5 ms·

We've refined the human experience to extinction. In pursuit of that extra 0.1% of growth and extra 0.15 EPS, we've optimised and reoptimised until there isn't

We've refined the human experience to extinction. In pursuit of that extra 0.1% of growth and extra 0.15 EPS, we've optimised and reoptimised until there isn't really space for being human. We're losing the ability to interact with each other socially, to flirt, now we're making life so stressful people literally want to kill themselves. All in a world (bubble) or abundance, where so much food is made, we literally don't know what to do with it. Or we turn it into ethanol to drive more unnecessarily large cars, paid for by credit card loans we can scarcely afford. My plan B is to become a shepherd somewhere in the mountains. It will be damn hard work for sure, and stressful in its own way, but I think I'll take that over being a corpo-rat racing for one of the last post-LLM jobs left.

lynx97 1y ago
[flagged]
- gogasca 1y ago
  +1 enjoying time with family and friends. Travelling, working out eating well...best time to be alive
  - winrid 1y ago
    This will be optimized away. You'll just end up doing more.
    - throwawayq3423 1y ago
      already has if you're not visiting the instagrammable places your travels aren't worth it
      - distances 1y ago
        Happily you can stay ignorant about that and just do your thing if you're not in Instagram.
- kingkawn 1y ago
  [flagged]
unglaublich 1y ago
The romantic fallback plan of being a farmer or shepherd. I wonder, do farmers and shepherds also romantize about becoming programmers or accountants when they feel down?
- Den_VR 1y ago
  The old term for it was to become a “gentleman farmer.” There’s a history to it - George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were the same for a part of their lives.
- lithocarpus 1y ago
  I'm close with a number of people living a relatively hard working life producing food and I've not seen this at all personally, no. It can be very rough but for these people at least it is very fulfilling and the idea of going to be in an office would look like death. People joke about it a bit but no way. That said there probably are folks who did do that and left to go be in an office, and I don't know them. Actually I do know one sort of, but he was doing industrial farm work driving and fixing big tractors before the office, which is a different world altogether. Anyway I get the sense he's depressed.
- shakna 1y ago
  I kinda did both... And I miss the farm constantly. But not breaking myself every single day.
- NathanKP 1y ago
  You'd be surprised how technical farming can be. Us software engineers often have a deep desire to make efficient systems, that function well, in a mostly automated fashion, so that we can observe these systems in action and optimize these systems over time. A farm is just such a system that you can spend a lifetime working on and optimizing. The life you are supporting is "automated", but the process of farming involves an incredible amount of system level thinking. I get tremendous amounts of satisfaction from the technical process of composting, and improving the soil, and optimizing plant layouts and lifecycles to make the perfect syntropic farming setup. That's not even getting into the scientific aspects of balancing soil mixtures and moisture, and acidity, and nutrient levels, and cross pollinating, and seed collecting to find stronger variants with improved yields, etc. Of course the physical labor sucks, but I need the exercise. It's better than sitting at a desk all day long. Anyway, maybe the farmers and shepherds also want to become software engineers. I just know I'm already well on the way to becoming a farmer (with a homelab setup as an added nerdy SWE bonus).
lanyard-textile 1y ago
We’ve lost the ability to interact, huh? How do you explain this comment :) The world has changed. Things are different and we adapt.
lithocarpus 1y ago
This trend and direction has been going a long time and it's becoming increasingly obvious. It is ridiculous and insane. Go for your plan B. I followed my similar plan B eight years ago, wild journey but well worth it. There are a lot of ways to live. I'm not saying everyone should get out of the rat race but if you're one, like I was, who has a feeling that the tech world is mostly not right in an insidious kind of way, pay attention to that feeling and see where it leads. Don't need to be brash as I was, but be true to yourself. There's a lot more to life out there. If you have kids and they depend on an expensive lifestyle, definitely don't be brash. But even that situation can be re-evaluated and shifted for the better if you want to.
- chairmansteve 1y ago
  What was/is your plan B?
  - lithocarpus 1y ago
    It's been a lot of things but the gist was to get out of the office and city and computer and be mostly outdoors in nature and learn all the practical skills and other things like music. Ironically I've ended up on the computer a fair amount doing conservation work to protect the places I've come to love. But still am off grid and in the woods every day and I love it.
NathanKP 1y ago
I'm right behind you on the escape to the mountains idea. I've actually already moved from the US to New Zealand, and the next step is a farm with some goats lol. That said... I don't necessarily hate what AI is doing to us. If anything, AI is the ultimate expression of humanity. Throughout history humans have continually searched for another intelligence. We study the apes and other animals, we pray to Gods, we look to the stars and listen to them to see if there are any radio signals from aliens, etc. We keep trying to find something else that understands what it is to be alive. I would propose that maybe humans innately crave to be known by something other than ourselves. The search for that "other" is so fundamentally human, that building AI and interacting with it is just a natural progression of a quest we've already been on for thousands of years.
- xeonmc 1y ago
  Humanity constructing a golden calf is an invariant eventuality, just like softwares expanding until it read emails.
rustystump 1y ago
This is over the top. With tiny reframe i think the story is different. What is the avg number of google searches about suicid? What is the avg number of weekly openai users? (800m) Is this an increasing trend or just a “shock value” number? Things are not as bleak as it seems and this number isnt even remotely surprising nor concerning to me.
- javaunsafe2019 1y ago
  Is that you Mr Anderson?
karlgkk 1y ago
> We're losing the ability to interact with each other socially, to flirt, Speak for yourself. I live in a city. I talk to my neighbors. I met my ex at a cafe. It’s great
