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Hate to be the dum-dum, but what's leading to humanity's self-destruction here? Loss of privacy? Outsized corporate power? Or, is this an extreme mix of hyperbo

• bayindirh 1y ago
  Creating an impermeable barrier between truth and real-time slop generation. How can you know what you're reading is true when you can't verify what's happening out there? This is true from global events to a pasta recipe.
  • dmos62 1y ago
    That's clearer. I can see how that can be a problem, but destruction of humanity? I think of this as a fun change in circumstance at best and a challenge at worst, rather than a disaster.
    • bayindirh 1y ago
      Consider a society where everyone has a different reality about something shared normally. Societies are built upon unspoken but shared truths and information (i.e. the social contract). Dissolve this information, dissolve or fragment the society. This, coupled with profiling and targeting will enable fragmentation of the societies, consolidation of power and many other shenanigans. This also enables continuous profiling, opening the door for "preemptive policing" (Minority Report style) and other dystopian things. Think about Cambridge Analytica or election manipulation, but on steroids. This is dangerous. Very dangerous.
      • artur_makly 1y ago
        This. Power and Control is only viable at scale when the aforementioned tacts are wielded with precision by "invisible hands" .. History has proved that keeping society stupid and disenfranchised is essential to control. Did you know that in the 1600s the King of England banned coffee? Simple.. fear of evolving propagating better ideas and more intense social fraternity. "Patrons read and debated the news of the day in coffeehouses, fueled by caffeine; the coffeehouse became a core engine of the new scientific and philosophical thought that characterized the era. Soon there were hundreds of establishments selling coffee." https://worldhistory.medium.com/why-the-king-of-england-banned-coffee-dce524b3e849 https://worldhistory.medium.com/why-the-king-of-england-bann...
        • bayindirh 1y ago
          I know Ottomans did it at one time but England? Now that's new to me. Thanks for sharing!
        • pjc50 1y ago
          Accountwalled, but somehow even this is subject to disputation of the detail. https://coffeeinquirer.com/was-coffee-ever-illegal-in-the-uk-unraveling-coffee-history/ https://coffeeinquirer.com/was-coffee-ever-illegal-in-the-uk... (the late 1600s was something of a fraught time for England and especially for Charles II, who had spent some time in exile due to the monarchist loss of the English Civil War)
      • dmos62 1y ago
        I don't want to invalidate your viewpoint: I'll just share mine. The shared truth that holds us together, that you mentioned, in my eyes is love of humanity, as cliche as that might sound. Sure it wavers, we have our ups and downs, but at the end, every generation is kinder and smarter than the previous. I see an upward spiral. Yes, there are those of us who might feel inclined to subdue and deceive, out of feelings of powerlessness, no doubt. But, then there are many of us who don't care for anything less than kindness. And, every act of oppression inches us toward speaking and acting up. It's a self-balancing system: even if one falls asleep at the wheel, that only makes the next wake-up call more intense. As to the more specific point about fragmented information spaces: we always had that. At all points in history we had varying ways to mess with how information, ideas and beliefs flowed: for better and for worse. The new landscape of information flow, brought about by LLMs, is a reflection of our increasing power, just as a teenager is more powerful than a pre-teen, and that brings its own "increased" challenges. That's part of the human experience. It doesn't mean that we have to ride the bad possibilities to the complete extreme, and we won't, I believe.
        • bayindirh 1y ago
          Thanks for your kind reply. I wanted to put some time aside to reply the way your comment deserves. My personal foundations are not very different than yours. I don't care about many people cares. Being a human being and having your heart at the right place is a good starting point for me, too. On the other hand, we need to make a distinction between people who live (ordinary citizens) and people who lead (people inside government and managers of influential corporations). There's the saying "power corrupts", now this saying has scientific basis: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-c... So, the "ruling class", for the lack of better term, doesn't think like us. I strive to be kinder every day. They don't (or can't) care. They just want more power, nothing else. For the fragmented spaces, the challenge is different than the past. We, humans, are social animals and were always in social groups (tribes, settlements, towns, cities, countries, etc.), we felt belong. As the system got complex, we evolved as a result. But the change was slow, so we were able to adapt in a couple of generations. In 80s to 00s, it was faster, but we managed it somehow. Now it's exponentially faster, and more primitive parts of our brains can't handle it as gracefully. Our societies, ideas and systems are strained. Another research studying the effects of increasing connectivity found that this brings more polarization: https://phys.org/news/2025-10-friends-division-social-circles-fuel.html https://phys.org/news/2025-10-friends-division-social-circle... Another problem is, unfortunately, not all societies or the parts of the same society evolve at the same pace to the same kinder, more compassionate human beings. Radicalism is on the rise. It doesn't have to be violent, but some parts of the world is becoming less tolerant. We can't ignore these. See world politics. It's... complicated. So, while I share your optimism and light, I also want to underline that we need to stay vigilant. Because humans are complicated. Some are naive, some are defenseless and some just want to watch the world burn. Instead of believing that everything's gonna be alright eventually, we need to do our part to nudge our planet in that direction. We need to feed the wolf which we want to win: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Wolves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Wolves
      • GolfPopper 1y ago
        But the impact of AI is going to be even worse than that. For virtually all of human history, there weren't anywhere near so many of us as there are now, and the success and continuation of any one group of humans wasn't particularly dependent on the rest. Sure, there were large-scale trade flows, but there were no direct dependencies between farmers in Europe, farmers in China, farmers in India, etc. If one society collapsed, others kept going. The worst historical collapses I'm familiar with - the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the fall of the Roman Empire - were directly tied to larger-scope trade, and were still localized beyond comparison with our modern world. Until very recently, total human population at any given point in history has been between 100 and 400 million. We're now past 8 billion. And those 8 billion people depend on an interconnected global supply chain for food. A supply chain that, in turn, was built with a complex shared consensus on a great many things. AI, via its ability to cheaply produce convincing BS at scale, even if it also does other things is a direct and imminent threat to the system of global trade that keeps 8 billion human beings fed (and that sustains the technology base which allows for AI, along with many other things).
