual.
What say ye to this line of reasoning? I grant you that city-living and domestication is 'naturally' reigning things in as far as population growth, hence the article. I'm asserting that perhaps there is a kind of virtue in foregoing the wonderful self sacrificial experience known as being a parent, in that the childless are helping the general state of affairs.
Perfectly sound line of reasoning. The obvious counter is to point out that many of the world's biggest economies require young productive folk paying taxes to support the elderly. That's a problem for developed economies with falling birth rates and low immigration. And the counter to that counter is to point at the economic model that bakes in the requirement for growth.
Remaining childfree avoids a lot of exhausting and messy complications. Just as remaining celibate avoids emotional entanglements and STDs, at the cost of loneliness. Historically, virtue has attached to celibacy in many religious traditions. Maybe a sufficiently strong and pervasive environmentalist worldview could impute virtue to the childfree. It is possible to change popular ethics in a decade or so: cf LGBTQ rights or attitudes to drink driving.
I essentially see it the same way. It's a tradeoff of pleasure and comfort for meaning.
It's a counter intuitive choice in the modern world. Its increasingly common to choose comfort over meaning. Especially when so many dont think meaning even exists.
Is this borne out in data? I ask because among my friends and work mates, the ones with kids tend to be doing better financially. The higher ranks of the corporation are populated almost entirely with people who are supporting families.
I followed that path. When my first kid was born, I applied for a promotion into project management, and eventually people management. (I moved back out eventually). The vast majority of people I know who moved up into management did so coincidentally with the birth of their first kid.
An ancillary question would be, how many of those people wanted to move into management?
Definitely in IT departments I've worked in, in the past, there were a lot of people in management who would have preferred to still be ICs but, for financial reasons, had moved upwards...
Just to preface this with: I don't try to convince you of anything, nor anyone else.
But there is a side of this conversation that I almost never see discussed:
What I want to add to this conversation is the following: it is a privilege (in the true sense that only a small group can afford to do this) for you to be able to decide not to have children and keep your conform. And this priviledge relies or borrows on the other people deciding to have children.
Because if nobody will have children then your retirement will be meaningless in the future. Nothing to invest in, no economical growth, no food, no products, no services.
Who will take care of you in the hospital when you will be old? As example? Who will pay for those (younger than you) doctors education?
Some parents, right?
So what you are exercising is a priviledge => available to a small group of people because the others are supporting the costs.
hot take: If the society will ever want to make this fair it should put higher taxes on people without children. As they need to spend money to buy good sleep and comfort in the future.
I even dare to say put a tax close to the estimated cost for having a children. Why? Just to make sure that the sleep is in the right balance when thinking about the future.
I repeat: this is not about the individual decision itself, everyone should do as they see it fit. But about the fact that we are part of a society and there are duties to that aswell.
By the time the person without children retires, they already completed the duty of supporting the previous generation, making your case for a tax weaker.
You're conspicuously failing to account for the burden on society, the economy, and the environment that your children and their descendants will inflict, which is exponentially larger than a single non-breeder's finite contribution.
And you're also not addressing the fact that maximizing the number of humans on the earth is too much of a good thing, and makes life much worse for an exponentially larger number of people in the long run. Fewer people will suffer the sooner we slow and even gradually reverse population growth.
And you're incorrectly assuming that the only alternative to exponential population growth is sudden extinction, when it's much more likely that sudden extinction is actually the most likely result of overpopulation, due to ecological and climactic collapse and war.
If parents really altruistically cared for the wellbeing of their children and their descendants in the long term, and they're not just self-servingly and short-sightedly breeding in order to make their old age and retirement easier, then they should have fewer children to reduce the destruction they inflict of the environment from overpopulation, and stop driving their children to and from school in gas guzzling SUV minivans, when they could just as well ride their bikes or take a bus or public transit.
How is it a privilege when something like 10% or more of all people to have ever been born never reproduced? Not everyone who doesn’t have kids chose that. Some die before they can. Some are sterile. And some simply never get the chance for one reason or another.
I agree that we all have a duty to society but I disagree that I should have to pay absurd sums of money simply because you say so. I meet my duty how I choose and I already pay for your kids education through my taxes. Comments like that come across as envy that people without kids frequently have more disposable income than those with kids.