- decremental 1y ago
  [dead]
- raducu 1y ago
  > Speak for yourself. I live in a city. I talk to my neighbors. I met my ex at a cafe. It’s great. What's the birth rate in the civilized world? How many men under 30 are virgins or sexless in the last year?
  - karlgkk 1y ago
    > How many men under 30 are virgins or sexless in the last year? Like I said: speak for yourself
  - reeredfdfdf 1y ago
    Some of those men could meet someone if they quit Tinder or whatever crap online platform they might be using for dating, and start meeting people in real life. Worked for me at least. There's simply less competition and more space for genuine social interaction.
    - raducu 1y ago
      > Some of those men could meet someone if they quit Tinder Maybe your intentions are good, but remember, unless we legalize polygamy, the "bad/inept/creepy straight-white men" narative should crumble for people in their 30s and 40s when it's the last train for marriage and children. But we don't have "some of those women..." narrative about single women in their 40s complaining they can't find a husband. My point is it's an universal problem in the civilized world, spanning vastly different cultures in Asia and Europe and North America, "some of those men" is very hand wavy explanation, and I think it spans from the extremely toxic (I'd say anti-human and demonic) hollywood pop culture.
android521 1y ago
I like your plan B. But I would wait until robots are good enough to help with the hard work
- beeflet 1y ago
  if they can do the hard work, they can do the easy work.
dmos62 1y ago
You can do something about it. Don't underestimate the power of an individual.
safety1st 1y ago
You don't need to withdraw from humanity, you only need to withdraw from Big Tech platforms. I'm continually amazed at the difference between the actual human race and the version of the human race that's presented to me online. The first one is basically great, everywhere I go, when I interact with them they're some mix of pleasant, friendly, hapless, busy, helpful, annoyed, basically just the whole range of things that a person might be, with almost none of them being really awful. Then I get online and look at Reddit or X or something like that and they're dominated by negativity, anger, bigotry, indignation, victimization, depression, anxiety, really anything awful that's hard to look away from, has been bubbled up to the top and oh yes next to it there are some cat videos. I don't believe we are seeing some shadow side of all society that people can only show online, the secret darkness of humanity made manifest or something like that. Because I can go read random blogs or hop into some eclectic community like SDF and people in those places are basically pleasant and decent too. I think it's just a handful of companies who used really toxic algorithms to get fantastically rich and then do a bunch of exclusivity deals and acquire all their competition, and spread ever more filth. You can just walk away from the "communities" these crime barons have set up. Delete your accounts and don't return to their sites. Everything will immediately start improving in your life and most of the people you deal with outside of them (obviously not all!) turn out to be pretty decent. The principal survival skill in this strange modern world is meeting new people regularly, being social, enjoying the rich life and multitude of benefits which arise from that, but also disconnecting with extreme rapidity and prejudice if you meet someone who's showing signs of toxic social media brain rot. Fortunately many of those people rarely go outside.
- isolay 1y ago
  All of this only goes to show how far we've come on our journey to profit optimization. We could optimize away those pesky humans completely if it weren't for the annoying fact that they are the source of all those profits.
  - safety1st 1y ago
    Oh, but humans are actually not the source of all profit! This is where phenomena like click fraud become interesting. Some estimates for 2025: around 20-30% of all ad clicks were bots. Around $200B in ad spend annually lost to click fraud. So this is where it gets really interesting right, the platforms are filled with bots, maybe a quarter? of the monetizable action occurring on them IS NOT HUMAN but lots of it gets paid for anyway. It's turtles all the way down. One little hunk of software, serving up bits to another little hunk of software, constitutes perhaps a quarter of what they call "social" media. We humans aren't the minority player in all this yet, the bots are still only 25%, but how much do you want to bet that those proportions will flip in our lifetimes? The future of that whole big swathe of the Internet is probably that it will be 75% some weird shell game between algorithms, and 25% people who have completely lost their minds by participating in it and believing it's real. I have no idea what this all means for the fate of economics and society but I do know that in my day to day life I'm a lot happier if I just steer clear of these weird little paperclip maximizing robots. To reference the original article, getting too involved with them literally makes you go crazy and think more often about suicide.
krackers 1y ago
>now we're making life so stressful people literally want to kill themselves Is this actually the case? Working conditions and health during industrial revolution times doesn't seem that much better. There is a perception that people now are more stressed/tired/miserable than before, but I am not sure that is the case. In fact I think it's the opposite, we have enough leisure time to reflect upon the misery and just enough agency to see that this doesn't have to be a fact of life, but not enough agency to meaningfully change it. This would also match how birth rates keep declining as countries become more developed.
weatherlite 1y ago
I partly agree and partly disagree. Yes, we're more individual and more isolated. But ChatGPT/Gemini can really provide mental relief for people - not everyone can afford or have the time/energy to find a good human therapist close to their home. And this thing lives in your computer or phone and you can talk to it to get mental relief 24 / 7. I don't see it as bleak as you see it, mental help should be accessible and free for everyone. I know, we've had a bad decade with platforms like Meta/TikTok but I'm not convinced as you are the current LLMs will have an adverse effect.
leobg 1y ago
Book recommendation: Ashley Montagu, On Being Human It’s from the 1950s, I believe.
joomla199 1y ago
Your comment reminded me of Business Business [0] [0] https://youtu.be/WO5wpeYSotg?si=hgwzJ5mxJyAZeYoA https://youtu.be/WO5wpeYSotg?si=hgwzJ5mxJyAZeYoA

