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> However, practice environments for social skills are typically out of reach for most people. This is exactly what I predicted...AI and technology isolates us

> However, practice environments for social skills are typically out of reach for most people. This is exactly what I predicted...AI and technology isolates us from each other by destroying communities, and is slowly replacing real human interaction with computer interaction. The end result is that in the future, people will have fewer and fewer opportunities to interact with others and will have to be drip-fed satiations for their basic needs such as socialization, similar to how hospital patients are given IVs. Before you say this is outrageous, actually take a look at history and how technology has pushed as farther and farther apart. Nowadays there is very little real interaction beyond the nuclear family. Think of self-checkouts, chat-bots, AI partners and therapists, technology making us more self-reliant (which is a bad thing). If we keep letting technology take away our communities this way in this two step process (first, take away the community then supply an inferior, superficial substitute), then we will compelely lose our humanity.

Zetobal 3y ago
Look beyond your bubble. The child participating in 'School over the Air' in Australia likely appreciates having such a resource to develop their social skills. Sometimes, you need a private space, especially if the community around you isn't on the same wavelength as you are or it's your family and some farm hands.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  So your rebuttal is that isolated examples of this technology being beneficial outweight the mass societal cost of people becoming more isolated in general? And I simply do not see how the need for "private space" and "practising social skills" go hand in hand. Yes, everyone needs their alone time. And everyone needs social contact (except maybe some exceptions, maybe...). Both can be accomplished WITHOUT technology, and much more easily. Don't you think if someone needs private space and isn't getting, that's something that should be dealt with away from technology?
  - Zetobal 3y ago
    You can just not use it.
    - vouaobrasil 3y ago
      No, not if you want to participate in certain aspects of society. For example: getting a job, which is pretty crucial, IMO.
      - Zetobal 3y ago
        You mean social skills or the AI part... because Social Skills make sense the AI part doesn't. You need to stop looking in the mirror for every assumption you make there is a whole world out there.
- boringg 3y ago
  OP argument is that it is bad for societal as a whole. Coming back with an example for a very small sub group doens't refute OPs position. Your position that it can help with edge cases is valid however if OPs position was taken then there would be a large swath of damage for a small gain in a small population. That doesn't have much logic to it.
kelseyfrog 3y ago
It may take an active, conscious, participatory approach to compensate for. Though, can you help me understand the connection between the grocery store checkout process and community a bit more?
- paganel 3y ago
  Not the OP, but I do consider the cashier people from the groceries store nearby as part of the community.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Exactly, and usually after shopping at the same place for a while, I get to know the cashier a little bit. I've actually had some good conversations with some of them, and tellers at the post office as well. (One could say that it might be better for them if they didn't have a job and they got UBI, but to be honest, as young adult, I appreciated my first menial job at least in that it gave me a sense of responsibility and independence. And a lot of these people are young people.) What a lot of technologists seem to think is that AI will make everything wonderful by allowing us unlimited free time to do hobbies, but the desire to spend all of one's free time on hobbies is a very peculiar and minority desire of the very intelligent. (And it may be more of a fantasy than soemthing that would actually make them happy in reality.)
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  > Though, can you help me understand the connection between the grocery store checkout process and community a bit more? It can be viewed on multiple levels. First, there are many papers on the psychological literature about this, but [1] is an example, which is that even a little social contact with a few real people can make a person feel better. Check out Google scholar or the article I linked below to learn more. But that is also intuitive. But if a person is feeling a bit down and they have the "easy way out" (self checkout, other technologies that diminish casual human interaction), they will not gain the benefit of human contact. Second, on a greater scale, if all these little things add up, people will seek out interactions less often. For example, a few years ago I ran into some strangers that became friends because I needed their help to find a rare bird (I'm a birder). If I had an advanced AI app that listened for bird calls and helped me find birds better than any human, I might never have made friends with them. The point is, when technology is lacking to do something, we are more likely to seek out people to help us. Yes, technology does make some parts of life easier, but there must be a BALANCE, and not this recent trend of automating EVERYTHING, which takes the self-reliance thing to its logical extreme. 1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-020-00298-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-020-00298-6
SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
I’m not sure I agree with this take that technology is taking away community in general. I think communities are simply changing. I mean HN is a community and it’s all technology. IRC is a ton of fond memories for me in a time where my irl community was failing me as an awkward nerd, and gave me friends that I can irl meet and chat with now. You seem to have this idealized notion of what community was like outside of technology. But that community always had outsiders and ignored people, that community had communal lynchings and hangings, pogroms, witch trials etc. and strict ways of life where, if you didn’t conform, you were far more isolated than now where you could meet fellow weirdos!
