We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

This doesn't match my experience. In fact one thing I noticed living in Japan is how much more willing people are to spend money to meet up. Lots of events costs 3000-7000 yen. Clubs and bar have a cover charge. People will organize parties where they rent a bar and tell their friends it's 4000 yen each (about $27 currently but was closer to $40) in the past. They'll even have house parties and tell everyone to pitch in 1000-2000 yen. In the states, my experience is even a $5 and people will complain.

The point being it's culture not economics. In fact Japanese generally make less money. IT salaries are in the $50k range. Minimum wage is $7.5 Yet they still go out.

When mall is called a public space... Public space situation is really sad.

Bullshit. Most people can afford grabbing a beer in a supermarket and going to the park. They just choose not to.

I think the real change is that nowadays it's just easier and more practical NOT to maintain friendships. Yes, it's lonely, but it's more efficient.

You're basically saying that people who aren't social mistakenly view the rest of the world as not social because of their specific experience, but doesn't that effect also cut the other way? You're seeing people being social because you're going to those situations.

But there are time use surveys etc which provide a quantitative view of a lot of people. Because they're voluntary, they can't be a perfect representative sample of the overall population. But I think the broad, systematic view is still the best view we have of the overall trend. Also note that the scale and pace of the trend is slow enough that any individual _can't_ really provide an anecdotal view of it, because their own life is in a different place.

E.g. one source [1]:

> Atalay reports that, between 2003 and 2019, people spent an increasing amount of time alone. Over this 16-year period, the portion of free time people spent alone increased, on average, from 43.5 percent to 48.7 percent, representing an increase of over 5 percentage points.

Any given individual's time-use would probably change over 16 years regardless of what the population-level trends were just because that duration might also be the difference between e.g. being in school vs being married with young children or from being a busy professional to being a retiree.

[1] https://www.philadelphiafed.org/the-economy/macroeconomics/h...

One thing that not enough people realize is that the gap between haves and have-nots widen in almost everything when technology advances, and I don't mean just wealth (that is one too), but also knowledge (LLM/AI widens knowledge gap between the curious and not-curious by a lot), and in this case socialization -- the availability of technology (in both organizing activities like your example and in AI loneliness like the article) widens the socialize and not-socialize people.

In the old days, not-socialize people tend to be forced to socialize anyway; but techonology enables them to not-socialize 99% of time now. Likewise, socialize people needed to put in more effort to socialize in the old days, but now it's easier than ever.

When more people realize this, the discourse should shift from "technology creates this trend" to "technology widens the gap between X and not-X".

> I don’t buy the claim that everything social and in-person is in decline.

I'm pretty confident this is a well measured fact.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9811250/

Depends on where you live. Areas that have a culture of outdoor activity and strangers talking to one another is a requirement. Here in MN, for example, outdoor activity does exist year round but strangers talking to one another is not.

Two separate questions, with possibly uncorrelated answers.

In my state is the federal minimum of $7.25/hr. You're looking at two hours of work for one cocktail.

And my state is addicted to alcohol. The overwhelming majority of people I know in this state won't even meet up with you if there's not a beer waiting for them. People work all week and then spend half their paycheck in one night, then rinse, wash, repeat.

I consider the state of affairs here to be nothing short of abject poverty.

I look around at the declining, unmaintained infrastructure, I hear youth talk about how so many establishments have closed and how if you don't have money there is nothing to do, and you get harassed at parks (I have personally had the police pull up and accost me for just existing at a park) so the only thing left to do is get into mischief, unless you just don't want social contact with your peers. I tell people it looks and feels worse than post-Soviet Eastern Europe out here in Louisiana.

> It is about the crushing stress of surviving in this economic climate that is leaving people absolutely no energy to go and socialize.

The past 2-years have been some of the most difficult of my life (for a number of non-work reasons). After work, family, and household tasks, I have often been left with little energy in the evenings (and no real desire to socialize). And yet, as a part of a church men's group I attend weekly, I have had the opportunity to engage with others going through similar things. How do I know that they are going through similar things? Because it's come out when as I've consistently engaged with the same group of people.

It's very easy when you're tired and stressed to “turtle” and internalize everything; I've done it more times than I can count. And yet this is the time when I most need others. These guys are not in my friends group, and yet the struggles (and successes) that are shared are sometimes more than I hear from close friends. The result of hearing others' struggles is the realization that a) I am not the only one going through hard stuff, and b) focusing on others' struggles makes dealing with my own easier.

