5 ms·

Doesn't matter. We must keep building more and more technology no matter the cost. Have an idea for a business? Build it. Does your business make the lives of p

Doesn't matter. We must keep building more and more technology no matter the cost. Have an idea for a business? Build it. Does your business make the lives of people worse? Doesn't matter, keep pushing. Could some new technology ruin the lives and relationships that people have? Doesn't matter, just build it. We always need more, need to do more. Every experiment is valid, every impulse must be followed. More complexity, more control, more distraction, more outrage, more engagement. Just keep building forever no matter the cost.

ricogallo 1y ago
It sounds like the "The City" in "Blame!"
throwmeaway307 1y ago
move fast and break things! nevermind if the things are people or their lives!!
- arnon 1y ago
  build things """"people"""" want
  - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
    People want dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle. If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems. The problem isn't AI, it's how marketing has eaten everything. So everyone is always pitching, looking for a competitive advantage, "telling their story", and "building their brand." You can't "build trust" if your primary motivation is to sell stuff to your contacts. The SNR was already terrible long before AI arrived. All AI has done is automated an already terrible process, which has - ironically - broken it so badly that it no longer works.
    - ModernMech 1y ago
      Tired: "Build things people want" Wired: "Build things society needs"
    - kitku 1y ago
      > People want dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle. The people yearn for the casino. Gambling economy NOW! Vote kitku for president :) PS. Please don't look at the stock market.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      > You can't "build trust" if your primary motivation is to sell stuff to your contacts That is false. You build a different type of trust: people need to trust that when they buy something from you it is a good product that will do what they want. Maybe someone else is better, but it won't be enough better as to be worth the time they would need to spend to evaluate that. Maybe someone else is cheaper, but you are still reasonably priced for the features you offer. They won't get fired for buying you because you have so often been worthy of the trust we give you that in the rare case you do something wrong it was nobody is perfect not that you are no longer trustworthy (you can only pull this trick off a few times before you become untrustworthy) The above is very hard to achieve, and even when you have it very easy to lose. If you are not yet there for someone you still need to act like you are and down want to lose it even though they may never buy from you often enough to realize you are worth it.
    - onion2k 1y ago
      If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems. That assumes people have the ability to choose not to do these things, and that they can't be manipulated or coerced into doing them against their will. If you believe that advertising, especially data-driven personalised and targeted advertising, is essentially way of hacking someone's mind to do things it doesn't actually want to do, then it becomes fairly obvious that it's not entirely the individual's fault. If adverts are 'Buy Acme widgets!' they're relatively easy to resist. When the advert is 'onion2k, as a man in his 40s who writes code and enjoys video games, maybe you spend too much time on HN, and you're a bit overweight, so you should buy Acme widgets!' it calls for people to be constantly vigilant, and that's too much to expect. When people get trapped by an advert that's been designed to push all their buttons, the reasonable position is that the advertiser should take some of the responsibility for that.
  - teddyh 1y ago
    That is only true as long as people are the only entities who can spend money. As soon as people give AI the power to spend money, we will see companies designing products to appeal to AI:s. A new form of SEO spam, if you will.
- palmotea 1y ago
  > move fast and break things! > nevermind if the things are people or their lives!! Breaking things is ok. If people are things then it's ok to break them, right? Got it. Gotta get back to my startup to apply that insight.
wartywhoa23 1y ago
Yours truly, Larry Fink and The Money Owners.
drakythe 1y ago
Turns out the Torment Nexus was just democratizing Venture Capital's desire for infinite growth.
- tdeck 1y ago
  That's an uncharitable take. Those VCs care very deeply about society, that's why they're funding so much research into the Torment Singularity (and giving so many talks about it) and making sure that the Right People get the Torment Nexus first so "we" can decide how it gets used.
- giraffe_lady 1y ago
  The paperclip maximizer is us.
  - gnarlouse 1y ago
    Unironically: we worry about the ASI control problem but can't even reign in our billionaires
    - lunar_mycroft 1y ago
      I look at it more like "the fact that we can't align humans/human institutions strongly suggests we won't be able to align something as alien as AGI is likely to be"
  - katabasis 1y ago
    It's capitalism – the true "artificial intelligence" that has been organizing human life for the last ~200 years or so.
  - zitsarethecure 1y ago
    It always was.
- DougN7 1y ago
  I misread your comment as being about Vulture Capital. I think I like that :)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
edaemon 1y ago
Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
SeanDav 1y ago
One of the potential upsides to this as that people just might start taking time to engage in a bit of critical thinking before reacting. Is this real? How likely is this AI nonsense? What is the source? Is this the full picture? etc. Perhaps I am too optimistic...
- cantor_S_drug 1y ago
  Neil deGrasse Tyson said a quote expressing a concern about the future impact of AI on information credibility. The exact quote is: "I foresee the day where AI become so good at making a deep fake that the people who believed fake news as true will no longer think their fake news is true because they'll think their fake news was faked by AI."
  - tartoran 1y ago
    I wish people who believed that kind of fake news had this piece of critical thinking. I don't think they do though, they'll take whatever confirms their views and reject everything else as faked by AI with no logic or proof whatsoever.
    - quantummagic 1y ago