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  > I mean HN is a community and it’s all technology. IRC is a ton of fond memories for me in a time where my irl community was failing me as an awkward nerd, and gave me friends that I can irl meet and chat with now. Well, personally, I would love to know what percentage of people here actually cared about the other people here in terms of actually caring, like having a real friend. I'm assuming it's rather close to zero. Don't get me wrong, I like debating on here but it's nothing like an in-person community. You can disagree all you like, but I think one thing that is near-universal is that there is something special about in-person communities that cannot be replicated online. Sorry to say, although I like talking to people on here, I have no idea who any of you are, what your faces look like, and for all intents and purposes, you could even be AI. The truth is, and I think most average people would agree, there's nothing like a genuine, real community with real people having face-to-face interaction. And an idealized notion?! Come on, seriously! I'm just talking about some basic stuff like interacting with neighbours, talking to employees at the grocery, helping other community members out with basic stuff, etc. In fact, it would be nice if community bonds were even stronger at times...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
    > I'm just talking about some basic stuff like interacting with neighbours, talking to employees at the grocery, helping other community members out with basic stuff, etc. Yeah, these communities can be hostile to people who don’t fit in, especially visible minorities.
ben_w 3y ago
> Think of self-checkouts, chat-bots, AI partners and therapists, technology making us more self-reliant (which is a bad thing). When was the last time you used a bank teller rather than an ATM? For me, at least 5 years ago. On the other hand, despite ATMs, I'm told more people than ever work as bank tellers. > If we keep letting technology take away our communities this way in this two step process (first, take away the community then supply an inferior, superficial substitute), then we will compelely lose our humanity. I think the process is backwards: the substitutes (superficially better but not really) are usually what cause people to leave local communities. It's video games which take people out of clubs and cause the clubs to close, not a lack of clubs which drive them to video games. And the disjoint of remote people, of parasocial relationships, isn't new. Let's say you're in St. Paul's Cathedral as a worshiper: it seats 3,500, far more than the Dunbar’s number our brains can cope with. The Bishop of London doesn't know all the people present, for the same fundamental reason that someone with 3500 "friends" on Facebook doesn't really know all of them. All well before radio stars and TV, let alone the internet and AI. So, whatever of our humanity can be killed off by the mere existence of this change (as opposed to deeper things like malicious propaganda), it was already dead long before any of us were born.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  > I think the process is backwards: the substitutes (superficially better but not really) are usually what cause people to leave local communities. It's video games which take people out of clubs and cause the clubs to close, not a lack of clubs which drive them to video games. Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry, I was not clear. I do mean that we have a process of substitute > leaving community > more substitute. I just isolated two steps from this, but I see how that was confusing.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Then we are probably in agreement :)
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  > All well before radio stars and TV, let alone the internet and AI. All true, which is why I think we should be cautious of ALL technology, and try and vigorously decide which ones we should use in a process similar to that of the Amish (but without the religion, perhaps). Any discussion would be better than the ZERO discussion that we have today.
ziddoap 3y ago
This is a pretty exaggerated take. Technology is a tool, it can be used to increase your social interactions (e.g. finding like-minded groups online to meet up with in-person) or to decrease your social interactions. You say technology is "destroying communities", but don't acknowledge all of the communities technology has helped build.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  > Technology is a tool, it can be used to increase your social interactions (e.g. finding like-minded groups online to meet up with in-person) or to decrease your social interactions. The number one myth about technology is that it is just a tool. It is a society-shaping force. For example, WhatsApp in Brazil: even if you HATE whatsapp and Meta and don't want to use it, you might be forced to use it if you want to get a job, book a hotel, etc, because it's so entrenched. Sorry to say, but technology works through first being optional, then being adopted because it gives a person marginal advantages in the short-term, and then being mandatory because the majority adopts it. Many people are forced to use technology even if they would rather not because if this process. That technology is a tool is the greatest misprepresentation of any concept in the history of humanity. Edit: let me ask you one question, how did you get the idea that technology is just a tool? How many times to people repeat this mantra? Try thinking about it more deeply and over many decades of time and understand the root cause of this thinking.
  - ziddoap 3y ago
    That's a whole other conversation, sure. My point was that you can (and many people do) use technology to increase their social interaction. You seem to suggest it can only possibly decrease it. >The number one myth about technology is that it is just a tool. I didn't say it was _just_ a tool. It is _a_ tool, which can be used to help increase social interaction. >Edit: let me ask you one question, how did you get the idea that technology is just a tool? I didn't.
    - vouaobrasil 3y ago
      > You seem to suggest it can only possibly decrease it. Well, I think it can increase it, but that the increases in time form a sequence of local maxima that themselves are strictly decreasing. (Edit: I meant in terms of overall societal health, like adding up the social happiness of everyone).
throw18376 3y ago
a lot of people have truly deficient social skills. technology didn't make them this way they're just bad at it, so bad that they can't even have enough social interactions to improve and practice. can't even hold a conversation with a cashier. they simply lack the skills to be part of a community. ideally such people could build remedial social skills by practicing with a real therapist. but that's costly and difficult to make accessible, because "bad at conversation and annoying" is not a mental illness. an LLM here could help. just to give someone a sense of how to hold simple, normal conversations and practice very basic theory of mind, to the point where they could start building real social skills. the problem is whoever builds that system may choose to exploit the users and build dependence. but that's a choice, it doesn't have to happen.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jimbokun 3y ago
> Nowadays there is very little real interaction beyond the nuclear family. What nuclear family?

