I like how our future will be even more dominated with ads then our present.

Even the AI companies, who tout themselves as the future of almost everything, must still suck the dick of advertising.

The world already belongs to advertising, AI is just another host the parasite has latched onto.

Makes a joke of any claims of AIs dominance of the future. Unfortunately an incredibly unfunny joke because, fuck, advertising won.

Buy Alphabet stock. If you want have restless, unsatisfying sleep on a mattress of money.

I'm going on and on here, but fuck this is so sad. We invented AI and all it did was optimize how humans minds could be raped and pillaged.

Not just the best and brightest humans working out how to make people click ads, now the best and brightest AIs are working on it too. I guess this is the 'alignment' they keep talking about.

How fucked is this that the Mag 7 and the literally biggest companies in the world, technological leaders of humanity, and it's all about advertising. All in service of advertising.

I guess Yogurt had the right idea all the way back in 1987: Merchandising!

I guess the time is absolutely right for the sequel, I wonder what else they'll do that will still hold up in another 40 years.

Many services are only free due to ads.

You're posting on HN. It's only free here because it's a giant ad for Y Combinator and their companies.

It has totally skewed all internet-related markets to the point of dominating ownership.

Information wants to be loose!

> intelligence implies violence

Feels like a precursor to the Dark Forest theory.

Another very unoriginal and shallow work.

Assuming sarcasm.

The Three Body Trilogy was absolutely packed with fantastic and original ideas, and explained/presented in ways that flowed well with the story. That's how I found it anyway. I very much enjoyed all three Three Body Problem books. Also very much enjoyed Blindsight.

If not sarcasm, I feel sorry for your not being able to extract joy from any of those books, and hope there are others that tickle your fancy that maybe the HN readership might like to know about. Going by your email address, I'd guess that maybe Accelerando might do it?

I only read the first book of the trilogy and the "science" in it was so profoundly absurd that I couldn't motivate myself to read any further. I think part of the issue is that it had been sold to me under the guise that it was hard sci-fi, and it was anything but.

I disagree it's unoriginal, though. It's pretty original, you just have to be prepared to suspend your disbelief (it's kind of on me that I wasn't when I read it).

Is it? Maybe I didn't get far enough into the series, but the parts I did read and the synopsis online are all derivative of old ideas. The "dark forest" idea is a very old and much debated solution to the Fermi paradox, and appears in other works (e.g. the wolves in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series). The VR stuff was derivative of dozens of previous works. The rehydration of the solarians is not that different than the spiders freezing in A Deepness in the Sky by Vinge. Plenty of alien invasion and doom cult literature out there (too much, in my opinion).

But I took Dark Forest to mean the Dark Forest Theory which the post I was replying to mentioned, and that's just a common theory under a new name, which has been a commonly known solution to the Fermi paradox for so long that no one is credited with coming up with it. It's given the "deadly probe" name in a SETI review of the Fermi paradox literature in 1984.

My criteria for originality may be more lenient than yours. I think it would be difficult to find sci-fi that isn't derivative of older ideas to an extent, and it's harder for more recent work to stand out, because basically everything's already been done. Managing to combine a dozen ideas from previous works into a coherent whole is far from uncreative. So I feel the author was original enough in his approach, even though I thought it was scientifically inept.

I loved Blindsight, but Echopraxia lost me at numerous points. I'll need to go back and re-read.

In my opinion they don't produce them, they attract them, and for different reasons.

It is almost surprising that it survived post-SBF's exposure as a massive (and that undersells it) fraud.

The reason it's not surprising is the size of the money bulwark of the people still behind it.

Fair point. Just take the good and discard the rest.

Churches and religions as a general rule want to 'do good', but also have a variable amount of crazy kinda irremovably attached to them, which is the bit that is generally focused on too.

The dangerous part is where the 'doing good together' part slowly turns into normalizing the crazy part by 'social infection'.

As long as you don't end up being able to rationalize some behavior that, before you joined the group, you'd never have participated in or condoned.

Crazy justifies itself by small degrees.

I get the feeling that the current membership is not, in fact, donating almost all their money.

If you're a regular person and you start taking an EA approach to the world, that is probably not going to look like donating almost all your money: most people don't have that much disposable income, and applying your working hours directly to important problems will often be more effective. But if you have billions of dollars you totally should be trying to figure out how to give most of it away effectively.

I agree with that.

What EA has turned into is analogous to what the US Government has turned into.

It took 250 years for the US to go from the constitution to ICE detention centers and banned journalists, but it only took EA 15 years to go from 'donating to the poor' to 'sacrificing real present humans for the sake of future theoretical humans'.

That seems like a rather tribal take on your part. Are you not accounting for the indigenous people who were killed and displaced? What about slavery and Jim Crow? What about women not having the right to vote until 1920? What about the many wars? Only now you take issue with the current situation because your preferred party is not in power?

There’s nothing new about ICE detention centers and you should read up on previous presidents and their relationship with journalists. In particular check out Obama. See https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-obama-administration-mos...

Good point. The US has always sacrificed people. That's not really a new thing.

But that we look at it differently today has nothing to do with any particular party or who is in power (that has little relation to the parties of today), but with the fact that we live today, and have a tendency to glorify the past. (And there's definitely an attempt to whitewash history, ignore all the terrible things the US has done and pretend the US was always great and perfect.)

But there's also the belief that over time, we should be learning and doing better, and we wouldn't do those terrible things of the past anymore. So the shock when they do happen is real. And the current US government is pretty explicit about wanting to bring back all the horrors of the past.

Good perspective. Lots of good ideas get corruped over time. But EA managed to do it in record time while the founders are still around.

The name always ends up being an umbrella for the craziness that groups of like minded rich-beyond-your-wildest-dreams folks will turn it into.

It's practically an axiom.

How do you turn a good idea into an existential threat to humanity? Let a like-minded group of very rich people commandeer it for a short while.