You’re layering
several hypotheticals on top of each other, which leads to progressively distant possibilities. Good on you for caring about humans though
I think this is decisively the wrong way to think about it. Yes, layering hypotheticals like that means that any one scenario is extremely unlikely to be the thing that gets you, but that doesn't mean the shape of the problem is wrong.
It's like arguing with someone who doesn't believe in using seat belts when driving. "Why should I put them on?" they say, and when you try to explain what might go wrong they won't listen to any explanation that isn't a hyper-concrete hypothetical. So finally you give in and say, "Well, when we get onto the highway, a truck might lose control and hit us", and their response is "I don't think that's very likely, it seems highly improbable that today we will be hit by a truck when getting on the highway".
I agree with OP that this seems like the kind of thing where the unknown unknowns are so great that the correct approach is serious caution, and that any demand to know exactly how or why it will go wrong, falls in the trap where every specific example is very unlikely to be the thing that goes wrong, but still in total there's like an 80% chance that it goes horribly wrong. I don't know if we have the terminology to talk about this kind of failure mode. "You shouldn't play God" maybe? At least you shouldn't ask for specific examples of how things could go wrong, if you're going to turn around and claim each one highly improbable.
"I don't know if we have the terminology to talk about this kind of failure mode."
We actually have and is called RISK.
RISK = Probability * Damage.
Applied to the seatbelt event we have a death level damage and a high probability of happening given recent studies, so using a simple belt could easily save you from deadly accidents.
Applied to any unrealistic scenario we have insane level damages but also an incredibly low probability (near 0) so RISK = ~0%
Well that's the point about unknown unknowns though, we actually have no idea what the probability is. But we do know it's not low, that's the only unlikely scenario.
We only know it's a very complicated system with many interlocking dependencies, and based on what we know about complicated systems in general, as well as biology in particular, is that if any one of these unknown dependencies break, the whole system can fail catastrophically.
Therefore the probability that something will go wrong is very high, and the damage could easily be irreparable damage to the species, if not extinction. Does that not give an intolerably high risk?
I don’t think this technology we’ll get people to stop having sex to the degree that IVG is all we’ll ever use. And to the degree that we believe some humans are genetically destined for anything, that’s the line of thinking that leads to dystopia.
I don't know man, people basically aren't having sex already. The fertility rate is way below replacement in all modernized countries, half of gen Z has never had sex at all, contraception is free, people struggle to get pregnant the more chronically ill the population gets, and the people who actively do want to get pregnant are going to want to use whatever technology there is to improve things.
But outside the bible, who says we must be more and above replacement rates? Is such a tragedy for humanity if there are only 4 billion humans in 100 years? 4 happier billions? It doesn't HAVE to go up all the time, and between extinction (zero humans) and overcrowding (X billions) there are many unknown ways to go.
Unfortunately most of society and the economy is built on the foundational assumption of a growing (or at least stable) population. There will be some extremely tough challenges to solve with an actively declining population.
A lot of these issues have more to do with how we’ve constructed our society than with some loss of purity. If you want people to have more sex, make cities and towns more livable, get people out of cars, give them living wages so they have free time, create societal supports for childcare, make giving birth and pediatric care completely free, and support people forming associations outside of work. These are all barriers that have appeared basically my lifetime and it’s way more likely that people are making informed choices than that there’s some horrible transformation we’re all undergoing.
This framework would be hard to apply to unknown unknowns. That's why in software engineering you'd apply canarying. Then the longer timeframe for potential negative effects, the slower the adoption of a new process should be.
The history of humanity, I say of hominids even, was defined by humans playing it unsafe - migrating, sailing, inventing bombs, you name it. We played god before even we invented gods, and reached this point in time. Should we say "this is best we can do, let's stop everything"? Nah, not likely.
"To play God" isn't just to do something spectacular which wasn't possible before. It's to use other people - to put yourself on a higher teleological level than other people, declaring their purpose (whatever it is) as fully subordinate to your purpose (whatever it is).