“Socializing” with others may cost money, but connecting with them doesn't have to: I spend $0/week meeting the guys in my group for an hour or two. In reflecting on my own attitudes towards socializing in the past, I've come to realize that it can be very self-focused: How can _I_ feel better? How can _I_ have fun? What can _I_ get out of going out?

I am, by no means, the arbiter of selflessness (not even close, ha!), but I have learned that connecting with others' with their good in mind has had the incredible effect of giving me energy where there was very little before.

Just my $0.02.

> If you want to go hang out with friends it will cost you $4-8 for a cup of coffee. A dinner starts at $50/person. A trip to an amusement park is over $100 easily. The median individual income in the US currently is just over $65k/year or about $32.50/hour. That means half the workforce makes less than that. When an 8oz cocktail costs you an hour of your life because you work for minimum wage, you’d rather stay home and watch TikTok.

These comments are so strange to read. There’s an entire world of people out there doing things and socializing without buying cocktails or $100 amusement park tickets to do it.

You don’t need to pay anything more than what it takes to get you to someone else or a common meeting spot like a walk through the park.

In the fitness world there’s a never ending stream of people who complain that they want to get in shape but can’t afford a $100/month gym membership. When you explain to them that the $20/month budget gym is fine or you can buy some $30 quality running shoes on clearance, they either disappear or get angry because you’ve pierced their excuse for avoiding the activity. I tend to see something similar when you explain that you don’t need to buy $8 coffees or $100 amusement park tickets to socialize with people.

I don't buy this explanation. There are plenty of things you can do together that don't cost very much - or anything at all. You can go take a hike. You can go to the park and hang out, or play a board game. You can go to a court and play pickleball. Heck, go to the library! All these things are free and many people do them.

Coal miners in 1890s appalachia had healthier and more active social lives than american white collar workers. This does not have anything to do with economics.

> A dinner starts at $50/person.

I went to dinner with a friend last night and my meal was $22. I go to lunch with coworkers and often only spend ~$15-ish.

One also doesn't need to do activities that cost money in order to hang out with people one knows. Get together and play board games or cards. I hung out with my friends last weekend - we brought our records over and DJ'd, someone brought some frozen burgers, I supplied some THC tincture I've had for months, another person brought a cheap bottle of wine they also already had. We had a blast for like seven hours.

Hiking is also fantastic, and free!

> When an 8oz cocktail costs you an hour of your life

I don't know about that, we meet with a group of friends at someone's house, we all pitch in for the ingredients and make the cocktails ourselves.

You're right, but also.

Most of my best years with friends I spent little to no money while meeting them.

Just going to the local park and sit down and talk or do dumb things, free.

I'm sure this is more a reflection on me but I try to go out to meet strangers at meetups and I find I quite often don't like the people.

You might get the random ultra woke person who makes it impossible for others to have a conversation because they're just waiting to be triggered by anything anyone else says and find a way to spin every comment into an offence.

If anyone brings up politics then the meetup is over, at least for me.

I struck up a conversation with the person setting next to me at an outdoor cafe. He was probably 84-ish. He'd married someone from Japan he'd met there in the 60s. They had not had any children. I brought up the population issue in a light way (Japan's population is declining), something like making the joke that they didn't help Japan's population decline. He replied something like "anyone who tells you there's an underpopulation issue is lying. The planet has 8 billion people which is way too many". And that was when I knew I wasn't going to continue the conversation.

(not Japan but same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk)

>Younger generations seem very isolationist to me.

Gen Z here, blame smartphones and the destruction of communal areas/3rd spaces; COVID really threw gasoline on an already bad fire.

Same gen (42). I feel like we have a really unique lens on all of this, too: old enough to remember being in a smoky bar, socializing (not healthy, but fun as hell), but also young enough to have had some technological exposure at a crucial time of our youth. We _leveraged_ technology for socializing in person. Our online pursuits were around organizing lighthearted social goofiness like "getting iced", LARPing, and flash mobs. All of which would probably make younger generations eye roll to death out of secondary cringe.

I guess at some point people started taking themselves way too seriously. Worrying about what others think, or something, I don't know. In a way, social interaction is kind of like a standoff in the dusty streets of an old west town. Someone has to make the first move to expose themselves, and it doesn't seem like anyone wants to be that person anymore.