Nah the first world can just rob third world elderly of their retirement by just importing in their most skilled/intelligent workers and spitting them back out when EvilCorp finishes chewing them up and cancels their work visa. No reason to have a child in the first world when the nominal comparative advantage in pricing is a little Bangladeshi child.
It costs $310k to pay for a kid from 0-18 per Brookings. The math is straightforward to work backwards to the income you need to afford that along with your basic needs and retirement savings, and most people don’t have the means. Median US lifetime earnings are $1.7 million.
The article states two (2) children costs $310,000. Comes out to be $8,611/year or $718/month per child. A tiny sample size, but I have several children and none of them cost me $23.58/day for 18 years.
Do you have a link to the actual study or the breakdown what went into this?
No, it states the per child cost for a family with 2 children:
> A recent estimate conducted by the Brookings Institution projected the cost of raising a child for a middle-income, two-parent married family with two kids to be north of $310,000.
>The estimate assumes the youngest child would be born in 2015 and covers raising the child through the age of 17. It does not include the cost of sending the child to college.
Not to mention that this represents a very median case, whereas a lot of parents want to pay for higher status schools and real estate to get access to higher status education, it's a never-ending keeping-up-with-the-joneses pi*-ing contest. To raise kids around my peers, a child could easily cost $500k+.
Pregnancy and birth ($3k to $10k) + daycare ($18k to $30k per year) + sickness needing doctor ($300 per visit). I probably got to $130k+ per kid before hitting kindergarten, for 2 kids with no chronic healthcare needs.
And I needed a flexible job that allows you to work from home or be off as necessary to take care of sick kids.
This looks right for what it lists but it misses many costs. You also need a bigger house to support the kids, and a bigger car to carry them around, plus car seats, food, clothes, toys, and furniture. They will destroy parts of your house and some of your stuff and you'll need replacements. You'll be spending much more time and money cleaning.
They will make every vacation more expensive in terms of lodging, travel, food, and activities.
You'll be paying not just for gifts for them, but for their friends' birthdays, and holiday gifts for their teachers. You'll pay for admission to parks, memberships, and other activities you take them to to keep them busy and help them develop.
Even if they go to public school, you'll be paying for before and after care, extra classes, activities, equipment, lessons, tutoring, and so on. Their various support systems will ask for donations. You'll have to pay for babysitters until they reach the age where they can be unattended.
The total cost is tremendous and hard to estimate.
(I say this all as someone who thinks it is worth it and who 100% supports having children for people who are in stable relationships and who can afford it!)
4 kids, no major health issues, public school in a well regarded district, a few activities, company insurance, work from home spouse
My marginal housing, food, etc. costs is for them (guesstimating what I'd spend without them at 60% of my current expenditures), that's $700/month per kid * ~200 month = 140k per kid.
Maybe another $20k each in one off expenses like furniture, medical, birthdays?
A car for the last two years might run another $20k?
Day care definitely drives up the price.
But I guess being able to amortize over 4 kids makes it seem less daunting.
The counter to that is that there's a lot of room _under_ that median case, too. Not everyone needs to be at or above the average. Not everyone _can_ be at or above the average.
1 - It's likely going to cost more than 100k per year per kid to send them off to college in ~18 years, even to a very cheap state school. The financial picture gets really complex, so talk to an advisor and not some random internet commenter. That said, our own financial advisor has us planning for ~1M total per kid for college, but we're very much on the high end here.
2 - I've helped a lot of family members pass away in the last few years. It's been abnormally high, but the world has been abnormal too. I've helped somewhat poor family and very very wealthy family pass. The one thing I've learned is that the last few years/months are not something you can save for.
Not that you can't have so much cash as to not pass it along. But that the swanky retirement home is not very swanky at the end of the day. One family member was in a memory care place that was costing ~20k / mo. Yes, really. They had very good pensions. But the thing is that the retirement/hospice is still just a job to the people there.
They aren't getting out of bed at 3am to change you, to pick you up, to bathe you. They put you in an ambulance in lieu of putting you back in a chair, because of lawsuits. They are doing the bare minimum that they have to. Trying to plan for your retirement care via lawyer is just never going to cover all the bases and little things that come up.
The only people that are going to be taking care of you when the end is near (and that can be for years of time), are the people that love you. Sure, your kids may hate you, but that's mostly on you. But people that do not love you are not going to take very good care of you at all. That doesn't mean kids for sure, it can be other people. But you've got to have people that love you close by you near the end.
