6 ms·

Maybe the very core of what it is to be human is to destroy ourselves.

• AlexandrB 10mo ago
  Would be funny if the "great filter" is not nukes or some other weapon, but social media. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
  • Nasrudith 10mo ago
    The Great Filter is just bullshit until we come across space ruins to prove that something has been filtering out civilizations. It is possible that we are just the "precursors" without any giants to stand upon the shoulders of. Catastrophazing new media hasn't gone out of fashion yet. Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?
    • walterbell 10mo ago
      Any real-world side effects of Reality TV?
      • ben_w 10mo ago
        Arguably the election of Trump.
    • ben_w 10mo ago
      The absence is the evidence. Being a precursor is not inconsistent with great filters, a great filter is why nobody else is there to be one. Great filter is anywhere at all in the progress of life from pre-life chemistry to stable interplanetary expansion; filters behind us, for example multicellular life or having dry land so we can invent fire, are still potential great filters and they would leave no space ruins to find. That said, my assumption is lots of little filters that add up. Eleven filters behind us each with 10% pass rates is enough to make us the peak of civilisation in this galaxy; eleven more between us and Kardashev III would make the universe seem empty.
      • deleted 10mo ago
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    • throwaway94275 10mo ago
      One could argue modern social media like Tiktok and Snapchat is an evolution of reality TV, in app/smartphone form.
    • tw04 10mo ago
      > Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations? I’d say we’ve already got measurable statistics. When half of genz isn’t dating or married, it’s signaling trouble. https://aibm.org/commentary/gen-zs-romance-gap-why-nearly-half-of-young-men-arent-dating/ https://aibm.org/commentary/gen-zs-romance-gap-why-nearly-ha... Now, we can discuss if that’s good or bad for the planet, but it’s not great for humanity.
      • XorNot 10mo ago
        Yes I'm sure reality TV did it and not cost of living meaning they have little money for entertainment and definitely will never purchase their own home.
        • tw04 10mo ago
          Yes, college aged men who aren’t in a relationship are avoiding pursuing one because they’re thinking about whether or not they’ll be able to afford a house some day. It definitely has nothing to do with social media and dating apps breaking human interaction.
        • joquarky 10mo ago
          Please keep the sarcasm on Reddit.
        • ben_w 10mo ago
          If "will never purchase their own home" was a reason to not have kids, many more people in previous generations would've been childless. What has changed is expectations. The room I rented in my final year of university, and that was only 20 years ago, would (I think) no longer be legal: too poorly insulated. Very cheap though, I think it was £40 a week? Even after adjusting that for inflation since then, that was cheap. But it's (I think?) no longer possible. Expectations for things that can be bought have gone up faster than our ability to buy them. We didn't used to all expect to be able to fly somewhere on holiday. We didn't used to all expect to have a phone — and I don't just mean a smartphone, or even a mobile phone, my first partner was a bit older than me, born in the 70s, their family didn't have a landline. All the streaming services are expensive, I grew up with 4 free-to-air channels and no internet (not even a dialup modem) let alone broadband that you need to stream video, no cable TV or satellite TV. Smart bulbs for mood lighting can quickly become expensive, I grew up in an upper middle class house and yet it had one, singular, dimming switch for the incandescent bulb it took. A microwave was a fancy accessory, not standard, when I was a kid. It all adds up. Also, our expectations for relationships have gone up faster than humans could ever change, as our expectations follow not reality but rather perception. Sure, the perception was already off when I was young, we had unrealistic body goals in high-gloss magazines and Hollywood glamour and unrealistic romances in stories and unrealistic sex in porn, but even with that the quantity one could consume was relatively limited… and now we have the highest-rated content from our always-on social media accounts, A/B tested to be more appealing than reality, and even when it isn't AI-enhanced or photoshopped, it's still the final cut to the cutting room floor of having to deal with flawed real people.
    • jjkaczor 10mo ago
      "Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?" The jury is still out on that one... failed "business" person who was also a "reality TV star" - and now appears to be in some level of dementia - currently in charge of the single biggest military-industrial complex on the planet...
    • coldtea 10mo ago
      >Catastrophazing new media hasn't gone out of fashion yet. Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations? And it was. We're now even further down in that downfall, and most content is "reality TV" style now: influencers, parasocial relationships, IG, TikTok, OF, news vlogs and podcasts that are about the anchor an not the content, and so on...
    • lqstuart 10mo ago
      The “Great Filter” is the fact that humans are nowhere near as remarkable nor “intelligence” as necessary as we want to think
    • joquarky 10mo ago
      What do you mean? Jerry Springer theatrics has infiltrated politics, and I would judge our civilization as being in a downward trend as a result.
  • ben_w 10mo ago
    I've read that short story, but can't remember enough details to search for it. Humans do find alien radio signals, but they keep going dark after a brief window; the narrator suspects why, because they witness fellow humans disappearing into simulations far more fun than reality could ever be.
    • TheEaterOfSouls 10mo ago
      Not quite the same concept, but The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster (published in 1909, but still pretty relevant imo) is about where this all might lead, with humans living in almost total isolation and only communicating through "the machine", which mostly sounds like modern social media lol. It's terrifying. Also really demonstrates how static human nature actually is.