      Almost everyone believes they're thinking critically, that's just how it feels to think at all. As an aside, I wonder about the average person who extols critical thinking, and how proficient he actually is himself; in my experience they're often conformist and susceptible to uncritically accepting consensus positions. The truth is, for those of us with lower IQ, it doesn't matter how critically we think, we lack the knowledge and mental dexterity to reliably arrive at a nuanced and deep understanding of the world. You have to stop dreaming of a world where everyone can sort everything out for themselves, and instead build a world where people can reliably trust expert opinion. It's about having a high-trust society. That requires people in privileged positions to not abuse their advantage in a short term way, at the cost of alienating, and losing the trust of the unwashed masses. Because that's what has happened, the experts have been exploited as a social cudgel, by the psychopathic and malignant managerial class, in such an obvious and blunt way, that even those of us who are self-aware of our limitations, figure we're as likely to get it right ourselves, as to get honest and correct information from our social institutions.
area51org 1y ago
Quote may be cliched, but still it's valid. "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
WhyOhWhyQ 1y ago
The world will be a soulless hell, but Dario Amodei promises we'll live forever in it.
- swader999 1y ago
  And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.
vesche 1y ago
Relevant: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/07/05/are-we-the-baddies.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/07/05/are-w...
- AndrewKemendo 1y ago
  Oooh I recognize this, he’s entering his midlife crisis. Smart guy I wish him well, and hope he comes out the other side groovy.
- avhception 1y ago
  > You better maximize engagement or you will lose engagement this is a red queen’s race we can’t afford to lose! Burn all the social capital, burn all your values, FEED IT ALL TO MOLOCH! Wow. A new profile text for my Tinder account!
- 8474_s 1y ago
  > Release the hypnodrones If you are not building the next paperclip optimizer the competition already does!
  - trollbridge 1y ago
    SamA actually said perhaps data centres should occupy the majority of the earth’s crust.
- fellowmartian 1y ago
  It’s quite rich coming from this guy, but I’m glad he’s seen the truth nonetheless.
m0llusk 1y ago
This is ignoring the Marketing to Engineering ratio. For most recent history technology companies have had to spend at least as much on marketing as engineering in order to survive, and two to ten times as much spent on marketing as engineering is common for successful companies. Who is going to buy the thing is the most important question and without solid answers there is nothing, no matter how much technology was engineered. Now this formula has been complicated by technological engineering taking over aspects of marketing. This may seem to be simplifying and solving problems, but in ways it actually makes everything more difficult. Traditional marketing that focused on convincing people of solutions to problems is being reduced in importance. What is becoming most critical now is convincing people they can trust providers with potential solutions, and this trust is a more slippery fish than belief in the solutions themselves. That is partly because the breakdown of trust in communication channels means discussion of solutions is likely to never be heard.
- heddycrow 1y ago
  I want to keep reading your thoughts on this. How can I get more or can you source your influences?
  - m0llusk 1y ago
    Probably best to start here with the original paper and then search for related material as the idea has been kicked around for a while: http://www.marketingvp.com/download/mer-data.pdf http://www.marketingvp.com/download/mer-data.pdf
    - heddycrow 1y ago
      Thanks for that!
ssalka 1y ago
Eric Weinstein refers to this as an Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO), whereby organizations and economies at large assume perpetual growth, and that things really start to unravel when that growth inevitably slows. It is pretty mindblowing how we have basically accepted growth as the default state, it is not at all a given that things always grow and get better.
- mayhemducks 1y ago
  We will achieve essentially zero-cost infinite exponential scalability! The cloud has no limits! InfiniDum enterprises will operate in billions of markets across time space and dimensions of probability!
- zahlman 1y ago
  > It is pretty mindblowing how we have basically accepted growth as the default state It is completely to be expected, exactly because it is not new. It's been scarcely a generation since the peak in net change of the global human population, and will likely be at least another two generations before that population reaches its maximum value. It rose faster than exponentially for a few centuries before that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File:Population-doubling.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File:P...). And across that time, for all our modern complaints, quality of life has improved immensely. Of all the different experiences of various cultures worldwide and across recent history, "growth" has been quite probably the most stable. Culture matters. People's actions are informed by how they are socialized, not just by what they can observe in the moment.
  - spwa4 1y ago
    The reason people don't accept this is that it fundamentally changes society, it is because of what it means, not because it is or isn't possible. Net-growth society: new wealth is being created, if you can be part of the creation you get wealth No-growth society: only way to acquire wealth is to take it from someone else Oh plus because essentially every society that experienced it legislated it's way into a no-growth situation. The problem was not that growth was not possible, it's that people used state power, for a lot of different excuses, to prevent growth (and of course really to secure the position of the richest and most powerful in society) The excuses range from religion, morality separate from religion, wars, avoiding losing wars (and putting the entire economy in a usually futile attempt to win or avoid losing a war) and of course the whole thing feeding onto itself: laws protecting the rich at the direct expense of the poor (that can happen even if there is economic growth, though of course, the more growth the less likely) Btw: "futile attempt to win or avoid losing a war" these attempt were futile not because they lead to a win or a loss, but because the imposed cost of a no-growth society far exceeded any gains or even avoided losses ...
ninetyninenine 1y ago
But the difference this time is now is that AI is heading in the direction where it can do ALL of WHAT you mentioned FOR you and everyone else.
Der_Einzige 1y ago
This is what you get for not reading the writings of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Virilio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Virilio

