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by jrockway 988 days ago
If compiler warnings were complete sentences, would you worry about burning out your empathy circuits when you suppress the warning? Guys, it's some numbers being multiplied together in a way that sounds like you're talking to a person. But you're not talking to a person. You're talking to a ball rolling down a billion dimension hill.
2 comments
ben_w 987 days ago
It would take a bit more than full sentences, and more than merely "suppressing" the warnings. How much more? Well, people have regularly been concerned about the psychological impact of both sexual and violent[0] content in films and video games — in the UK the moral panic about "video nasties", in the US people calling Doom etc. a "murder simulator". Neither of those those things was really trying to do that; conversely propaganda can get people to kill, and manages to do this with caricatures.

> Guys, it's some numbers being multiplied together in a way that sounds like you're talking to a person. But you're not talking to a person. You're talking to a ball rolling down a billion dimension hill.

If you can't tell, does it matter?

[0] why are these two so often conflated?

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TeMPOraL 987 days ago
> If compiler warnings were complete sentences, would you worry about burning out your empathy circuits when you suppress the warning?

I wouldn't if it was just someone turning build errors into prose. I would if it was an immersive enough interactive experience, explicitly designed to make me feel I'm dealing with a real person.

> Guys, it's some numbers being multiplied together in a way that sounds like you're talking to a person. But you're not talking to a person.

What if you can't tell you're talking to a machine? It's not like we never had humans pretending to be software. And after spending countless time shitting on a "humanlike but totally a bot" customer service agents, how long until you start treating actual human strangers the same way? The cues are all almost the same anyway, and every interaction is training you one way or another.

> You're talking to a ball rolling down a billion dimension hill.

That's probably as good a description of how our own intelligence works as any. Don't underestimate the amount of information and complexity that can be packed in absurdly-high-dimensional spaces.

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