And why shouldn't they be? The Xenials and late boomers intellectual chops got funneled into an industry specifically intended to attack and monopolize their attention loops and data. To their credit, they're probably having a healthier response to the entire thing than I do by pushing back against further unwelcome intrusion even if it's still pretty subconscious for a lot of them at this point.

> It surprises me how people are less and less open to socialize, to the point that some even see you with disgust if you DARE to interrupt them from.their mobile phone trance.

Have you considered that maybe it's you, and you're just interrupting at the wrong time? Imagine someone's reading a book and you interrupt them and then you blame them for getting annoyed?!

> For years, i tried to lose weight with gym and dieting. I failed, and now i know i probably never had a chance to, it was a scam all along.

> lost all weight i wanted with Wegovy

It’s not a scam. The trick is that you probably weren’t dieting aggressively enough before Wegovy. All diets and GLP inhibitors work on the same principle: Caloric restriction.

It is simply impossible to stay fat without eating enough calories. But that’s really really hard to do without help. I have friends and family on GLP and they regularly eat less than 800 calories per day. You can’t do that on your own, the willpower it would take is hard to imagine.

Conversely when I’m marathon training it’s almost impossible to eat enough calories to avoid losing weight. Eating itself becomes a huge chore. Run 10mi/day and I promise you’ll lose weight the old fashioned way.

> For years, i tried to lose weight with gym and dieting. I failed, and now i know i probably never had a chance to, it was a scam all along.

In what way is dieting a scam? You literally just eat less, and you will lose weight as long as you're on a calorie deficit.

I’m glad you lost the weight either way :)

Just want to throw this out there for you and everyone’s benefit. Regular physical activity helps you age gracefully and has a lot of physical and emotional benefits besides weight loss.

In my case it seems that the problem is a combination of stomach capacity and the desire to taste all those lovely things.

What works for me is to keep myself occupied, to insist on eating only things that I really want because of the taste, and to eat little at a time but more often.

My GP concurs and claims that restricting one's intake by having several small meals instead of one large one results in the stomach effectively shrinking so that over time you find yourself feeling full after a relatively small meal. When I am at home I use a smaller plate at dinner than the rest of my family so that I just can't pile as much on.

After nearly a decade of this the result is that I simply cannot eat the same amounts as I used without feeling uncomfortable, so I don't.

Until they invent the exercise pill, the gym is absolutely still a good idea

Your body is a machine that burns calories. Give it less calories and it will burn its calorie stores.

You are right that there are a lot of scams that complicate this fact as much as possible to get money from you.

But rest assured, if you calculate your TDEE (many simple calcs online), and food scale your calories (everything you eat) to a diet -500 under your TDEE, you will lose weight (or you are a perpetual motion machine).

>Wegovy (semaglutide) injection 2.4 mg is an injectable prescription medicine used __with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity__

Just saying.

Neither gym not dieting are scams and simply can't be by their nature. People who say that either have some serious health condition (and obviously you can beat some things with will alone) or people who failed at realising that "dieting" is about their consumption habbits.

Most people I see with this problem convince themselves that they are on a diet while they continue with their eating habbits.

You "just" tricked you brain and made things easier for yourself. Good for you but calling gym and dieting a scam is just laughable.

In what way was the gym a scam?

A sufficiently advanced ai that tricks humans would be a human life itself…

Real humans are real. Their flaws are real. Your emotions around them are real and so are the benefits to socialising. Accepting people as the flawed actors they are is a part of becoming a mature adult.

This comment makes me so sad- I mean this genuinely, looking at your comment history its clear you've fallen into the far right rabbit hole, and this is what "catch you when you say something they don't like" means. No shade to you, there are hundred billion dollar campaigns waged to trap people in ideas like those that are designed to be isolating. But their goal is to push you away from friends and family and towards extremist beliefs.

I emphasize with how it must feel to seem iced out and victimised, it sounds awful! but this is not a normal position to have and most people for not believe the humans around them are fake or gaslighting

If you gave me a model released two years ago and today and let me do some programming with both, I would have no problems telling you which one was released two years ago; progress on this front is very noticeable. But if you let me chat with each one for an hour, I'm honestly not sure I would be able to tell the difference.

Progress is famously not a straight line.

