Dude, you broke the future (transcript)

Corporations are optimization processes. Advertising is an optimization process. Social networks are. Smartphone addiction. Political polarization. Television, mobile games, and most forms of entertainment.<p>This prevalence, and the fact that it&#x27;s not <i>EVIL</i> doing it but just amoral goal-directed processes, seems to me to be the key to recognizing, fighting back, and fixing society.<p>We have to figure out some way to fight for our human values, against these optimization processes. I don&#x27;t think Stross has (or claims to have) a strong answer there... any ideas?

Meta note: I&#x27;m submitting this again, and don&#x27;t think of this as a dupe, because I think the transcript&#x2F;blog form is much more engaging than a video (and by accounts on the video thread, the transcript may be the better form here even if one likes videos).<p>Previous discussion on video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16032643" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16032643</a>

I think a way to look at it is this: The singularity happened, likely sometime in the 90s. It was, what any singularity is, the point where what came before it is not useful to predict what came after.<p>It is no surprise that the event defined by our inability to predict past it did not work out in the way we imagined.