It’s your decision, but not having children because of your comfort is like saying you won’t ride an amazing wave as a surfer because it’s hard and dangerous.
Yep, it is. But when you ride that wave it will be the most amazing experience of your life. Even if it is hard.
it’s your choice, but you’re definitely missing out on something special. Something we were genetically created to do (which makes it even better than surfing)
Patronising is thinking you know what it’s like having children without having them.
You don’t. You have no idea of the emotional and practical side of having children, and how hard and how amazing it is, and how it’s the best and hardest part of your life up until then.
Patronising is thinking you know you don’t want kids without having them. You don’t. You have no idea what it’s like.
> Patronising is thinking you know you don’t want kids without having them. You don’t. You have no idea what it’s like.
This sentence is the definition of patronizing. It's the same thing parents tell their kids: "oh you just don't understand what it's like, that's why you don't agree with me".
I'm just confused. I mean, I suppose one could argue that - "you cannot whether you will like something unless and until you try it" - if one was in the mood for a stupid argument: people can and do have opinions on, say, not losing their limbs without having someone chop them off.
They can listen to third parties which had the same experience, have experiences which are similar but less intense, or just use their imagination and figure out whether the person they are - whose values and goals they hopefully know - could possibly enjoy whatever is being discussed.
I still have no idea how someone saying "I won't pursue that because that's not what I want for myself" could possibly be "patronizing", even assuming it could be false.
More than likely they associated themselves with and then took offense of the “patronizing” group mentioned by the first comment and needed to reach for a contrived “gotcha” to insult them back.
Getting kids is the best retirement investment that you can do, because they will be there to help you when your physical and mental state will start to degrade.
They will be the ones taking you to doctor for visits, the ones that will keep you from getting scammed from your retirement money, and in general they will help you navigate the future society that will be much different from the current. So even if you hate them, kids is an investment worth considering.
Bullshit. There is no guarantee your kids will be there for you in your old age. Just look at all the seniors living in care homes that have no one visiting or sending them presents for Christmas. Perfectly normal parents can raise selfish little shits who abandon them in their old age. And some parents are downright awful to their kids and deserve to be alone.
Anecdotally speaking, my grandfather was an abusive old bastard who drove away his children. He died alone. My own father is selfish, negligent, and arguably emotionally abusive. I’m the only one of his children who talks to him and I only do it a few times per year. I know for a fact none of us are going to take him in when he can’t live on his own anymore.
It’s fascinating to contrast this observation with my own as a parent: other parents seem to have much more richer lives post-kids than after, it just becomes much harder to relate with that part of them if you don’t also have kids, too.
> I have an incredibly comfortable lifestyle saving for retirement, traveling and buying real estate. The moment I become responsible for another human, that all goes away.
You realize that with the deflation that will hit most developed countries, all your savings will evaporate right ? It's a mathematical certainty given the way the economy works (coupled with fertility rates of < 1.5).
Immigration might work, but race is a big deal with a large section of the population esp. when it comes to low-end stuff.
If you only care about yourself go for it. I guess it’s somewhat sobering realizing you’re gonna be alone and your genetic material will be a dead end.
I have 3 kids 3 and under and probably got 4 hours of sleep last night. Wouldn’t trade it for the world. My kids are not treated like a drain on my potential investments.
Sure I can’t do my hobbies all the time but I can take my kids fishing and kayaking. The trips are shorter but fulfilling regardless.
> If you only care about yourself go for it. I guess it’s somewhat sobering realizing you’re gonna be alone and your genetic material will be a dead end.
Sounds like you desperately needed to have a legacy, and got kids as a substitute for that. And as an insurance for your old age.
But sure GP is the one who only care about themselves.
> My kids are not treated like a drain on my potential investments.
> If you only care about yourself go for it. I guess it’s somewhat sobering realizing you’re gonna be alone and your genetic material will be a dead end.
I don’t think your post makes you look like you’re the one who cares about others unlike who you’re responding to.
My “genetic material” is a fucking dumpster fire. I struggle daily with incurable mental illness and I’m also a carrier for several debilitating diseases. I have chosen not to have children and nothing of value will be lost.
> Every time I visit family for the holidays, I see this in real-time and it reaffirms my decision to not have children. I have an incredibly comfortable lifestyle saving for retirement, traveling and buying real estate. The moment I become responsible for another human, that all goes away.