As if they were a tool you created. Obviously, if I carve a piece of wood into a spoon, it's I who get to say that what used to be a piece of wood now has a purpose of moving soup to mouths. The carved piece of wood now has a purpose, but it's wholly subordinate to my purpose (whatever it is).
You don't have to actually design people to play God - you can subordinate others to your purpose without doing that, that's what various God-kings in history did. But it certainly gives you a head start if you make them.
You can make something and don't subordinate it to your purpose. In our culture, we see children that way. We claim, basically, that we didn't deliberately design a child, we only obeyed our own natures without really having much choice in the matter, and thus we and our child is on the same teleological level.
This is not a cultural universal. In many cultures, parents (in particular fathers) would say basically "I made you, so you must do as I please, you have no reason for existing except for my purposes". It was a hard won battle for our culture to assert that children matter for their own sake and not just for their parent's.
Many things in this thread makes me want to say "Y'all MFs need Jesus". I won't say that, but I will say that you should stop and think about why it is that the Catholic church is so difficult about contraception, why Christians in general have historically made such a big deal of the difference "born of God" vs "Created by God" (arianism, etc.), and what that story of Abraham and Isaac was really about. Whether you agree or not, there's much about other people you will never understand if you don't think about teleological levels.
Thanks, that's an interesting analysis. I'm not a Christian, but I definitely get the sense that we're playing with an extreme danger here, and that we're not being sufficiently humble / cautious / in awe of the sacred -- and that such hubris might literally lead to human extinction, or close to it.
But many of the listed hypotheticals are not dependent (on top) on others, and since there are multiple that actually increases probability of an undesirable outcome.
But it reads to me like the thread parent's point is that there are many unknown risks which can exist? I also wonder about long term effects to the health of the genome from IVF and other forms of fertility treatment as infertility could be acting as some sort of protection mechanism of the genome. But I suppose such objections form a continuum which extends to treatment of all genetic diseases or diseases in general--all of which probably applies some evolutionary pressure towards more healthy individuals but which we as a society have to balance against wellbeing of individuals and their human rights.
This seems distantly impossible right now, but for this reason, I predict that any species that survives this kind of "great filter" effect of accidentally messing up their genome long term, will develop a strong taboo against fertility treatments and treatment of genetic diseases.
Like it seems horrible not to help the individual, when we have the technology to; but it's also horrible to hurt your species by selfishly propagating faulty genes. And this seems like the kind of problem cultural taboos are good at solving, and I don't really see any other mechanism by which a species can avoid this filter trap.
There is precedent for infertility being beneficial for a species in the animal kingdom. For example the vast majority of ants and bees are infertile. Yet the infertile ones still contribute meaningfully to society.
Humans could easily be successful with a similar model, and did so in the past before fertility treatments.
If I understand your point correct it could work as easily as communism: theoretically sound but undermined by human psychology. Natural evolution is slow and gives the species time to adapt to anything. Artificial evolution by comparison is very fast. But the real issue is that humans have intelligence, individuality, and egotism. We don’t see ourselves as just part of a collective.
Societies functioned in the past while taking away some rights from its citizens (like ownership) but nothing as fundamental as only a few able to reproduce.
I’ll use Ghostty as an example because that’s the only software I use that I know is written in Zig. It’s also a moderately complex project not a toy project.
My main Zig project will need over 1,000 edits to get it up there :O I've already had Claude spec out the changes required. I'll just have it or Codex or whatever fork itself into one agent per file and bang on it (for the stuff I can't regex myself) ;)
But the IO thing is frankly a good idea. I/O dependency injection, when I've used it in the past, has made testing quite a bit simpler (such as routing any I/O stream into a string to assert on) and the code much easier to reason about. The extra argument is a bit annoying, but that's the price of purity and it's worth it.
Palantir came to me multiple times over the years asking me to interview as a senior swe. The temptation was very strong back then. Insane pay package as you can imagine... but I had a really bad feeling about them and always turned them down.
What a huge relief. One of my best moments of foresight.