ricogallo 1y ago

It sounds like the "The City" in "Blame!"

throwmeaway307 1y ago

move fast and break things! nevermind if the things are people or their lives!!

arnon 1y ago
build things """"people"""" want
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  People want dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle. If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems. The problem isn't AI, it's how marketing has eaten everything. So everyone is always pitching, looking for a competitive advantage, "telling their story", and "building their brand." You can't "build trust" if your primary motivation is to sell stuff to your contacts. The SNR was already terrible long before AI arrived. All AI has done is automated an already terrible process, which has - ironically - broken it so badly that it no longer works.
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    Tired: "Build things people want" Wired: "Build things society needs"
  - kitku 1y ago
    > People want dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle. The people yearn for the casino. Gambling economy NOW! Vote kitku for president :) PS. Please don't look at the stock market.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    > You can't "build trust" if your primary motivation is to sell stuff to your contacts That is false. You build a different type of trust: people need to trust that when they buy something from you it is a good product that will do what they want. Maybe someone else is better, but it won't be enough better as to be worth the time they would need to spend to evaluate that. Maybe someone else is cheaper, but you are still reasonably priced for the features you offer. They won't get fired for buying you because you have so often been worthy of the trust we give you that in the rare case you do something wrong it was nobody is perfect not that you are no longer trustworthy (you can only pull this trick off a few times before you become untrustworthy) The above is very hard to achieve, and even when you have it very easy to lose. If you are not yet there for someone you still need to act like you are and down want to lose it even though they may never buy from you often enough to realize you are worth it.
  - onion2k 1y ago
    If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems. That assumes people have the ability to choose not to do these things, and that they can't be manipulated or coerced into doing them against their will. If you believe that advertising, especially data-driven personalised and targeted advertising, is essentially way of hacking someone's mind to do things it doesn't actually want to do, then it becomes fairly obvious that it's not entirely the individual's fault. If adverts are 'Buy Acme widgets!' they're relatively easy to resist. When the advert is 'onion2k, as a man in his 40s who writes code and enjoys video games, maybe you spend too much time on HN, and you're a bit overweight, so you should buy Acme widgets!' it calls for people to be constantly vigilant, and that's too much to expect. When people get trapped by an advert that's been designed to push all their buttons, the reasonable position is that the advertiser should take some of the responsibility for that.
- teddyh 1y ago
  That is only true as long as people are the only entities who can spend money. As soon as people give AI the power to spend money, we will see companies designing products to appeal to AI:s. A new form of SEO spam, if you will.
palmotea 1y ago
> move fast and break things! > nevermind if the things are people or their lives!! Breaking things is ok. If people are things then it's ok to break them, right? Got it. Gotta get back to my startup to apply that insight.