But the current systems are about as good as they'll get: we can make them a bit better in fields where we can cheaply generate synthetic data, but human communication is not one of them. (And even where you can generate synthetic data, your efforts would usually be better spent assembling a purpose-built system.) Sure, I probably could make something more effective, using non-LLM technologies (given a large enough budget), but… why would I, or anyone else, do that when it'd be obviously harmful, with no benefit?

Mine as well. Trolling pedos on AOL who thought they were meeting up with teen girls was our past time. We got quite good at looking up locations, organizing places to meet, and more. We were Chris Hansen, in bored teen boys form.

Ah the days of A/S/L.

sadly only a portion of its early existence

Not gen z but I just don't drink(i worked in clubs and didnt like that scene either). I think there's a growing portion of gen z that is like that if I recall what I've read correctly. They drink less.

I genuinely don't know what to do in my smaller suburb where the verbs aren't "look" "eat" or "drink". I wanna do. Museums are mostly boring to me, there's little interaction. I don't meet people at the library or gym. The volunteer things ive done had a weird gap where younger people and older people have more free time than middle aged workers and parents so I had few peers at those too.

I'm open to any and all ideas. Feels like things never truly changed back after covid as far as community events and social opportunities.

I think it is worth calling out how expensive it can be to go out and do things now though.

$10-12 beers and $15 cocktails gets expensive over a few weekends.

> I’ve been wondering recently what impact banning social media would have on birth rates. I’m confident it would be positive

The obsession with their birth rates is one of the creepy reasons why young people don't want to go out.

Doomscrolling is very different from web surfing. The mind is far less engaged. It’s a hypnotic state, deeply addictive and soporific.

Contrarian take (not saying I believe this) but what if AI companions actually engage the mind more? Is there some positive path available here?

>I’ve been wondering recently what impact banning social media would have on birth rates. I’m confident it would be positive but I’m not sure on what magnitude.

Sex is decoupled from birth rates, due to access to 100% effective birth control (IUD/morning after pill/abortion). Hence there is no reason to think it would have any positive effect. I would be surprised if even a single person I know had had an unplanned kid.

I mean, even in my younger years going to a bar or club was not an everyday activity. People watched TV most of the evenings. Or read junk books, which was popular before TV came along.

> I’ve been wondering recently what impact banning social media would have on birth rates. I’m confident it would be positive but I’m not sure on what magnitude.

People can and do use anticonception. They do not have kids just randomly out of bored stranger encounter anymore.

Ha ha, def. took the kids out geocaching (2000's). In the 90's I was MUD'ing and in USENET forums — but I don't really consider those "group" activities in the same way going out bowling is.

Yeah for sure. But also Orwell was extrapolating from the reality on the ground in communist countries. The scale achieved there was also massive. Your neighbors would turn you in if you criticized the people in power, etc.

This is also the reason the Soviets were ahead of the US in trying to train people like dogs (Pavlov's research) and why the communist forces ran brainwashing experiments on American POWs during the Korean War. If you look at what countries were willing to do back then it should make you concerned about what's coming.

For personalized targeting with psychological warfare, perhaps the closest analog is socialist East Germany's Zersetung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung

The main difference you get with LLMs is that it's cheaper to achieve these same goals Orwell was concerned about. You no longer have to make explicit and credible threats of violence. It's also easier to reach people in democracies and convince them that democracy is bad etc.

So for the sorts of concerns Orwell had, I think we're already seeing that. And Deepseek is one weapon in that war, since it has to comply with the Chinese regulations that LLMs must spread socialist core values.

How would you resist? I think a necessary precondition is that people continue to champion the importance of democracy and freedom of thought.

Yeah. We need better tools that empower individuals to think independently and we need them now.

Education is part of the answer, but I fear it isn't enough.

Psych is one of the few fields that is funding replication studies and throwing out concepts that don't pass muster. But because of this research you see headlines about it for psych and conclude the entire field is crap.

yeah i get the if monkeySee(psychology) then monkeyDo(replicationCrisis); monkeyFeelSmart() algo. it's still a good article :)

One should be careful not to conflate "worthless" with "things that hold no value to me personally".

"Outside of forums like this one"

The real culprits are revealed. Despite its flaws, Hacker News does foster real discussion that sometimes leads to real connection. Big online social spaces tend to do the opposite.

Private group chats do not tend to be encrypted. If my theory on what governments are most concerned about (disrupting alternative political organizing) holds true - they never will be allowed to be fully private.