It appears that the name kankerlijer is an insult meaning "cancer patient", sort of like how in the US the phrase "fucking cunt" might be used (except without the gendered notion - just in severity).
a lot of dutch curses and insults come from diseases (kanker/cancer and typhus are common). one of a few things i really appreciate about the Dutch language is they really make the most of a relatively small common vocabulary (compared to english).
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A specific part of GP’s comment keeps getting overlooked:
So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how we humans rely on jobs for income.
Humans being forced to trade time for survival, money, and the enrichment of the elite, is a bug. We are socially conditioned to believe it’s a feature and the purpose.
Nobody is saying robots should replace human connection and expression
> > Humans derive a lot of meaning from being useful and valued.
Sure, humans relying on jobs for income is a problem with transitions. But people finding purpose in jobs is a problem, too.
Right now how we get there is being "forced to' -- and indeed that's a bug. But if we transition to a future where it's pretty hard to find useful work, that's a problem, even if the basic needs for survival are still being met.
I haven't had to work for 25 years. But I've spent the vast majority of that time employed. Times when I've not had purposeful employment as an anchor in my life have been rough for me. (First 2-3 months feels great... then it stops feeling so great).
Thanks for sharing. Absolutely right; people need to feel useful and valued—not to mention, jobs can help us get out of the house and connect with people.
Just to be clear, are you saying the only life work that you can find fulfillment in is work that can be perfectly automated and handled by AI? Do you have an example of what you mean?
> Just to be clear, are you saying the only life work that you can find fulfillment in is work that can be perfectly automated and handled by AI?
No. I'm not saying that applies to me, but it may be getting dangerously close to many people. During my career, I've done CS, EE, controls, optics, and now I teach high school.
I do worry about CS in particular, though. If one's happy place is doing computer science, that's getting pretty hard.
LLMs feel to me like a 60th percentile new college grad now (but with some advantages: very cheap, very fast, no social cost to ask to try again or do possibly empty/speculative work). Sure, you can't turn them loose on a really big code base or fail to supervise it, but you can't do that with new graduates, either.
I worry about how 2026's graduates are going to climb the beginning of the skill ladder. And to the extent that tools get better, this problem gets worse.
I also worry about a lot of work that is "easy to automate" but the human in the loop is very valuable. Some faculty use LLMs to write recommendation letters. Many admissions committees now use LLMs to evaluate recommendation letters. There's this interchange that looks like human language replacing a process where a human would at least spend a few minutes thinking about another human's story. The true purpose of the mechanism has been lost, and it's been replaced with something harsh, unfeeling, and arbitrary.
Not to sound harsh but this is a personal flaw. It's hard to find a better way to phrase it than "you need to get a life outside of work." Many, many people would kill to have not needed to work for the last 25 years because they have better things to use their time on outside of it.
I've done plenty of those self-actualizing things. I've learned to fly airplanes. I've done hobby projects. I've gotten into astronomy. I've learned to make things in many kinds of ways (carpentry, sheetmetal, machining, welding, 3d printing, lithography) and have overkilled so many projects. I've gone to my kids' games. I've 100%-ed a lot of RPGs. I've travelled. I've read too many books.
But I want to be -useful-, too. I enjoy helping and working with kids in my current job more than I enjoy filling my time in empty ways (well, up to a point: summer sure feels nice, too :).
Money gave me the freedom to define the relationship with work in the way that works best for me; and it turned out that's more valuable to me than the ability to escape work entirely.
You're off base here for what may be a rather subtle reason. While I am not a marxist, I do think that the purchasing behavior of the wealthy makes much more sense when you think about things in terms of the labor theory of value.
The evidence for this is all around us. As automation of manufacturing has brought former luxuries into reach for middle-class families, those with means move on to consuming items that require more and more labor to produce. "Handmade" scented soaps. "Artisanal" cheeses. Nobody with money wants their wedding invitation to arrive at a destination with machine-canceled postage. It's tacky. Too automated, too efficient. In fact, I bet the ultra-wealthy don't even use postal mail for delivering their invitations, because it's not labor-intensive enough to be tasteful. Private couriers are probably the move. You can see this pattern over and over again once you know what to look for.