lynx97 1y ago

[flagged]

gogasca 1y ago
+1 enjoying time with family and friends. Travelling, working out eating well...best time to be alive
- winrid 1y ago
  This will be optimized away. You'll just end up doing more.
  - throwawayq3423 1y ago
    already has if you're not visiting the instagrammable places your travels aren't worth it
    - distances 1y ago
      Happily you can stay ignorant about that and just do your thing if you're not in Instagram.
kingkawn 1y ago
[flagged]

unglaublich 1y ago

The romantic fallback plan of being a farmer or shepherd. I wonder, do farmers and shepherds also romantize about becoming programmers or accountants when they feel down?

Den_VR 1y ago
The old term for it was to become a “gentleman farmer.” There’s a history to it - George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were the same for a part of their lives.
lithocarpus 1y ago
I'm close with a number of people living a relatively hard working life producing food and I've not seen this at all personally, no. It can be very rough but for these people at least it is very fulfilling and the idea of going to be in an office would look like death. People joke about it a bit but no way. That said there probably are folks who did do that and left to go be in an office, and I don't know them. Actually I do know one sort of, but he was doing industrial farm work driving and fixing big tractors before the office, which is a different world altogether. Anyway I get the sense he's depressed.
shakna 1y ago
I kinda did both... And I miss the farm constantly. But not breaking myself every single day.
NathanKP 1y ago
You'd be surprised how technical farming can be. Us software engineers often have a deep desire to make efficient systems, that function well, in a mostly automated fashion, so that we can observe these systems in action and optimize these systems over time. A farm is just such a system that you can spend a lifetime working on and optimizing. The life you are supporting is "automated", but the process of farming involves an incredible amount of system level thinking. I get tremendous amounts of satisfaction from the technical process of composting, and improving the soil, and optimizing plant layouts and lifecycles to make the perfect syntropic farming setup. That's not even getting into the scientific aspects of balancing soil mixtures and moisture, and acidity, and nutrient levels, and cross pollinating, and seed collecting to find stronger variants with improved yields, etc. Of course the physical labor sucks, but I need the exercise. It's better than sitting at a desk all day long. Anyway, maybe the farmers and shepherds also want to become software engineers. I just know I'm already well on the way to becoming a farmer (with a homelab setup as an added nerdy SWE bonus).