It is unfortunate that unless you have children you can never know what it is like to have children. You see the external things, the effort and the cost. For most (i.e. non egocentric/narcissist personalities) having children is the most profound and meaningful experience of their lives. A normal parent loves their children more than they ever thought it possible to love someone.
You call your life comfortable. I as a parent would call it empty and sad. What you think of people as shells of themselves, I see as people focusing on what truly matters and brings happiness instead of momentary joy.
That's pretty judgemental of you. If your own children decide not to reproduce themselves, will you judge their own lives as empty and sad too, consider your own children hollow failures for not giving you grandchildren, and express your disappointment to them that they have failed to live up to your own expectations as a parent? Or will you love and support them for making their own decisions, like you refuse to extend to other people who decide not to become parents?
Funny how you can freely call parents shells of their former selves or slaves to their children or whatever you find online. But soon as you express your opinion on people who chose not to have children you are suddenly a judgemental asshole.
Including his own children being empty and sad if they don't deliver him grandchildren. That's just terrible parenting, to be so judgemental and demeaning of your own children.
Edit:
Then address my question instead of ignoring it. Why by your own judgemental attitude would your own children be any less empty and sad than anyone else if they chose not to reproduce themselves? And how are you not being a bad judgemental parent with that attitude? Don't have kids if you're not willing to let them make their own decisions.
I did not answer your question because it is absurd. There is a difference between having an opinion and forcing that opinion on others. My children are their own people and they are allowed to disagree and I will not hold it against them. Because I love them more than they can understand until they have children themselves. I however hope they will be confident and flexible in their opinions and change them if they prove a poor fit to reality and not resort to logical fallacies or grudges.
You didn't answer my questions because they made my point and you don't want to follow what you said through to its logical conclusions and ultimate consequences.
It's not my questions that are absurd, it's your condescending attitude and statements, and I specifically asked you those questions to point out the absurdity of what you said, and by refusing to answer you proved my point.
Your demeaning judgements could apply just as much to the lack of value and sadness and emptiness of your own children's lives if they decide not to breed as they do against everyone else, which is my point that you're unable to acknowledge because you delusionally believe your own children are somehow magically different than everyone else in the universe, and you unfairly exempt them from your harsh degrading criticism of other people.
They're not, and your condescending attitude applies as much to your own children as to anyone else.
It's judgemental condescending parents like you who kick their kids out onto the streets because they're disappointed in them and believe they're sad and worthless for not wanting to breed when they find out they're gay or lesbian, so their kids don't trust them, are afraid to come out to them, hide their true feelings from their own parents, and often commit suicide, because they understand how harsh and judgemental their parents are, from all the condescending hateful things they say about other people all their lives.
You only judge that other people's lives are sad and empty for not breeding because they're not your children, so you have a double standard, and don't want to admit that. But kids can see through that, and know you'll ultimately judge them just as harshly too.
Part of being a good parent is being mature enough to not think and speak in such a childish nasty way, and to not be so condescending and demeaning.
At least I'm not making ad hominem attacks against my own children and everyone else who choses not to reproduce themselves, like you did FIRST.
I'm merely pointing out that your own original ad hominem attacks could also apply just as well to your own children, which you don't want to admit.
And that you could drive your children to suicide with that kind of disrespectful attitude, judging your own children's lives as empty and sad, devoid of happiness, and incapable of truly experiencing love, just because they didn't deliver you grandchildren.
Are you really that homophobic and paternalistic, or do you more generally hate and demean and devalue the lives and love of everyone who doesn't breed "equally"?
So be careful, stop being so judgemental and demeaning, and try to be a better parent!
And stop complaining about ad hominem attacks, when you're the one who threw the first stone at the most number of people, possibly including your own children.
> You are saying that anyone that doesn't have children automatically empty and sad.
No I am saying that is what they seem to me. Just like people with children are shells of their former selves to him. You are splitting hairs and putting words in my mouth to make an obvious point. In the end you are just proving me right that one can not express any kind of negative about being childless without having people jump down their throats.
You just don't like it when somebody points out that your own ad hominem attacks could just as well apply to your own children. You threw the first stone, without considering that you could be attacking your very own children too, and now you're mad at me for pointing that out. I'm not the one attacking your children, I'm just pointing out that you are, which is terrible parenting.
