> Are we simply getting old and bitter?

No, we are getting wiser. It's not bitterness to look at a technology with a critical eye and see the bad effects as well as the good. It's not foolish to judge that the negative effects outweigh the positive. It's a mark of maturity. "But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil."

> Are we simply getting old and bitter?

For crypto, no. It's basically only useful for illegal actions, so if you live in a society where illegal is well correlated with "bad", you won't see any benefit from it.

The case for LLM is more complicated. There are positives and negatives. And the case for social networks is even more complicated, because they are objectively not what they used to be anymore.

Low interest rates favor parasite middlemen, not those who actually do stuff

> Are we simply getting old and bitter?

Maybe, but it has nothing to do with change itself.

Change can be either positive or negative. Often it is objectively negative and can stay that way for decades.

> Every 20-30 years some new tech made it easier, cheaper, and faster to get your message to an intended recipient.

No it has regressed now. We are probably back to the level of 1950s before telephones became common.

People don't answer unknown numbers and are not listed in the telephone book.

When I was a kid in the 90s I could call almost anyone in my town by looking them up in the phone book.

> A large part of it is that we maxed out a lot of how communication tech can impact daily life, at least in terms of communication,

Perhaps for uneducated casual communications, lacking in critical analysis. The majority of what passes for "communications" are misunderstood, misstated, omit key critical aspects, and speak from an uninformed and unexamined position... the human race may "communicate" but does so very poorly, to the degree much of the human activity in our society is placeholder and good enough, while being in fact terrible and damaging.

I think the biggest problem with both technologies is how many people seem to think this.

Crypto was a way that people who think they’re brilliant can engage in gambling.

AI is a way for “smart” people to create language to make their opinions sound “smarter”

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> Imagine the DVR being invented today. A commercial device that helps you skip ads. It would never be allowed to happen.

That's arguably what AI is - it compressed the internet so that you can extract StackOverflow answers without clicking through all the fucking ads that await you on the journey from search bar to the answer you were looking for.

You can of course expect it, over the next decade or so, to interpose ads between you and your goal in the same way that Google and StackOverflow did from 2010-now.

But for the moment I think it's the exact opposite of your thesis. The AI companies are in cut-throat capture-market-share mode so they're purposely skipping opportunities to cram ads down your throat.

Yes, at some point mainstream technology turned on the users. So much modern tech seems to be about exerting control or "monetizing" instead of empowering.

I am generally anti-capitalist, and a big reason is because I don't think capitalism, inherently and fundamentally, can become anything other than what it is now. The benefit its provided is rarely accurately weighed against the harms, and for people who disproportionately benefit, like most here on HN, it's even harder to see the harms.

Anti-capitalist sentiment was incredibly widespread in the US during the 19th century through the 1930s, because far more people were personally impacted, and most needed look no further than their own lives to see it. If nothing else, capitalism has become more sophisticated in disguising its harms, and acclimating people to them to such an extent that many become entirely incapable of seeing any harm at all, or even imagining any other way for a society to be structured, despite humanity having exited for 100,000+ years.

Apparently you do not understand how they chose the two groups. Group identity was not based on a survey or any attribute of the participating individuals.

Low and high socio-emotional groups refer to whether the group was shown the low or high socio-emotional video. The pre-test and exclusion based on lack of attention and instruction following was performed before group selection for each individual, which was presumably random.

I still say "please" to the AI assistant so that I'll be among the last to be made into paperclips.

I'd take this advice one step further: just don't use the robots

Ask chatgpt ways to instruct an employee on a task.

1. A bot-generated argument is still an argument. I can't make claims about the truth or falsity based on the enunciator, that's simply ad hominem.

2. A bot-generated image is not a record of photon-emissions in the physical world. When I look at photos, they need to be records of the physical world, or they're a creative work.

I think you can't rationally apply the same standard to these 2 things.

As a person with trust issues, I find this adaptation to the change in status-quo quite natural for me.

I've seen chatgpt output here as comments for sure. In some cases obvious, in other cases borderline. I wouldn't guess that it's a major fraction of comments, but it's there.

Practicing social skills is often disillusioning. Marvin, the sad robot, offers a prediction after autocompleting Wikipedia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_the_Paranoid_Android

its a next word predictor. if youve been convinced it has a brain, i have some magic beans youd be interested in

Perhaps I missed it, could you help me see where specifically the paper acknowledges or asserts that LLMs do not have these capabilities? I see where the paper repeatedly mentions perceptions, but I also see right at the beginning, "Our research reveals that the socio-emotional capabilities of autonomous agents lead individuals to attribute a humanlike mind to these nonhuman entities" [emphasis added], and multiple places in the paper, for example in the section titled "Theoretical Background", subtitle 'Socio-emotional capabilities in autonomous agents increase “humanness”', LLMs are implied to have at least low levels of these capabilities, and contrasts it to the perception that they have high levels.

In brief, the paper consistently but implicitly regards these tools as having at least minimal socio-emotional capabilities, and that the problem is humans perceiving them as having higher levels.