[pigsty]

This is what terrifies me most about AI’s insane growth now. Not the risk of it destroying creative jobs. The risk of it giving us exactly what we want to always perfectly stimulate our brains and shortcut our pleasure pathways.

Smartphones in our hands is already putting boredom at risk of extinction. Where humanity will go when we can be exposed to unchallenging content that is precisely what we want 24/7, adapt to be different the moment we start getting slightly tired of current content, divorced from reality, and completely for free is something I can’t really imagine.

A lot of sci-fi deals with people living in VR worlds because they’re unable to cope with real life. Instead we’re on a path to virtual drug addiction but with no possibility of overdose or come down.

[scajanus]

Consuming content does not really make me happy or feel good. It is stimulating and addictive, but as of now I am still motivated to see friends, do sports, work towards goals etc. even if I often get sidetracked by my online material.

If you think about addiction simplistically and mechanically, drugs will always be more capable of releasing dopamine than what our bodies are capable of naturally. It would make sense to me that there is a limit to how addictive content can get, when consumed in the usual ways.

This is also a (health) education problem, and at least in Finland problematic social media use has been linked with "moderate/low school achievement, low health literacy, and low parental monitoring"[1] (though if there is causality, it probably goes both ways for some of those).

For what it is worth, for me personally there is a limit after which I get twitchy and need to do some hard or uncomfortable in the physical world to feel good again.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/4/1885

[alright_scowl]

That sounds great actually. Reality is overrated.

I welcome the future where humans have become obsolete.

[nostromo123]

You know what's great? You are already free to do that without imposing dystopian circumstances on other people.

[alright_scowl]

I'm not imposing anything on anyone. Merely stating the inevitable.