Zetobal 3y ago

Look beyond your bubble. The child participating in 'School over the Air' in Australia likely appreciates having such a resource to develop their social skills. Sometimes, you need a private space, especially if the community around you isn't on the same wavelength as you are or it's your family and some farm hands.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
So your rebuttal is that isolated examples of this technology being beneficial outweight the mass societal cost of people becoming more isolated in general? And I simply do not see how the need for "private space" and "practising social skills" go hand in hand. Yes, everyone needs their alone time. And everyone needs social contact (except maybe some exceptions, maybe...). Both can be accomplished WITHOUT technology, and much more easily. Don't you think if someone needs private space and isn't getting, that's something that should be dealt with away from technology?
- Zetobal 3y ago
  You can just not use it.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    No, not if you want to participate in certain aspects of society. For example: getting a job, which is pretty crucial, IMO.
    - Zetobal 3y ago
      You mean social skills or the AI part... because Social Skills make sense the AI part doesn't. You need to stop looking in the mirror for every assumption you make there is a whole world out there.
boringg 3y ago
OP argument is that it is bad for societal as a whole. Coming back with an example for a very small sub group doens't refute OPs position. Your position that it can help with edge cases is valid however if OPs position was taken then there would be a large swath of damage for a small gain in a small population. That doesn't have much logic to it.

kelseyfrog 3y ago

It may take an active, conscious, participatory approach to compensate for. Though, can you help me understand the connection between the grocery store checkout process and community a bit more?