lanyard-textile 1y ago

We’ve lost the ability to interact, huh? How do you explain this comment :) The world has changed. Things are different and we adapt.

lithocarpus 1y ago

This trend and direction has been going a long time and it's becoming increasingly obvious. It is ridiculous and insane. Go for your plan B. I followed my similar plan B eight years ago, wild journey but well worth it. There are a lot of ways to live. I'm not saying everyone should get out of the rat race but if you're one, like I was, who has a feeling that the tech world is mostly not right in an insidious kind of way, pay attention to that feeling and see where it leads. Don't need to be brash as I was, but be true to yourself. There's a lot more to life out there. If you have kids and they depend on an expensive lifestyle, definitely don't be brash. But even that situation can be re-evaluated and shifted for the better if you want to.

chairmansteve 1y ago
What was/is your plan B?
- lithocarpus 1y ago
  It's been a lot of things but the gist was to get out of the office and city and computer and be mostly outdoors in nature and learn all the practical skills and other things like music. Ironically I've ended up on the computer a fair amount doing conservation work to protect the places I've come to love. But still am off grid and in the woods every day and I love it.

NathanKP 1y ago

I'm right behind you on the escape to the mountains idea. I've actually already moved from the US to New Zealand, and the next step is a farm with some goats lol. That said... I don't necessarily hate what AI is doing to us. If anything, AI is the ultimate expression of humanity. Throughout history humans have continually searched for another intelligence. We study the apes and other animals, we pray to Gods, we look to the stars and listen to them to see if there are any radio signals from aliens, etc. We keep trying to find something else that understands what it is to be alive. I would propose that maybe humans innately crave to be known by something other than ourselves. The search for that "other" is so fundamentally human, that building AI and interacting with it is just a natural progression of a quest we've already been on for thousands of years.

xeonmc 1y ago
Humanity constructing a golden calf is an invariant eventuality, just like softwares expanding until it read emails.

rustystump 1y ago

This is over the top. With tiny reframe i think the story is different. What is the avg number of google searches about suicid? What is the avg number of weekly openai users? (800m) Is this an increasing trend or just a “shock value” number? Things are not as bleak as it seems and this number isnt even remotely surprising nor concerning to me.

javaunsafe2019 1y ago
Is that you Mr Anderson?

karlgkk 1y ago

> We're losing the ability to interact with each other socially, to flirt, Speak for yourself. I live in a city. I talk to my neighbors. I met my ex at a cafe. It’s great

decremental 1y ago
[dead]
raducu 1y ago
> Speak for yourself. I live in a city. I talk to my neighbors. I met my ex at a cafe. It’s great. What's the birth rate in the civilized world? How many men under 30 are virgins or sexless in the last year?
- karlgkk 1y ago
  > How many men under 30 are virgins or sexless in the last year? Like I said: speak for yourself
- reeredfdfdf 1y ago
  Some of those men could meet someone if they quit Tinder or whatever crap online platform they might be using for dating, and start meeting people in real life. Worked for me at least. There's simply less competition and more space for genuine social interaction.
  - raducu 1y ago
    > Some of those men could meet someone if they quit Tinder Maybe your intentions are good, but remember, unless we legalize polygamy, the "bad/inept/creepy straight-white men" narative should crumble for people in their 30s and 40s when it's the last train for marriage and children. But we don't have "some of those women..." narrative about single women in their 40s complaining they can't find a husband. My point is it's an universal problem in the civilized world, spanning vastly different cultures in Asia and Europe and North America, "some of those men" is very hand wavy explanation, and I think it spans from the extremely toxic (I'd say anti-human and demonic) hollywood pop culture.

