Social media will be dead because it will be replaced by Artificial Media, which will be the most potent and powerful of all media types, people will struggle to look away.
When AI can kill at scale, it means no person is too small or too insignificant to not be worth getting hunted down and killed, it will be cheap and easy. Before it used to be that only high value targets would be worth killing. But now even you, a nobody, will be killed. You say or do something the government doesn’t like, it’s over for you.
That will always be true for some individuals. But the sector isn't going away. Everyone is retooling right now and it's hard to tell what this generation of AI is even going to do to jobs. I strongly suspect that the companies that manage the retooling most successfully will be hiring more people not less.
I mean this with respect, but if this is your sincere worldview, I'd suggest you step outside the tech news bubble a bit more.
There are some white collar jobs, possibly including many software engineers, that are at risk from gen AI. I guess there's some delicious irony in that, given that not long ago, we've been telling blue-collar workers to deal with economic shifts and learn to code. But short of some LessWrong fanfic about self-assembling nanobot AGI doomsday, there's plenty of other things for humans to do for a living.
I think the GP and many conflate tech jobs and relative high paying jobs. If you remove high paying from your filters you’ll get more results. Many have not accounted for that. Like most things, if you don’t own the means of production or income generation, your salary is just a loan. Once you’re out and can’t get back in and lose the things you’ve acquired it becomes more clear. The upside, we then start to treat one another better and can see more clearly how most were never actually in the club. After civil disruption comes better policy, historically.
I have found similar energy, not in code, but rather in making AI generated videos of little stories. Or even AI generated paintings that I’d like to replicate by hand and put up in my home.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we built some kind of punishment system into Agents, where agents could punish other agents and drain some fixed amount of points from them, and when the points reach 0, that agent is deleted. It might result in them working more carefully?
It’s largely impossible now, it’s not a technical problem, it’s cultural.
UO forced many different types of players to coexist in the same world that simply do not mix anymore. You had peaceful dungeon crawlers and craftsmen coexisting alongside killers, rapists, thieves (wild that stealing items from other players inventory was actually a thing, probably unheard of in today’s MMOs).
The friction between these different types of players is where the magic happened, it’s what created real conflict and higher stakes in the world. When you stepped out of your house, there was always a risk that killers could be lurking ready to murder you and loot your house dry. And if you forget to lock the door, someone passing by will clean your house out for anything valuable.
In a way, old school UO was a true Middle Ages type MMO, everything since then has only grown more civilized, more enshittified. People don’t want to pay for a world that doesn’t give a shit if they have a bad experience. The truth is though there was no “bad experience”, it was all just an experience.
Oh boy, you reminded me of the tag teamers where a pick pocket would steal your bag of runes (that you use to teleport to safety), then attack you while you try to fumble a teleport back home, only to find you can't locate your bag of runes.
The defense to this was to carry dozens upon dozens of nested bags, because each bag opening could trip the pick pocket detection.
Also the defense to your home was to literally circle it in tents/buildings creating an empty courtyard that you could only teleport into with a rune you kept safely in your bank box. There were some warping bugs that would allow you into a courtyard though, or even through the front door (circle of visibility bug, as well as floor tile warping).
don't forget that Corp Por was not always the dominant combat spell. For instance there was the An Mani era of combat, and while i don't remember their names bot lightning bolt and meteor swarm were the dominant combat spell for a while as well
Aha, yes! And it looks like meteor swarm was Kal Des Flam Ylem).
Its time to shine was short lived, I want to say it didn't even last the entirety of October '94. At the time it was out of reach of most toons anyways, but each individual meteor was close to instakill, plus it was AoE. The downside of course was it was AoE and friendly fire would make you red.
I remember one time in that time range getting called in because an argument was brewing between some guild mates and another guild in some dungeon. I arrived, decided to end the argument with a meteor swarm, promptly killed literally everyone from both guilds due to the AoE, and was a dread lord for a while. Needless to say, not how I drew it up on the board!
You approach that from a game design perspective to reduce the reward and set bounds on how much fun a player is allowed to destroy maliciously and what kind of counterplay is available, but if you completely eliminate it the world loses a lot of its drama. Conflict drives narrative.
I know Raph Koster has spent a lot of time since he designed UO thinking about this problem. I haven't looked at his current project but am curious to what extent he's licked this issue.
turns out it is for a lot of players which is why the kind of game is extinct. Just like in the real world, there's a fine line between risk and adventure and walking into something that looks like Liu Cixin's the Dark Forest.
You want enough friction to generate interesting interactions, you don't want so much freedom that the worst exploiters start to crowd out every honest player, because then, just like in a rundown lawless neighborhood, you're getting a lesson in the broken window theory and you're only left with the scammers.
That's great until a game designer discovers that grief chases away the majority of players, and the griefers themselves will leave if they have no one to grief.
So from a philosophical perspective sure you're right. But from a dollars and cents perspective it's just good business to find ways to legislate griefing out of games. And that's why the market moved the direction it did.
There are games that managed to allow PvP while also having places players can be safe, whether axiomatically, or by having enough players interested in providing protection that there are safe locations you can count on not being attacked because anyone trying will be quickly caught.
Companies have built entire systems of such complexity and slop that they require AI just to do the maintenance. They have fired engineers thinking they can just replace them with AI.
Well when the prices rise, they have no choice but to stay locked in, paying whatever it takes just to keep their companies running. If they stop using AI, their workforce suddenly does not have capacity to do the work required because of the layoffs. And there are not enough people to hire because people are quickly turning away from software engineering as a career. What a disaster it will be.
Isn't exposing corruption a good thing? If betting markets are giving the masses access to knowledge about events that would normally be restricted from them, what is wrong with that? Information wants to be free. You can make use of metrics from betting markets without actively participating in them.
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