We all have watched so many TV shows and movies, and read so many books, that we look at real life like it is a storybook. The main character always wins in the end.
These stories are fun, but wildly misleading. We have basically brainwashed ourselves through our entertainment into thinking life is a narrative.
In real life, the good guys often do not win. The bad guys many times never get what they deserve. There usually are no surprise plot twists that will save us.
We are a species playing with technology that has developed at an exponential rate around us. The white collar recession developing now as a result of automation, off shoring, and AI could radically change the life many are used to. Artificial intelligence could far exceed human intelligence and simply wipe us out. Or a small terrorist group could use a genetically altered disease that is incurable to wipe us all out.
I think our ancestors who did not have all the entertainment we have today had a more realistic view of the world. Reading very old books is quite helpful to try to reconnect to reality.
We are like children playing with matches in a bomb factory.
I don’t really have solutions to this. I don’t own a tv, but I still read a lot of fiction. And waste time on Facebook and news websites.
I have a hard time envisioning a world without me, although that has been the default state of nature for thousands of years.
Do we accept Ted Bundy’s proposition that technology advancement is destructive toward our species? Or do we embrace Sam Altman’s utopia that supposedly will arrive with general artificial intelligence? Or will we simply be wiped out as the author of Superintelligence suggests? Or maybe none of this will occur.
Can we cut ourselves off from the artificial stories that continually draw our attention? TV shows, movies, fiction books, social media and online video, news websites, etc? Would doing so be beneficial?
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45872530
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Source: news.ycombinator.com