    • underlipton 1y ago
      Google gave us direct access to much of the world's knowledge base, then snatched it away capriciously and put a facsimile of it behind a algorithmic paywall that they control at the whims of their leadership, engineering, or benefactors. The despair any rational person will feel upon realizing that they lobotomized the overmind that drove Information Age society might just be traumatic enough, in aggregate, to set off a collapse. So, yes. Destruction of humanity (at least, as we know it) incoming. That's without the super AI.
    • FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
      Asymmetry of power creates rulers and the ruled. Widespread availability of firearms helped to partly balance out one aspect (monopoly on violence) and the wide availability of personal computers plus the Internet balanced out another (monopoly on information). Only part left is the control of resources (food, housing, etc.). AI is destabilizing the current balance of knowledge/information which creates the high potential for violence.
  • deadbabe 1y ago
    You turn off your computer and go outside.
    • kakacik 1y ago
      I certainly can and do that. Can you please convince remaining 8 billions to do the same? Based on ie election behavior or populations, what you describe is naivety on a level of maybe my 5 year old son. Can you try to be a bit more constructive?
      • deadbabe 1y ago
        More constructive!? Ok, let’s break it down for you: What all 8 billion people in the world think does not matter to you. There are people out there cutting heads off in the name of religion, or people who think their dictator is a divine being. People outside your country have little effect on your daily life. Even people within your country have a weak effect on your daily life. What other people believe only really matters for economic reasons. Still, unless you are very dependent on social safety nets even they don’t matter that much. You just find more money and carry on. You might think that more propaganda will result in people voting for bad politicians, but it is actually possible to have too much propaganda. If people become aware of how easily fake content is generated, which they are rapidly realizing in the age of AI, the result is they become skeptical of everything, and come up with their own wild theories on what the truth really is. The people whose thoughts matter most are the people you interact with on a daily basis, as they have the most capability to alter your daily life physically and immediately. Fortunately you can control better who you surround yourself with or how you interact with them. If you turn off the conversation, the world will appear pretty indifferent even to things that seem like a big deal on social media.
        • bayindirh 1y ago
          It's ironic that the front page of HN had a related article: - Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization: https://phys.org/news/2025-10-friends-division-social-circles-fuel.html https://phys.org/news/2025-10-friends-division-social-circle... tl;dr: More close friends people have, more polarized societies become. It's easy to profile people extensively, and pinpoint them to the same neighborhood, home or social circle. Now what happens when you feed "what you want" to these groups of people you see. You can plant polarization with neighbourhood or home precision and control people en-masse. Knowing or seeing these people doesn't matter. After some time you might find yourself proverbially cutting heads off in the name of what you believe. We used to call these flame wars back then. Now this is called doxxing and swatting. The people you don't know can make life very miserable in a slow-burning way. You might not be feeling it, but this the core principle of slowly cooking the frog.
• kakacik 1y ago
  Absolute control over what people think and know, which is sort of absolute control overall with power to normalize anything, including what we consider evil now. Look at really powerful people of this world - literally every single one of them is badly broken piece of shit (to be extremely polite), control freaks, fucked up childhood and thus overcompensating missing/broken father figure, often malicious, petty, vengeful, feeling above rest of us. Whole reason for democracy since ancient times to limit how much power such people have. The competent sociopathic part of above will always rise in society to the top regardless of type of system, so we need good mechanism to prevent them from becoming absolute lifelong dictators (and we need to prevent them from attaining immortality since that would be our doom on another level). People didn't change over past few thousands of years, and any society that failed above eventually collapsed in very bad ways. We shall not want the same for current global civilization and for a change learn from past mistakes, unless you like the idea of few decades of warfare globally and few billions of death. I certainly don't.
• schwartzworld 1y ago
  Well, you could always focus on the ridiculous environmental impact of llms. I read once that asking ChatGPT used 250x as much energy as just googling. But now google incorporated llms into search so… I grew up on the banks of the Hudson River, polluted by corporations dumping their refuse into it while reaping profits. Anthropic/openai/etc are doing the same thing.
  • bix6 1y ago
    The water usage is insane too.
    • TeMPOraL 1y ago
      Yes. It's horrible. Probably 250x as much as watering your lawn per 1M ChatGPT queries. Except your sprinklers' vendor probably incorporates ChatGPT in their marketing, so they're literally using water to sell you tools to use water! Oh the humanity! I can't take those eco-impact threads seriously. Yes, ChatGPT uses compute, compute uses water and electricity. So does keeping your lawn trimmed and your dog well, and of the three, I bet ChatGPT is actually generating most value to everyone on the net. Everything we do uses electricity and water. Everything that lives uses energy and water. The question isn't whether, or how much, but what for. Yes, LLMs use a lot of energy in absolute terms - but that's because they're that useful. Yes, despite what people who deny basic reality would tell you, LLMs actually are tremendously useful. In relative terms, they don't use that much more energy or water vs. things they displace, and they make up for it in the improvements. Want to talk environmental impact of ChatGPT et al.? Sure, but let's frame it with comparative figures for sportsball, concerts, holiday decorations, Christmas lights, political campaigns, or pets. Suddenly, it turns out the whole thing is merely a storm in a teacup.
      • bix6 1y ago
        Have you read about the impact of data centers in non-US countries? Building a data center that requires potable water in a drought stricken country that lacks the resources to defend itself is incredibly destructive. And I don’t have a dog but that water usage certainly provides the most benefit. Man’s best friend > online sex bot.