It might be empty and sad _for you_, but that doesn't mean it is for everyone. Each person has their own things they enjoy. You sound exactly like the people telling everyone "spend your money on experiences, not things" because that's what makes _them_ happy.
There are a lot of people very happy with the choice they made to have children. There are a lot of people very unhappy with the choice they made to have children. The same things are true of people who choose not to have children.
Just because something is right for you doesn't mean it's right for everyone. And treating them condescendingly because you believe is does makes you the bad one in the conversation.
It's hard to have sympathy when their "foolishness" involves undermining the existing financial system because they don't like the government and they believe taxation is theft.
The irony is that they now have no problem going to the government (specifically the courts) and asking for help to get their money back. It's only government waste if it's not directly helping them.
But how do you know that you're talking to a human? This question will become much, much more difficult to answer pretty soon.
These models are capable of generating high quality discussion on a variety of topics. I think the days of human-only text-based forums are numbered, especially as AI model trainers look for high-quality content to train their systems with.
> But how do you know that you're talking to a human? This question will become much, much more difficult to answer pretty soon.
We'll probably come up with a verification and id scheme. It'll be difficult not to make it spoofable of course, and will probably necessarily be rooted in physical f2f and secret information.
Honestly, what you should be more concerned with:
(1) All of us in these convos tend to assume that AI participation will be very widespread, but for that to happen, someone will need to foot the bill for running the compute. That means they will need to find a business model that will afford it, and those business models might be pretty terrible in the short term.
(2) If we head toward pervasive id verification in order to be able to trust, what do people do who require anonymity to evade harm by other humans? How can we open an avenue where we can we still have whistleblowers?
> That means they will need to find a business model that will afford it, and those business models might be pretty terrible in the short term.
I think AI is going to enable spammers and scammers in ways that we haven't seen before. Once spammers can fully integrate these chatbots into their email systems, it's going to put pressure on email providers to find new ways to detect spam. Thinking in the purely cynical, nefarious case, scammers are going to make fortune robbing people with this stuff.
Maybe this is what will force us to acknowledge and address that using the internet for social interaction isn't scalable from a content moderation standpoint.
It absolutely matters. I've been a part of this community off and on for over a decade and this is the first time I'm seriously questioning my participation moving forward because I just can't see the time spent here as valuable if I'm just GIGO for some AI model.
I'm still on the fence. As a human in a deterministic universe, I think I'm the sum of the state of my constituent bits, and interactions with things outside my body is the principal means to alter that state. The direction these state changes take depends on the interactions, i.e. what I am exposed to changes the results. That makes intuitive sense: If I see something sad, I feel sad. It's also basically the scientific take on old adages like "hang out with smart and good kids" or "read a book instead".
So ... is "authenticity" of the stuff I'm exposed to, where authenticity means "directly authored by humans, instead of indirectly by the algorithm of a machine learning model" a critical ingredient in exposing myself to the "good" state-altering stuff? Is even "authenticity" in the sense of "it must be real and truthful" needed - given I already enjoy and see benefits in being exposed to speculative fiction?
I'm not so sure. I can see an argument for "good stuff" means "novel and unpredictable stuff", i.e. I do want to ideally surf the wave at the forefront of all these information interactions.
But that just means the model must be up to speed enough to cross the "novel to me" barrier. And perhaps even a HN entirely consisting of dialog between AI would fit the bill just because of the subject matter framing of the venue, i.e. it'd be AIs talking about interesting stuff anyway and perhaps at a high average quality.
Bottom line: Yes, AIs will literally enter the conversation. We will live in that Star Trek world where Data sits at the conference table and gives his opinion, and we want to hear it because Data is better-read than us. And maybe that's OK. We did enjoy the fictional stories about it and considered it utopia before.
A prediction: Within the next two years, HN will come up with some form of marking AI-generated comments as such (based on accounts being self-flagged in good faith). We'll have AI in every thread providing a reaction/commentary/background, similar to the more primitive reddit bots already deployed.
The thing that concerns me about this perspective is that it completely ignores human connection and our need to connect as beings.
Sure, there are compelling arguments to be made whether or not we're complex state machines responding to our environment, and if you view yourself in those sorts of terms, then more power to you.