android521 1y ago

I like your plan B. But I would wait until robots are good enough to help with the hard work

beeflet 1y ago
if they can do the hard work, they can do the easy work.

dmos62 1y ago

You can do something about it. Don't underestimate the power of an individual.

safety1st 1y ago

You don't need to withdraw from humanity, you only need to withdraw from Big Tech platforms. I'm continually amazed at the difference between the actual human race and the version of the human race that's presented to me online. The first one is basically great, everywhere I go, when I interact with them they're some mix of pleasant, friendly, hapless, busy, helpful, annoyed, basically just the whole range of things that a person might be, with almost none of them being really awful. Then I get online and look at Reddit or X or something like that and they're dominated by negativity, anger, bigotry, indignation, victimization, depression, anxiety, really anything awful that's hard to look away from, has been bubbled up to the top and oh yes next to it there are some cat videos. I don't believe we are seeing some shadow side of all society that people can only show online, the secret darkness of humanity made manifest or something like that. Because I can go read random blogs or hop into some eclectic community like SDF and people in those places are basically pleasant and decent too. I think it's just a handful of companies who used really toxic algorithms to get fantastically rich and then do a bunch of exclusivity deals and acquire all their competition, and spread ever more filth. You can just walk away from the "communities" these crime barons have set up. Delete your accounts and don't return to their sites. Everything will immediately start improving in your life and most of the people you deal with outside of them (obviously not all!) turn out to be pretty decent. The principal survival skill in this strange modern world is meeting new people regularly, being social, enjoying the rich life and multitude of benefits which arise from that, but also disconnecting with extreme rapidity and prejudice if you meet someone who's showing signs of toxic social media brain rot. Fortunately many of those people rarely go outside.

isolay 1y ago
All of this only goes to show how far we've come on our journey to profit optimization. We could optimize away those pesky humans completely if it weren't for the annoying fact that they are the source of all those profits.
- safety1st 1y ago
  Oh, but humans are actually not the source of all profit! This is where phenomena like click fraud become interesting. Some estimates for 2025: around 20-30% of all ad clicks were bots. Around $200B in ad spend annually lost to click fraud. So this is where it gets really interesting right, the platforms are filled with bots, maybe a quarter? of the monetizable action occurring on them IS NOT HUMAN but lots of it gets paid for anyway. It's turtles all the way down. One little hunk of software, serving up bits to another little hunk of software, constitutes perhaps a quarter of what they call "social" media. We humans aren't the minority player in all this yet, the bots are still only 25%, but how much do you want to bet that those proportions will flip in our lifetimes? The future of that whole big swathe of the Internet is probably that it will be 75% some weird shell game between algorithms, and 25% people who have completely lost their minds by participating in it and believing it's real. I have no idea what this all means for the fate of economics and society but I do know that in my day to day life I'm a lot happier if I just steer clear of these weird little paperclip maximizing robots. To reference the original article, getting too involved with them literally makes you go crazy and think more often about suicide.

krackers 1y ago

>now we're making life so stressful people literally want to kill themselves Is this actually the case? Working conditions and health during industrial revolution times doesn't seem that much better. There is a perception that people now are more stressed/tired/miserable than before, but I am not sure that is the case. In fact I think it's the opposite, we have enough leisure time to reflect upon the misery and just enough agency to see that this doesn't have to be a fact of life, but not enough agency to meaningfully change it. This would also match how birth rates keep declining as countries become more developed.

weatherlite 1y ago

I partly agree and partly disagree. Yes, we're more individual and more isolated. But ChatGPT/Gemini can really provide mental relief for people - not everyone can afford or have the time/energy to find a good human therapist close to their home. And this thing lives in your computer or phone and you can talk to it to get mental relief 24 / 7. I don't see it as bleak as you see it, mental help should be accessible and free for everyone. I know, we've had a bad decade with platforms like Meta/TikTok but I'm not convinced as you are the current LLMs will have an adverse effect.

leobg 1y ago

Book recommendation: Ashley Montagu, On Being Human It’s from the 1950s, I believe.

joomla199 1y ago

Your comment reminded me of Business Business [0] [0] https://youtu.be/WO5wpeYSotg?si=hgwzJ5mxJyAZeYoA https://youtu.be/WO5wpeYSotg?si=hgwzJ5mxJyAZeYoA