The use of LLMs for constructive activities (writing, coding, etc.) rapidly produces a profound dependence.
Try turning it off for a day or two, you're hobbled, incapacitated. Anecdotally, ThePrimeagen describes forgetting how to write a for/range loop in Go after using CoPilot for a while (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQNyYx2fZXw). Funny stuff.
Competition in the workplace forces us down this road to being utterly dependent. Human intellect atrophies through disuse.
In the arts, we see something different. People don't seem to like AI-generated content. For example, I monitor a random sample of recent pornography (4-second slideshow from all over the Internet, see https://rnsaffn.com/zg3/) and AI-generated porn is still very niche, comparable in frequency to small fetishes like elder or latex or rope porn. I expected it to be more popular, but generally humans prefer something else.
As Tim Cook recently said, (paraphrased) once you start using Apple Intelligence to think and work, it's hard to stop.
Those skills that you no longer use will be lost. This is the profitable new addiction, and programmers like us are the first group of people to become hooked.
Well, how else are you going to prop up economies as birthrates fall? Get people to compulsively spend and never be satisfied with what they have. Sports, gambling, video games, substances, etc are all just distractions from our shitty empty lives.
The article touches on GLP-1's but doesn't state explicitly: GLP-1's treat addiction. Scientific backing for this is still preliminary, but when/if confirmed, it'll be a game changer for humanity. Whether it's a digital, chemical, or biological addiction, (but sure which category gambling falls under) it'll be huge to be able to treat that underlying gnawing feeling that addicts of all stripes face.
What a sad state of affairs if you need to put 50%+ of your population on drugs because of "addiction".
Humanity was mostly fine for millions of years in that regard, maybe we should think about what the actual fuck we're building instead of giving life long treatments to everyone
Humanity was fine living in an environment much closer to what our bodies evolved for. But now tempting things are evolving faster than our biological countermeasures so we need sociological or chemical ones. What is the alternative? Coordinate so that everyone slows down making things and information people really, really like?
Well we're apes with a brain supposedly better than other apes brains no? Letting us plan in advance and anticipate consequences, right?
We banned crack and mandated seat belts, cracks feels reallllllly good and seat belts are annoying
I guess it depends on if you see humanity as a horde of dumb beasts drugged on sex, sugar and alcohol or a collective of relatively smart individuals capable of taking collectively smart decisions for their greater good.
> I guess it depends on if you see humanity as a horde of dumb beasts drugged on sex, sugar and alcohol or a collective of relatively smart individuals capable of taking collectively smart decisions for their greater good.
Why not both? Clearly we have addiction problems in society - opiates, sugar, alcohol, cell phones - and clearly we have smart individuals and have been able to take collective action.
That collective action did not eradicate any of the above mentioned addictions though, and many of them grew worse (or were encouraged!) under the watchful eye of the collective.
We clearly need more tools at our disposal for these problems.
But then again the top mind of psychology are working at meta &Co getting paid big bucks to milk as much of your brain as possible
We're manufacturing the addiction and the cure, the top 0.01% are profiting of that while the rest of the world is suffering, we can just like... not manufacture the addiction in the first place. Same shit for opiates, it's not just an accident/coincidence, it's something that was developed and planned to make as much profit as possible, the addictive part of it was a feature.
Regardless of if you put the responsibility on society or on the individual it doesn't make sense to defend these addiction creating entities
And now that people stopped flooding the market with opiates legally, the addiction has stopped? No, someone just made it illegally.
Most of these things are “once the cat is out of the bag” situations. The only addictive drug I can think of that was effectively removed from the US market was Methaqualone, and that’s mostly because we had easier to acquire substitutes by the time it finally disappeared.
I mean, treats addiction and increases health risks for non-diabetic people. GLP-1's results on cardiac mass reduction look very convincing. Fairly sure we are not solving systemic addiction with a drug in our lifetime.
> The world’s most valuable resource isn’t data, compute, oil, or rare earth metals; it’s dopa, i.e., the fuel of the addiction economy, which runs the most valuable companies in history.
Same, but I was referring to the addition economy in the title. That’s not what is going on HN here I think. What would help a bit is removing visible upvote counts and the karma counter, because those can be addictive.