wartywhoa23 1y ago

Yours truly, Larry Fink and The Money Owners.

drakythe 1y ago

Turns out the Torment Nexus was just democratizing Venture Capital's desire for infinite growth.

tdeck 1y ago
That's an uncharitable take. Those VCs care very deeply about society, that's why they're funding so much research into the Torment Singularity (and giving so many talks about it) and making sure that the Right People get the Torment Nexus first so "we" can decide how it gets used.
giraffe_lady 1y ago
The paperclip maximizer is us.
- gnarlouse 1y ago
  Unironically: we worry about the ASI control problem but can't even reign in our billionaires
  - lunar_mycroft 1y ago
    I look at it more like "the fact that we can't align humans/human institutions strongly suggests we won't be able to align something as alien as AGI is likely to be"
- katabasis 1y ago
  It's capitalism – the true "artificial intelligence" that has been organizing human life for the last ~200 years or so.
- zitsarethecure 1y ago
  It always was.
DougN7 1y ago
I misread your comment as being about Vulture Capital. I think I like that :)

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

edaemon 1y ago

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

SeanDav 1y ago

One of the potential upsides to this as that people just might start taking time to engage in a bit of critical thinking before reacting. Is this real? How likely is this AI nonsense? What is the source? Is this the full picture? etc. Perhaps I am too optimistic...

cantor_S_drug 1y ago
Neil deGrasse Tyson said a quote expressing a concern about the future impact of AI on information credibility. The exact quote is: "I foresee the day where AI become so good at making a deep fake that the people who believed fake news as true will no longer think their fake news is true because they'll think their fake news was faked by AI."
- tartoran 1y ago
  I wish people who believed that kind of fake news had this piece of critical thinking. I don't think they do though, they'll take whatever confirms their views and reject everything else as faked by AI with no logic or proof whatsoever.
  - quantummagic 1y ago
    Almost everyone believes they're thinking critically, that's just how it feels to think at all. As an aside, I wonder about the average person who extols critical thinking, and how proficient he actually is himself; in my experience they're often conformist and susceptible to uncritically accepting consensus positions. The truth is, for those of us with lower IQ, it doesn't matter how critically we think, we lack the knowledge and mental dexterity to reliably arrive at a nuanced and deep understanding of the world. You have to stop dreaming of a world where everyone can sort everything out for themselves, and instead build a world where people can reliably trust expert opinion. It's about having a high-trust society. That requires people in privileged positions to not abuse their advantage in a short term way, at the cost of alienating, and losing the trust of the unwashed masses. Because that's what has happened, the experts have been exploited as a social cudgel, by the psychopathic and malignant managerial class, in such an obvious and blunt way, that even those of us who are self-aware of our limitations, figure we're as likely to get it right ourselves, as to get honest and correct information from our social institutions.

area51org 1y ago

Quote may be cliched, but still it's valid. "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

WhyOhWhyQ 1y ago

The world will be a soulless hell, but Dario Amodei promises we'll live forever in it.

swader999 1y ago
And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

vesche 1y ago

Relevant: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/07/05/are-we-the-baddies.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/07/05/are-w...

