3 ms·

Is it really collective desire or are these products being pushed upon us? And why does it always have to be the dystopic "destroying human nature and society a

Is it really collective desire or are these products being pushed upon us? And why does it always have to be the dystopic "destroying human nature and society as we know it" science fiction and not the utopic "everyone lived happily ever after" science fiction? Or does it just feel that way to me?

dag100 3mo ago
For a utopia to exist, everything has to go right. Dystopias are almost all modelled on some existing facet of human behaviour. Naturally one state is unstable as it requires practically complete co-operation in most cases while the other one is stable as it usually exists as some sort of undesirable equilibrium between competing forces.
qlte 3mo ago
Based on the HN “realists” I routinely see in comments, I expect it will go something like this: I’m generally pro-privacy, but here’s the hard truth: at my startup, we disabled keyboard input in our app Slopgen and switched the default to Conduit Thought Input™, and only 2% of users bothered to navigate the 17 submenus and submit their SSN and face scan to re-enable typing. Yep, 2%, that’s all. DAUs only decreased by ≈11%, but our ARR is already up 170% thanks to our AdThink™ revenue sharing agreement, and only 1% of users argued with our Fin.ai bot for the 45 minutes needed give a thumbs down feedback about the change. Let’s face it: talk is cheap but users *want* these features, revealed preference *always* tells the real story. Better get used to it now or get left behind.
pbjerkeseth 3mo ago
Desire is probably the wrong word, fixation is more accurate. Like the skiing advice that you shouldn't look at things (trees) that you want to avoid. As for Utopias/Dystopias, I don't know how to answer that without waxing poetic about ideas like chaos being the natural order, or beauty being in the eye of the beholder, <insert other platitude>.

dag100 3mo ago

For a utopia to exist, everything has to go right. Dystopias are almost all modelled on some existing facet of human behaviour. Naturally one state is unstable as it requires practically complete co-operation in most cases while the other one is stable as it usually exists as some sort of undesirable equilibrium between competing forces.

qlte 3mo ago

Based on the HN “realists” I routinely see in comments, I expect it will go something like this: I’m generally pro-privacy, but here’s the hard truth: at my startup, we disabled keyboard input in our app Slopgen and switched the default to Conduit Thought Input™, and only 2% of users bothered to navigate the 17 submenus and submit their SSN and face scan to re-enable typing. Yep, 2%, that’s all. DAUs only decreased by ≈11%, but our ARR is already up 170% thanks to our AdThink™ revenue sharing agreement, and only 1% of users argued with our Fin.ai bot for the 45 minutes needed give a thumbs down feedback about the change. Let’s face it: talk is cheap but users *want* these features, revealed preference *always* tells the real story. Better get used to it now or get left behind.

pbjerkeseth 3mo ago

Desire is probably the wrong word, fixation is more accurate. Like the skiing advice that you shouldn't look at things (trees) that you want to avoid. As for Utopias/Dystopias, I don't know how to answer that without waxing poetic about ideas like chaos being the natural order, or beauty being in the eye of the beholder, <insert other platitude>.