paganel 3y ago
Not the OP, but I do consider the cashier people from the groceries store nearby as part of the community.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Exactly, and usually after shopping at the same place for a while, I get to know the cashier a little bit. I've actually had some good conversations with some of them, and tellers at the post office as well. (One could say that it might be better for them if they didn't have a job and they got UBI, but to be honest, as young adult, I appreciated my first menial job at least in that it gave me a sense of responsibility and independence. And a lot of these people are young people.) What a lot of technologists seem to think is that AI will make everything wonderful by allowing us unlimited free time to do hobbies, but the desire to spend all of one's free time on hobbies is a very peculiar and minority desire of the very intelligent. (And it may be more of a fantasy than soemthing that would actually make them happy in reality.)
vouaobrasil 3y ago
> Though, can you help me understand the connection between the grocery store checkout process and community a bit more? It can be viewed on multiple levels. First, there are many papers on the psychological literature about this, but [1] is an example, which is that even a little social contact with a few real people can make a person feel better. Check out Google scholar or the article I linked below to learn more. But that is also intuitive. But if a person is feeling a bit down and they have the "easy way out" (self checkout, other technologies that diminish casual human interaction), they will not gain the benefit of human contact. Second, on a greater scale, if all these little things add up, people will seek out interactions less often. For example, a few years ago I ran into some strangers that became friends because I needed their help to find a rare bird (I'm a birder). If I had an advanced AI app that listened for bird calls and helped me find birds better than any human, I might never have made friends with them. The point is, when technology is lacking to do something, we are more likely to seek out people to help us. Yes, technology does make some parts of life easier, but there must be a BALANCE, and not this recent trend of automating EVERYTHING, which takes the self-reliance thing to its logical extreme. 1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-020-00298-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-020-00298-6

SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago

I’m not sure I agree with this take that technology is taking away community in general. I think communities are simply changing. I mean HN is a community and it’s all technology. IRC is a ton of fond memories for me in a time where my irl community was failing me as an awkward nerd, and gave me friends that I can irl meet and chat with now. You seem to have this idealized notion of what community was like outside of technology. But that community always had outsiders and ignored people, that community had communal lynchings and hangings, pogroms, witch trials etc. and strict ways of life where, if you didn’t conform, you were far more isolated than now where you could meet fellow weirdos!

vouaobrasil 3y ago
> I mean HN is a community and it’s all technology. IRC is a ton of fond memories for me in a time where my irl community was failing me as an awkward nerd, and gave me friends that I can irl meet and chat with now. Well, personally, I would love to know what percentage of people here actually cared about the other people here in terms of actually caring, like having a real friend. I'm assuming it's rather close to zero. Don't get me wrong, I like debating on here but it's nothing like an in-person community. You can disagree all you like, but I think one thing that is near-universal is that there is something special about in-person communities that cannot be replicated online. Sorry to say, although I like talking to people on here, I have no idea who any of you are, what your faces look like, and for all intents and purposes, you could even be AI. The truth is, and I think most average people would agree, there's nothing like a genuine, real community with real people having face-to-face interaction. And an idealized notion?! Come on, seriously! I'm just talking about some basic stuff like interacting with neighbours, talking to employees at the grocery, helping other community members out with basic stuff, etc. In fact, it would be nice if community bonds were even stronger at times...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
  > I'm just talking about some basic stuff like interacting with neighbours, talking to employees at the grocery, helping other community members out with basic stuff, etc. Yeah, these communities can be hostile to people who don’t fit in, especially visible minorities.