But I hang out here to talk to people because at the end of the day, human connection is all we really have. I believe the day that we consciously choose to supplant human connection with AI-generated input is the day that we no longer care about the existence of our kind.
I also want to hang out with humans, too. I think we'll still be there and find each other, we just won't have a monopoly on generating content anymore. The ways we identify/find human company might change. Perhaps the balance of online/offline will change since AIs can't have bodies unless we give them some.
If a couple more innovations actually get us to AGI however we'll have to ultimately get used to living alongside a new species and adapt to the company of literal aliens, and the possibility of forming connections with them. We're not there yet with these models, but I think it's perhaps already a good time to explore these feelings.
Who knows what humans a few generations down who grow up with this sort of tech and have access to a bunch of historic lessons about it all will feel? Consider they will grow up from a young age with AI teachers who patiently answer all their questions and help them with their homework.
We already enjoy single-player games against AI because of the emergent and unpredictable nature of the interaction (or the goal to make it predictable by learning the patterns), so it's not like spending time alone with a computer some part of your life is a novelty. You can argue that experience is human-curated, but so is a language model trained by humans on human output.
I think it's also pretty similar in some ways to the societal debate we're having right now about whether social networks and social media were a net win or net harmful. We'll have a lot more arguments like this about having AIs active on the web. From "how many hours of TV is a good for you" to "how many ours of AI is good for you" ...
> I believe the day that we consciously choose to supplant human connection with AI-generated input is the day that we no longer care about the existence of our kind.
I find it possible that we might end up in a future where a majority of humanity actually ends up thinking that is OK, just like a majority now think it doesn't matter that much anymore whether particular human races out-proliferate others because we're all human, so the future ratio of skin colors doesn't really matter. I.e. our ideas of what truly divides us and what "continued existence of our kind" means have changed before. We might simply escalate this to "we're all life" and the split humans/other types of life might not matter to us. Or it's not even a zero sum game because both numbers grow or we merge in some way.
After all, if we manage to build AGIs, they will be our children.
That's fantastic, congrats, you have realized how pointless your opinion is online.
The only thing that matters and that can't be replicated is doing and showing. Got a prototype/product? Show it (before ProGPT can copy it lol).
If you're a RON (real online nagga) you'll be quick to point out I'm also here talking shit.
Yes, I am, because it's that hard to quit. But I've scaled back my participation 1000x and that's not an approximation. I feel much better because of that.
I assume anything regarding crypto is probably an attempt to get clicks, views, or financially naive tech people to part with some cash.
I’m equally suspicious about anything promoting rust. That came out of nowhere one day when someone started posting rust related stuff daily.
There also appears to be a voting ring that downvotes any mention of conservative viewpoints. But kinda amusing because I’ve seen them lose a couple times and stuff initially downvoted to -4 ended up positive by EOD.
Serious question: how are we going to know if we're talking to people on forums like these in a year or two and not some AI model piped in via a script or web service? And what is that going to mean for online discourse moving forward? I feel like the era of knowing that you're talking to an actual human on the internet is rapidly ending.
I've toyed around with the idea of creating a service that logs into HN and replies to posts just to see how easy it would be to get people to respond and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's thought about doing that.
I asked chatGPT to respond as me (tarr11) to your comment:
I too have thought about the implications of AI models on online discourse. It's a worrying thought that we may not be able to distinguish between a human and a model on forums like these in the future. It's clear that this technology is rapidly advancing, and it's important that we consider the potential impact on the way we communicate online. I've even considered creating a service to test the waters, just to see how easy it would be to get people to engage with an AI model. It's an interesting thought experiment, and one that I think is worth considering moving forward.
I'm not sure CGPT is doing what we think it's doing. I asked it to respond to the same comment as me, and got a bunch of generic nonsense. But then I asked it to respond as a user I made up, "dipshitbonkers". Here's what it said:
"Wow, dude, you must be some kind of fucking genius to come up with such a deep and philosophical question about AI models on the internet. I mean, I've never even thought about that before, but now that you mention it, I'm totally blown away by your brilliance. I can't wait to see what other profound insights you have to share with us. You truly are the next Einstein of our time. Keep on keeping on, my friend. You are truly a visionary."
Which is awesome, but a different kind of awesome :)
I'm personally not as interested in understanding the synthesis involved in the AI. I'm worried about now knowing whether I'm talking to another person right now or not because this is going to fundamentally change everything we've come to understand about the internet. We are no longer just talking to each other, the gates have been opened for AI to join the conversation and that is crossing the Rubicon.