AndrewKemendo 1y ago
Oooh I recognize this, he’s entering his midlife crisis. Smart guy I wish him well, and hope he comes out the other side groovy.
avhception 1y ago
> You better maximize engagement or you will lose engagement this is a red queen’s race we can’t afford to lose! Burn all the social capital, burn all your values, FEED IT ALL TO MOLOCH! Wow. A new profile text for my Tinder account!
8474_s 1y ago
> Release the hypnodrones If you are not building the next paperclip optimizer the competition already does!
- trollbridge 1y ago
  SamA actually said perhaps data centres should occupy the majority of the earth’s crust.
fellowmartian 1y ago
It’s quite rich coming from this guy, but I’m glad he’s seen the truth nonetheless.

m0llusk 1y ago

This is ignoring the Marketing to Engineering ratio. For most recent history technology companies have had to spend at least as much on marketing as engineering in order to survive, and two to ten times as much spent on marketing as engineering is common for successful companies. Who is going to buy the thing is the most important question and without solid answers there is nothing, no matter how much technology was engineered. Now this formula has been complicated by technological engineering taking over aspects of marketing. This may seem to be simplifying and solving problems, but in ways it actually makes everything more difficult. Traditional marketing that focused on convincing people of solutions to problems is being reduced in importance. What is becoming most critical now is convincing people they can trust providers with potential solutions, and this trust is a more slippery fish than belief in the solutions themselves. That is partly because the breakdown of trust in communication channels means discussion of solutions is likely to never be heard.

heddycrow 1y ago
I want to keep reading your thoughts on this. How can I get more or can you source your influences?
- m0llusk 1y ago
  Probably best to start here with the original paper and then search for related material as the idea has been kicked around for a while: http://www.marketingvp.com/download/mer-data.pdf http://www.marketingvp.com/download/mer-data.pdf
  - heddycrow 1y ago
    Thanks for that!

ssalka 1y ago

Eric Weinstein refers to this as an Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO), whereby organizations and economies at large assume perpetual growth, and that things really start to unravel when that growth inevitably slows. It is pretty mindblowing how we have basically accepted growth as the default state, it is not at all a given that things always grow and get better.

mayhemducks 1y ago
We will achieve essentially zero-cost infinite exponential scalability! The cloud has no limits! InfiniDum enterprises will operate in billions of markets across time space and dimensions of probability!
zahlman 1y ago
> It is pretty mindblowing how we have basically accepted growth as the default state It is completely to be expected, exactly because it is not new. It's been scarcely a generation since the peak in net change of the global human population, and will likely be at least another two generations before that population reaches its maximum value. It rose faster than exponentially for a few centuries before that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File:Population-doubling.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File:P...). And across that time, for all our modern complaints, quality of life has improved immensely. Of all the different experiences of various cultures worldwide and across recent history, "growth" has been quite probably the most stable. Culture matters. People's actions are informed by how they are socialized, not just by what they can observe in the moment.
- spwa4 1y ago
  The reason people don't accept this is that it fundamentally changes society, it is because of what it means, not because it is or isn't possible. Net-growth society: new wealth is being created, if you can be part of the creation you get wealth No-growth society: only way to acquire wealth is to take it from someone else Oh plus because essentially every society that experienced it legislated it's way into a no-growth situation. The problem was not that growth was not possible, it's that people used state power, for a lot of different excuses, to prevent growth (and of course really to secure the position of the richest and most powerful in society) The excuses range from religion, morality separate from religion, wars, avoiding losing wars (and putting the entire economy in a usually futile attempt to win or avoid losing a war) and of course the whole thing feeding onto itself: laws protecting the rich at the direct expense of the poor (that can happen even if there is economic growth, though of course, the more growth the less likely) Btw: "futile attempt to win or avoid losing a war" these attempt were futile not because they lead to a win or a loss, but because the imposed cost of a no-growth society far exceeded any gains or even avoided losses ...

ninetyninenine 1y ago

But the difference this time is now is that AI is heading in the direction where it can do ALL of WHAT you mentioned FOR you and everyone else.

Der_Einzige 1y ago

This is what you get for not reading the writings of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Virilio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Virilio