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"

> No-growth society: only way to acquire wealth is to take it from someone else

Wealth is created by work. In any society, be it growth or no-growth, you can create and acquire wealth by working. (Not necessarily for a wage. Working for yourself also creates wealth. Every time you make yourself dinner, or patch a torn pant leg, or change your car's oil, you are creating wealth.)

The problem is that non-working parasites (investors, rent-seekers, warlords) can't acquire wealth in a no-growth society without taking it from someone else.[1] (Because in a no-growth society, investing on the net is ~zero-returns, ~zero-value.)

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[1] They take it from someone else in a growth society, too, but a person who works and loses half their productive surplus to a rent seeker is still getting the benefits of growth. In a no-growth society, the rent-seeker's gain is 100% someone else's net loss.

In a no-growth (or even degrowth, which I have recently learned is a thing) society taking what you need from someone else is not the only option: someone can also choose to share it.

A society like that may be quite different in innumerable ways, of course, and the idea of “wealth” in the way we understand it may not make sense.

Thanks for that!

> 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.

> All AI has done is automated an already terrible process, which has - ironically - broken it so badly that it no longer works.

Evil contains within itself the seed of its own destruction ;)

Sure, sometimes you should fight the decline. But sometimes... just shrug and let it happen. Let's just take the safety labels off some things and let problems solve themselves. Let everybody run around and do AI and SEO. Good ideas will prevail eventually, focus on those. We have no influence on the "when", but it's a matter of having stamina and hanging in there, I guess

It boggles my mind when, despite my general avoidance of advertising online, I see the language being used. Call me old fashioned, but "viral" is a bad thing to me. "Addictive" is a bad thing. "Tricks" are bad! But this is the language being used to attract customers, and I suppose it works well enough.

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.

> 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.

Tired: "Build things people want"

Wired: "Build things society needs"

Fixed it for you: People are most easily manipulated into dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle.

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.