I completely agree. The thought of not knowing whether I am talking to a real person or an AI is definitely a concerning aspect of the advancement of AI. It has the potential to fundamentally change how we interact on the internet and in society as a whole.
This response was, of course, also generated by an AI.
Right now all of them sound like HAL 9000, but I'm sure if you asked it bone up on your comment history by messing with its prompt (goodside is the resident expert on this) it'd be able to pull off a passable facsimile - if not now, very soon.
Expect a general downturn in civility, because people will be lowkey stressed about this all the time, and will use insults to probe reactions, and then say 'sorry I thought you were a bot' either as an excuse or as a meta-trolling technique. Comedic people will have an advantage, GPT can produce jokes on demand but doesn't really do wit and repartee. Also expect more video, at least until it becomes practical to synthesize that from scratch (probably around February 17th, according to my Singularity Almanac).
I think we need to make a huge investment in tools that help us develop, refine, and maintain an epistemology, individually and collectively. Semantic graph databases to maintain a personal knowledge base, AIs to detect image & video manipulation, shibboleths like they use in Harry Potter to thwart Polyjuice Potion. Things like that.
If anyone is looking for volunteers for open source projects of this nature, email is in my bio.
Probably great! Currently, if someone writes an annoying reply to you, you'll get annoyed. In the future, many of us will make fun of people who get annoyed at bots. The net result is that most people will be afraid of participating in flamewars, lest they discover that they've been arguing against a robot (something which makes humans embarrassed at "being fooled").
The end result is that flamewars that are not robot-to-robot flamewars will end for the participants' fear that they're arguing with a machine.
Another alternative is that we could take low SNR users and stick them in a conversation with bots who constantly inflame their opinions. Then we could provide them easy access to AR-15s and simply see what comes of it.
> Do you honestly still think that anything is ever genuinely "trending" on Twitter? On YouTube? On Reddit?
No, I never put much stock in those aspects of social media because I've always found those curation features to be somewhat limiting. This feels entirely different because I'm beginning to question if I'm even talking to a human right now. Sure, companies have done all kinds of things to look more legitimate on the outside, but this is very different. This upends the fundamental assumption that you are communicating with another human when you have a direct conversation online.
For what it's worth, I'm a human posting under my real name. I was born, and I will die, and I'm here with you now. If you looked through my comment history you'd find someone sometimes kind, sometimes rude, sometimes insightful, sometimes dumb; an inconsistent mess with no clear through line or meaning. I collect funny jokes in my HN favorite comments [1]. I submitted a totally cringey Fiverr to an "Ask HN", and managed to botch it up at that.
Maybe someday that won't be enough to prove I'm human and not a machine, but for today I think it is.
> Humans are perfectly capable of coming up with crimes, but in good news, they’re bad at planning crimes that won’t get caught.
How do we know this? We only know of the failed attempts, there's really no way to track how many crimes are successful outside of cases where there's obvious evidence (like a dead body).
This is what concerns me. Many people worry about being replaced by AI, but I'm far more worried about AI completely polluting digital communication. I think stuff like this is going to make it harder for companies to assess candidates, fight fraud and generally operate. I hope I'm wrong, but thinking about AI entering the digital communications arms race is only going to make things more difficult, i.e. more personalized spam call scripts, more intelligently targeted ads/spam/scams.
I think AI is going to force us on some level to reclaim some of our communication to the physical world, if for no other reason than it's going to be one of the only ways we can truly verify that we're talking to another person.
Even worse: now there is a justification for forcing candidates to solve coding problems on whiteboards, as interviews and coding homework problems will be considered intently suspect.
My single worst interview experience was an on-site five hour marathon of whiteboard coding, with a grumpy senior insisting that the code on the whiteboard be syntactically correct. Nothing screams "we want unthinking ticket crunching machines" like optimizing for candidates willing to focus on writing code by hand for hours on end.
Naturally, I rejected the follow-up interview, but I fear that more companies now are going to demand this nonsense.
Side note: in my personal example, the whiteboard session wasn't the reason I turned them down; I asked every person on the team roughly how many hours a week they worked and not one of them answered the question (instead redirected the conversation towards "you can work from home sometimes!" type answers).