ben_w 3y ago

> Think of self-checkouts, chat-bots, AI partners and therapists, technology making us more self-reliant (which is a bad thing). When was the last time you used a bank teller rather than an ATM? For me, at least 5 years ago. On the other hand, despite ATMs, I'm told more people than ever work as bank tellers. > If we keep letting technology take away our communities this way in this two step process (first, take away the community then supply an inferior, superficial substitute), then we will compelely lose our humanity. I think the process is backwards: the substitutes (superficially better but not really) are usually what cause people to leave local communities. It's video games which take people out of clubs and cause the clubs to close, not a lack of clubs which drive them to video games. And the disjoint of remote people, of parasocial relationships, isn't new. Let's say you're in St. Paul's Cathedral as a worshiper: it seats 3,500, far more than the Dunbar’s number our brains can cope with. The Bishop of London doesn't know all the people present, for the same fundamental reason that someone with 3500 "friends" on Facebook doesn't really know all of them. All well before radio stars and TV, let alone the internet and AI. So, whatever of our humanity can be killed off by the mere existence of this change (as opposed to deeper things like malicious propaganda), it was already dead long before any of us were born.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
> I think the process is backwards: the substitutes (superficially better but not really) are usually what cause people to leave local communities. It's video games which take people out of clubs and cause the clubs to close, not a lack of clubs which drive them to video games. Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry, I was not clear. I do mean that we have a process of substitute > leaving community > more substitute. I just isolated two steps from this, but I see how that was confusing.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Then we are probably in agreement :)
vouaobrasil 3y ago
> All well before radio stars and TV, let alone the internet and AI. All true, which is why I think we should be cautious of ALL technology, and try and vigorously decide which ones we should use in a process similar to that of the Amish (but without the religion, perhaps). Any discussion would be better than the ZERO discussion that we have today.

ziddoap 3y ago

This is a pretty exaggerated take. Technology is a tool, it can be used to increase your social interactions (e.g. finding like-minded groups online to meet up with in-person) or to decrease your social interactions. You say technology is "destroying communities", but don't acknowledge all of the communities technology has helped build.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
> Technology is a tool, it can be used to increase your social interactions (e.g. finding like-minded groups online to meet up with in-person) or to decrease your social interactions. The number one myth about technology is that it is just a tool. It is a society-shaping force. For example, WhatsApp in Brazil: even if you HATE whatsapp and Meta and don't want to use it, you might be forced to use it if you want to get a job, book a hotel, etc, because it's so entrenched. Sorry to say, but technology works through first being optional, then being adopted because it gives a person marginal advantages in the short-term, and then being mandatory because the majority adopts it. Many people are forced to use technology even if they would rather not because if this process. That technology is a tool is the greatest misprepresentation of any concept in the history of humanity. Edit: let me ask you one question, how did you get the idea that technology is just a tool? How many times to people repeat this mantra? Try thinking about it more deeply and over many decades of time and understand the root cause of this thinking.
- ziddoap 3y ago
  That's a whole other conversation, sure. My point was that you can (and many people do) use technology to increase their social interaction. You seem to suggest it can only possibly decrease it. >The number one myth about technology is that it is just a tool. I didn't say it was _just_ a tool. It is _a_ tool, which can be used to help increase social interaction. >Edit: let me ask you one question, how did you get the idea that technology is just a tool? I didn't.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    > You seem to suggest it can only possibly decrease it. Well, I think it can increase it, but that the increases in time form a sequence of local maxima that themselves are strictly decreasing. (Edit: I meant in terms of overall societal health, like adding up the social happiness of everyone).

throw18376 3y ago

a lot of people have truly deficient social skills. technology didn't make them this way they're just bad at it, so bad that they can't even have enough social interactions to improve and practice. can't even hold a conversation with a cashier. they simply lack the skills to be part of a community. ideally such people could build remedial social skills by practicing with a real therapist. but that's costly and difficult to make accessible, because "bad at conversation and annoying" is not a mental illness. an LLM here could help. just to give someone a sense of how to hold simple, normal conversations and practice very basic theory of mind, to the point where they could start building real social skills. the problem is whoever builds that system may choose to exploit the users and build dependence. but that's a choice, it doesn't have to happen.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jimbokun 3y ago

> Nowadays there is very little real interaction beyond the nuclear family. What nuclear family?