I certainly meant the regulation to cover those. To be able to sell data about user behavior, you have to track it, regardless of whether across several sites or just a single site.
Alcohol is poison, but over thousands of years humanity has learned to coexist with it. Sure there are exceptions but in general we have an idea of what a healthy relationship with booze looks like.
Tech and social media are so new, we haven't figured out what a healthy dynamic looks like yet. Hard to talk about an antidote until you know what healthy looks like.
The first question should be if we want an antidote? We've tried banning many things to little effect. In many ways, the economy needs the spending to stay afloat.
Release people from the shackles of capitalism and start over. Easier said that done, but it's completely understandable why most people are looking for different ways of escaping reality in this century.
If it wasn't phones, it would be drugs, alcohol, and gambling.
Wow, didn't know the boomers had a no nut november equivalent.
I feel we are very close to a tipping point, we will get to 90% awake screentime, then 99% then 99.9%. At some point we'll start increasing our efforts to revert that on a massive scale until something works
I have a peculiar relationship with Galloway as a figure, which manifests in that when I watch/listen to/read things he makes, I rapidly oscillate between "he got it all figured out" and "this man has no idea what he's talking about" and the rest of this comment is about the man himself and the system he represents, not the article in question, so if you want that focused discussion go ahead and scroll, it's not going to be here.
I have consumed no other creator's work who gets so shockingly, agonizing close to understanding what's wrong than Galloway who also manages to, regularly, immediately shift back into pro-America, pro-capitalism, pro status quo without his brain physically splitting in half, and it's genuinely a feat of mental gymnastics. He's previously advocated for removing section 230 protection for algorithmically elevated content (great idea!) but also thinks TikTok is a deliberate plot by the Chinese to make Western country's populaces think our country sucks, as though tons of us don't have... an entire lived experience under Western capitalism already telling us that? Scott, I didn't need the Chinese government to tell me that needing to spend $1,500 on an ambulance to get to the hospital that will bankrupt me because my appendix exploded sucks ass. I put that one together myself.
And I say all of this to say he is such an incredible distillation of what is, in my opinion, actually wrong with Western nations and Westerners: the just... shocking levels of incuriousity. This man has clearly been thoroughly educated, but his mind is utterly trapped within the notion of how great America is, presumably because he grew up in a time where it was and it was, in fact, so great, and more importantly, that it was still permitting some of that dividend to fall to people who weren't already loaded. And the reaction to this educated, clearly intelligent man who is identifying all these problems with our society is not to suggest a better society, no, it's to utterly mentally backflip onto "communists are propagandizing our children." He identifies that the government is staffed to the gills with people even older than he is, even more indoctrinated than he is, but can't cross the Rubicon of actually criticizing the system that put them there. He is fully aware of how the Boomer generation has utterly decimated the ability of it's own and all subsequent children to make a decent living via catastrophic wealth transfers and tax policies, while letting the nation their parents gifted them utterly ROT, but his solution is to fuck over people with student loans even harder than they've already been fucked because goodness knows, he isn't ready to pay back any of the money transferred to him, no matter how much he's ready to complain about it.
I'll commend him for his ability to actually see and bear witness to the problems plaguing the young, that makes him better than 90% of his contemporaries right out of the gate. However his solutions are more free markets, more chest beating, more of what already brought us to the precipice of a ruined world and just, nah man. Hardest conceivable pass please.
Try turning it off for a day or two, you're hobbled, incapacitated. Anecdotally, ThePrimeagen describes forgetting how to write a for/range loop in Go after using CoPilot for a while (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQNyYx2fZXw). Funny stuff.
Competition in the workplace forces us down this road to being utterly dependent. Human intellect atrophies through disuse.
In the arts, we see something different. People don't seem to like AI-generated content. For example, I monitor a random sample of recent pornography (4-second slideshow from all over the Internet, see https://rnsaffn.com/zg3/) and AI-generated porn is still very niche, comparable in frequency to small fetishes like elder or latex or rope porn. I expected it to be more popular, but generally humans prefer something else.
As Tim Cook recently said, (paraphrased) once you start using Apple Intelligence to think and work, it's hard to stop.
Those skills that you no longer use will be lost. This is the profitable new addiction, and programmers like us are the first group of people to become hooked.