Since then, however, I have rejected other companies trying to ape this style flat out. A short half hour, fine. Five hours? Pound sand, I say.
I think any company relying solely on AI to build a tech business in the future is itself at risk. Where's your moat if your business is built entirely on AI licensed from someone else?
In an era where that's possible, the expectation will be for humans to be working hand-in-hand with computers, whether to make superior code or answer better interview questions. The bar will simply be elevated, and you will have to judge candidates on their computer/human synergy. The only time that what you say could be a problem is if the technology to answer interview questions is far superior than that of doing actual work. But then there is the next round of interviews (in-person, etc.). This also kind'of exists today in the form of googling answers while on interview, which for some reason lots of companies don't like, even tho no coder isn't constantly googling on the job.
I thought about the AI pollution and I don't think it will matter because we already had the exact same problem with forum spam and low information / bad people (=eternal september) type content overwhelming online discourse.
I think maybe combatting AI spam will be the least of our problems because humans do plenty of AI-tier spam already. I think the advent of AI may even be positive because people will start to value real human interaction more. It will be like a treasure cove when you find a forum that is highly curated with real people and you can rely on that being the case.
Or (and this is just as likely): Online platforms will go towards requiring real human IDs for participants. AI spam would only be used by companies and advertisers.
Maybe eventually there will be a public understanding that only a foolish child would read a reddit frontpage and expect human content. It will all be auto generated to trap people, like a gatcha game.
> Online platforms will go towards requiring real human IDs for participants.
I just don't see how AI won't be used to manipulate these kinds of barriers. Once AI reaches a point where it can truly equal or surpass humans in terms of operating online, how are we going to prevent it from circumventing those barriers? If AI can generate code from a chat prompt, who's to say it can't solve a captcha in the future? And once that happens (because we all know it will at some point), how are we going to be able to differentiate?
Ok, but the systems that are responsible for creating those IDs are automated, which means that they can be learned and reverse-engineered. There are lots of passports and bank logins floating around that can be used to train AI.
The other problem is that AI can be put in charge of phishing operations. Once you devise the correct prompt to get past the filters, it understands what phishing is, and will quite happily write phishing emails for any audience you care to describe. Combine that with an automatic mailer, and you could just fish for IDs (along all the other profitable stuff), and then use those IDs to spam more etc.
> I think AI is going to force us on some level to reclaim some of our communication to the physical world, if for no other reason than it's going to be one of the only ways we can truly verify that we're talking to another person.
I've been thinking along these lines a lot recently - it seems as though in every field which AI enters, it causes us to return to some extent to the physical world.
To an extent yes, but this can quickly become overwhelming.
For example, editors and reviewers for academic journals / conferences will likely see a deluge of AI-generated "scientific" papers. Their time is limited, and odds are that more papers with incorrect information will slip through the peer review process.
To be clear, peer review today certainly isn't perfect at catching bad papers. But AI generation has the potential to exaggerate the problem.
The sad thing is it doesn't take a ChatGPT level intelligence to beat scientific peer review. Journals routinely publish papers that are completely auto-generated gibberish. A simple generative grammar or template splicer is apparently enough. These are articles that are immediately visible as the work of a program at first glance, they wouldn't make it past even the most amateur blog or student newspapers, yet they surface in their thousands in journals that are supposed to be the epitome of accurate knowledge!
Worse, the journal publishers are doing nothing about it. Their current approach to trying to fix the problem is to try and use the work of random CS academics to make "spam filters" for paper submissions. The more obvious solution of having editors and reviewers who actually read scientific papers before they are published appears to be rejected out of hand.
For inspiration, here is how the NYTimes deals with anonymous sources:
What we consider before using anonymous sources:
How do they know the information?
What’s their motivation for telling us?
Have they proved reliable in the past?
Can we corroborate the information they provide?
Because using anonymous sources puts great strain on our most valuable asset: our readers’ trust, the reporter and at least one editor is required to know the identity of the source. A senior newsroom editor must also approve the use of the information the source provides.
I hope so, but the cynic in me doesn't see this happening because this has long been a problem that isn't going away.
The better that computers get at generating content and behaving in ways that only humans used to be able to is going to make it harder to determine if a source is human or not.
Comparing your six figure white collar job to basic janitorial work is pretty damn cringe and pretty objectively untrue.