• agumonkey 10mo ago
  maybe there's no core just unchecked forces due to technology removing barriers
  • micromacrofoot 10mo ago
    yeah evolutionarily we gained all this power to survive, now that we've got that figured out the drive to survive has been turned in its head now we need to figure out a way to survive our survival instincts in the world of abundance and safety we have created imo we have to conquer our own biology because we are too amped up as a species to choose temperance
    • kingkawn 10mo ago
      Nothing has been conquered. Technology is providing a behavioral selection process that is effectively self-culling the populace and is going to make the mass adaptation to the next century of climate change much more bearable for all
      • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
        You are being downvoted, but I am wondering if people, who are doing it are doing it reflexively just because they disagree and not because they thought it through. There is an argment to be made that there is a level of self-preservation that disappears when things become too sanitized. Case in point, during one of FL issues, people were panicking over gas and -- some -- were putting gas in unapproved containers without giving much thought over whether it is a good idea since gas can do a lot more than just power cars. Granted, some of the silly behavior is a direct result of social media egg ons/clout chase and weird level Tyler Durden accellerationist vibes, but some people simply don't know.. or care to know. I am not saying it is a good thing, but there is something to be said about current distracted humans operating internal combustion engine. Then again, my dad already told me it is all going to hell, because I can't change oil...
      • micromacrofoot 10mo ago
        we have certainly conquered caloric density, reducing individual caloric expenditure, and eliminating environmental hazards (though it's not evenly distributed) to the point where pockets of the population are dangerously sedentary and overfed (and thus life expectancy is declining from a previous peak)
• api 10mo ago
  No, our nature is to satiate our dopamine system. That system evolved to keep us fed, nourished, and to make us make friends and belong and have sex to make more humans. The problem is that we are now so smart and clever that we can start learning how the dopamine system works and hacking it. This isn't new. We've been doing it for a long time with booze, porn, drugs, sexual excess, gambling, pointless consumerism, certain kinds of religious fervor, endless things. But almost all of those things are self-limiting. They're either costly, dangerous, in limited supply, or physically harmful enough to our health that we shy away from them and taboos develop around them. Addictive digital media may actually be more dangerous than those things precisely because it is cheap, always available, endless, and physically harmless. As a result it has no built-in mechanism that limits it. We can scroll and scroll and chase social media feedback loops forever until we die. AI slop feeds are going to supercharge this even more. Instead of human creators we will have AI models that can work off immediate engagement feedback and fine tune themselves for each individual user in real time. I'm quite certain all the antisocial media companies are working on this right now. Won't be long before they start explicitly removing human creators from the loop and just generating endless customized chum with ad placement embedded into it. Some people have the discipline to push back, but many do not either for psychological/neurological reasons or because they are exhausted and stressed and unable to summon the energy. Humans do not have infinite willpower. So I've been predicting for a while that eventually we're going to heavily regulate or tax this space. This concerns me too due to the free speech implications and the general risk of overreacting and overcorrecting. It'll be tempting for politicians to regulate or tax only the platforms they don't like, or to use the regulatory mechanism to crack down on legitimate speech by grouping it in with addictive chum. We've seen similar things with attempts to regulate porn or hate speech. But it's coming. I have little doubt. I think we'll see this when GenZ and GenA start entering politics. It's really still shocking to me. If you went back in time and told me in, say, 2006, that our engagement-hacking would be so successful that it became an X-risk to humanity, I'm not sure I'd believe you. I never would have believed how effective this stuff could be. It's just a damn screen for god's sake! I think a lot of people are still in denial about this problem because it seems so absurd that a touch screen can addict people as well as fentanyl, but it's true. I see it around me all the time. Edit: My preferred way to go about reeling this back in would be to strike at the root and start taxing advertising the way we tax booze, drugs, gambling, and other vices. Advertising revenue is the trunk of this tree. The entire reason these systems are created is to keep people staring so ads can be pushed at them. Take that away and a lot of the motive to build and run these things goes away. Another, which we're already seeing, is to age-restrict antisocial media. Young minds are particularly vulnerable to these tactics, more so than adults, and all addiction pushers try to addict people early. Lastly, we could start campaigns to educate people. We need schools teaching classes explaining to kids how these systems addict and manipulate them and why, and public PSAs to the same effect. It needs to be treated like a health issue because it is. Taxes, education, and age restriction is how we almost killed cigarettes in the USA, so there is precedent for these three things together working. We also need to be a lot more precise in our language. The problem is not the Internet, phones, computers, "tech," AI, etc. The problem is engineering systems for engagement, specifically. If you are trying to design a system to keep people staring at a screen (or other interface) for as much time as possible, you are hurting people. What you're doing is in the same category as what the Sackler family did with oxycontin. Engagement engineering is a predatory destructive practice and the people who do it are predators. I think it's taken a long time for people to realize this because, again, it's just a damn screen! It's shocking that this is so effective that we need to have this societal conversation.
• mlrtime 10mo ago
  My hypothesis is: Humans are social and need social interaction to thrive. However we are not wired for the diversity of interacting with 7 Billion people and all the derivatives. We thrive in small groups where there is high trust social networks and generally being around people with the same culture and belief system.
  • krapp 10mo ago
    But humans don't, in any meaningful sense, interact with 7 billion people when they use social media any more than they interact with the entire population of their city whenever they go out. And most people living in any reasonably sized city - to use that as a real world analogue for social media - aren't only interacting with small, high trust social networks of the same culture and beliefs, and they manage just fine. Your hypothesis (which seems more and more common) seems to me to be a "just so" story, but it doesn't correlate with what I've observed of real human behavior.
    • mlrtime 10mo ago
      Your reply is flawed 1) People choose to live in the same city so they have that in common 2) 7B don't all interact together, thats not the point. The point is that its random who you talk to as most social media is anonymous. Combine this and you have low trust + low chance of having similar viewpoints/culture/beliefs. Manage just fine does not mean everyone is happy, and in these major areas like NYC people always seem to congregate with the groups they share the most in commong with.