Hacker News with Generative AI: Society

Are We Living in a Time of Cultural Collapse? (honest-broker.com)
Many articles have been written about me over the years. But I’ve never been hit with an opening sentence like the one published on Monday by The Atlantic.

Culture, Society, Media, Opinion

7 points by pseudolus 2 days ago | 0 comments

2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future (wikipedia.org)
2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future is a 1981 book by Princeton physicist Gerard K. O'Neill. The book is an attempt to predict the social and technological state of humanity 100 years in the future.

Future, Technology, Society, Books

3 points by zeristor 7 days ago | 0 comments

The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat SIM City (2010) (vice.com)
I’m English, but when I was twelve I lived in North Carolina and went to an inner-city school a bit like that one in The Wire. I only have two memories of that time.

Culture, Society, Biography, Childhood

99 points by Tomte 7 days ago | 25 comments

The AI Apocalypse Happened–We Just Didn't Notice (substack.com)

Artificial Intelligence, Society, Technology, Future

4 points by MitiaHiers 10 days ago | 0 comments

Reality Check (wheresyoured.at)
I'm sick and god-damn tired of this! I have written tens of thousands of words about this and still, to this day, people are babbling about the "AI revolution" as the sky rains blood and crevices open in the Earth, dragging houses and cars and domesticated animals into their maws. Things are astronomically fucked outside, yet the tech media continues to tell me to get my swimming trunks and take a nice long dip in the pool.

Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Society, Media

129 points by elorant 11 days ago | 106 comments

What we get when male fitness standards clash with female preferences (nataliaantonova.substack.com)
And this is what we get when male fitness standards clash with female preferences.

Gender, Fitness, Relationships, Preferences, Society

26 points by robarr 11 days ago | 21 comments

An Age of Extinction Is Coming (nytimes.com)
Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a “bottleneck” — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction.

Technology, Society, Artificial Intelligence, Extinction, Cultural Change

9 points by tigerlily 15 days ago | 1 comments

Are ChatGPT and co harming human intelligence? (theguardian.com)
Recent research suggests our brain power is in decline. Is offloading our cognitive work to AI driving this trend?

Artificial Intelligence, Human Intelligence, Research, Technology, Society

68 points by topaz0 18 days ago | 82 comments

An Age of Extinction Is Coming (nytimes.com)
Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete.

Technology, Society, Future, Extinction

8 points by martialg 18 days ago | 1 comments

Banned Books List 2025 (pen.org)
What books are banned in 2025? Thousands of titles have been removed from public schools across the country.

Book Censorship, Education, Literature, Society

12 points by jruohonen 20 days ago | 7 comments

The 'freaky and unpleasant' world when video games leak into the physical realm (bbc.com)
Video games are the biggest form of entertainment in the world, but sometimes they bleed into people's lives offline in surprising and disturbing ways.

Video Games, Entertainment, Technology, Society, Culture

29 points by l3x 20 days ago | 53 comments

Come with Me If You Want to Survive an Age of Extinction (nytimes.com)
Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a “bottleneck” — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction.

Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Culture, Extinction, Society

9 points by chucksmash 20 days ago | 2 comments

We're Raising Kids to Prefer AI over People–and No One's Noticing (substack.com)

Artificial Intelligence, Children, Society

46 points by softchaos 23 days ago | 79 comments

Make Something Heavy (workingtheorys.com)
We're creating more than ever, but it weighs nothing.

Art, Creation, Meaning, Society

4 points by theturtletalks 24 days ago | 2 comments

The Old World Is Dead (spacedino.net)
The Old World is Dead.

Culture, Philosophy, Society

20 points by kayge 25 days ago | 1 comments

The End of Children (newyorker.com)
Societies do collapse, sometimes suddenly. Nevertheless, prophets of doom might keep in mind that their darkest predictions have been, on the whole, a little premature.

Society, Predictions, Collapse

22 points by mefengl 27 days ago | 6 comments

Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future (theguardian.com)
Black Mirror is more than science fiction – its stories about modernity have become akin to science folklore, shaping our collective view of technology and the future.

Science Fiction, Television, Technology, Future, Society

176 points by magoghm 28 days ago | 174 comments

The Modern Struggle Is Fighting Weaponized Addiction (2020) (nav.al)
The modern struggle is really about individuals—disconnected from their tribe, religion and cultural networks—who are trying to stand up to all these addictions that have been weaponized: alcohol, drugs, pornography, processed foods, news media, Internet, social media and video games.

Addiction, Technology, Culture, Society

39 points by HiPHInch 31 days ago | 16 comments

China Miéville says we shouldn't blame science fiction for its bad readers (msn.com)
“Let’s not blame science fiction for this,” he said. “It’s not science fiction that’s causing this kind of sociopathy.”

Science Fiction, Literature, Society

5 points by walterbell 34 days ago | 1 comments

Cashless society drives drop in children swallowing coins, researchers say (independent.co.uk)
The shift away from using coins has fuelled a drop in children needing surgery to remove objects they have swallowed or stuck up their noses, research suggests.

Health, Society, Trends, Children, Research

11 points by bookofjoe 34 days ago | 20 comments

Captured: How Silicon Valley is building a future we never chose (codastory.com)
AI’s prophets speak of the technology with religious fervor. And they expect us all to become believers.

Silicon Valley, Artificial Intelligence, Future, Society, Technology

6 points by defrost 35 days ago | 2 comments

Six unsettling thoughts Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, has about AI (npr.org)
Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, is thinking about artificial intelligence – how it interacts with humans, and how it may reshape democracy. Or replace it.

Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Society, Democracy

12 points by bookofjoe 39 days ago | 1 comments

Decline of cash credited for drop in surgery for children swallowing objects (theguardian.com)
Cashless societies may be a sad fact of modern life for those with a nostalgic attachment to the pound in their pocket, but doctors have discovered one unexpected benefit of the decline of coins.

Health, Society, Finance, Children

86 points by geox 41 days ago | 61 comments

Digital Echoes and Unquiet Minds (chrbutler.com)
When the iPhone was first introduced in 2007, the notion of an “everything device” was universally celebrated.

Technology, History, Society

171 points by delaugust 42 days ago | 87 comments

AI will change the world but not in the way you think (thomashunter.name)
The current generation of consumer facing AI tools, known as Large Language Models (LLMs), continue to proliferate through society, used by folks from every stage of life, from office workers to school children.

Artificial Intelligence, Society

91 points by tlhunter 44 days ago | 107 comments

The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going to Miss Almost Everything (2011) (npr.org)
The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers.

Culture, Media, Art, Technology, Society

10 points by bumbledraven 44 days ago | 1 comments

Music and the Decline of Civilization (renovatio.zaytuna.edu)
In almost every description of a declining civilization we find the same tropes: an excess of liberty, a confusion of social norms, and the weakening of authority that soon descends into lawlessness.

Music, Culture, Civilization, Society

21 points by walterbell 45 days ago | 39 comments

The Internet Slum: is abandoning the Internet the next big thing? (2004) (fourmilab.ch)
Is it time to start thinking about abandoning the Internet?

Internet, Technology, Society

213 points by kimi 51 days ago | 274 comments

The zeitgeist is changing. a romantic backlash to the tech era looms (theguardian.com)
Cultural upheavals can be a riddle in real time. Trends that might seem obvious in hindsight are poorly understood in the present or not fathomed at all. We live in turbulent times now, at the tail end of a pandemic that killed millions and, for a period, reordered existence as we knew it. It marked, perhaps more than any other crisis in modern times, a new era, the world of the 2010s wrenched away for good.