There will always be a demand for human labor, because value is a human construction. That said, the rate at which the economy will change because of AI (if the True Believers are to be believed) is probably too fast for most workers to adapt, so you may not be entirely wrong in your conclusion depending on how thing shake out, but the way you got there is bogus imo.
It is. It's not something you can wave away with some new political system.
Automation results in centralization of power. It transforms labor-intensive work to capital-intensive work and reduces the leverage of the working class.
You could have a system that distributes wealth from automation to the newly-unemployed working class, but fundamentally the capital-owners are less dependent on the working class, so the working class will have no leverage to sustain the wealth distribution (you cannot strike if you don't have a job). You are proposing a fundamentally unstable political system.
It's like liebig's law of the minimum or any other natural law. You can try to make localized exceptions in politics, but you are futilely working against the underlying dynamics of the system which are inevitably realized in the long term.
I think you misread the situation. The move is towards open models, small efficient models, what makes you believe there will be a moat around AI for automation?
I think the point here is that a lot of automation still requires "real-world" components (read: hardware). E.g. robots, factories with said robots and so on. So you being able to run LLMs on your PC is still not going to put big factories owned by big companies out of business.
> so the working class will have no leverage to sustain the wealth distribution
As has been seen time and time again throughout history the commoners will only put up with so much and when all else fails and they start suffering a bit too much leverage comes from the end of a barrel.
Correct. If we don’t do anything, it effectively is about as immutable as a law of nature. But if enough people respond, the system will change in some way.
Note that the stench of inevitability likes to sneak into these discussions of systemic problems. Nothing is set in stone. Anyone telling you otherwise has given up themselves. The comment section attracts all kinds of life outlooks, after all. The utility of belief in some sort of agency (however small) shouldn’t be surrendered to someone else’s nihilistic disengagement.
Yet the elite won't share that benefit until someone makes them. History makes me think that won't happen until hunger motivates the masses from their apathy.
it's only for "the enrichment of the elite" if one looks at life with a perspective of entitlement, resentment and disregard for the nature of...nature (existence,randomness, realty itself).
just because humans can't "outdo" technology doesn't mean we should "blame" "the elite". that's literally how the great catastrophes of socialism, communism, Marxism, etc started
Humans aren't "forced" to do anything, (depending on how you look at it). You could just lay down, "live" in your own excrement until you starve to death. That seems reasonable! Liberate the proletariat! Why doesn't everyone else work for me?!
It's far less effective than the hydrocarbons that heat my house. My point being that I think people on HN like to underestimate how important work is when talking about replacing humans.
It's not "just business", it's my ability to survive.
But when you dig down deep on theories like that it just doesn’t make sense from a chemistry or physics standpoint. Everyone saw that Star Trek episode about silicon based life and ran with it as being possible. It’s just a show.
If you have the money for it, you should really consider hiring a contract artist to supplement your gaps.
A concept artist and a 3D modeling artist altogether will cost like $3000 for 1 fully complete character that fits your vision. For 2D probably a lot cheaper.
For me, $3000 is worth the months/yrs of saved time.
Of course if you are having fun learning the art side and don't care about the destination as much then ignore this and have fun with it! If you practice every day for a year you'll probably start getting close to what you invision.
EDIT:
I'll also add that it's possible most of the aesthetic you're looking for can be achieved via shaders (for both 3D and 2D games). A lot of art looks very different in-game because of shaders doing all kinds of manipulations.
They could start with stick figures and placeholder graphics to communicate the idea, then level up; a great example of this iterative approach is Factorio, which redid some of its graphics and graphics pipelines over the years, starting off with basically MS Paint style graphics, then moving to a detailed 3D model transformed to 2D sprites pipeline.
Then there's the Kingdom of Loathing games that never moved on from shitty Paint drawings, lol.
