While a subset of humanity definitely can become addicted to such 'artificial' stimuli -- porn, videogames, webcam, television, books, drugs, etc -- most of us do not.

Most people who play videogames still go to work and make things. Most people who consume porn still seek out physical mates. Most people who have done opium still seek out life and pleasures beyond the artificial orgasmic haze of the high. Most people who smoke pot still go about life like the rest of us. And more to the point: most people who interact with computers do not do so the way that HN readers do.

Have we learned nothing from the rise of "social" software? Most people are not like us. They value technology based on how useful it is in helping them perform tasks in the real world. Most of them don't sit on Facebook all day and artificially interact. They coordinate parties and playdates, buy concert tickets and share the results of their real world interactions. Hell, a big chunk of the latest batch of popular social apps are predicated on using technology to record and socially-score real-world activities (the various photo sharing services, travel services, shop review services, location check-in services, etc).

Any argument predicated on using the behavior of addicts as predictive of the behavior of the wider public is fundamentally flawed. And particularly so, when it comes to assumptions that the wider public will ever use computers in ways that seem inevitable and obvious to geeks.

>>Most people who play videogames still go to work and make things. Most people who consume porn still seek out physical mates. Most people who have done opium still seek out life and pleasures beyond the artificial orgasmic haze of the high. Most people who smoke pot still go about life like the rest of us. And more to the point: most people who interact with computers do not do so the way that HN readers do.

This is a salient point. To piggyback on your mention of marijuana, the article's core argument is not that dissimilar from the near-apocalyptic predictions made in anti-drug campaigns.

I think a fundamental assumption on which this article is based is that we just haven't found that perfect, reality-effacing high yet. It's essentially a prohibitionist message looking to the horizon rather than the present.

"Oh, so all-that-other-stuff hasn't annihilated society... but the next-big-thing totally will!"

I too am surprised. In my mind, it has long been inevitable that - at the very least - the wealthy population of the planet will retreat into a virtual world, ala "The Matrix".

It's not just the benefits of instant, unlimited sensory gratification (which are IMMENSE - real-world physical attraction and location no longer becomes an issue for finding partners, you can enjoy any activity at any time which in the past could cost you enormously in terms of money and/or risk: in a virtual world there's no spread of diseases if you're not in physical contact with people, no risk of death driving @ 140mph, etc. which also means a reduction in health costs, etc.).

It's simply far more efficient in many ways: why physically travel to work when you can have virtual meetings, offices, etc.? You could attend university anywhere in the world regardless of your location. Doctors could operate remotely where it's physically cheaper to live. Sitting at home all day (or in a Matrix farm) also means using less energy so you eat the bare minimum, don't need to own a car, don't need a big house with a garden, etc. On a larger scale, how useful will e.g. war become as the demand for physical resources falls? The efficiencies are mind-blowing; it is globalization of both personal and economic activities and human resource allocation without the physical constraints.

Ironically enough, in the same vein as your comment, I would expect people on HN are more likely to be fans of such an extreme form of telecommuting, telelearning, etc.

Not that I'm not suggesting all of this is good or healthy. Who knows what the psychological or physical effects of such a lifestyle will be.

Speculating further: At that point, why bother exploring the universe? Or more interesting: to what extent would wealth exist? It seems people would only need enough wealth to maintain their physical bodies and access to the planetary supercomputer. Accumulating more wealth could prove very difficult since classical economics falls apart in a virtual world where supply can become potentially unlimited over time. Would it be possible to accumulate sufficient "real" wealth to construct devices capable of finding and communicating with aliens, and/or visiting them? Would industries capable of building such devices even exist after everybody moves into the matrix after a few thousand years? All in all, once civilization reaches a particular level of technological development, it seems like there's a very small window where anybody will see benefit to OR have the resources to communicate with aliens.

I generally agree with the premise that the wealthy (ie most of the developed world) are retreating into stimulation of their pleasure centres, aided and abetted by an industries which are increasingly focused upon satisfying this. And I also agree that it's a real risk to the ultimate future of our species. This is hardly a new idea: Olaf Stapledon wrote in "Starmaker", in 1937, about a VR-obsessed species anaesthetizing itself into extinction.

What I find curious is that many of the <i>very</i> wealthiest are rejecting this trend in very absolute terms. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Robert Bigelow are spending their fortunes on real hardware rather than virtual reality, with the explicitly stated goal of making humanity a multiplanetary species. Other billionaires (Paul Allen, Richard Branson) are making complementary efforts, although without quite the same degree of aspirational rhetoric.

If they collectively succeed in establishing small colonies on Mars, then the initial rigours of colonial life will not allow for the kind of idle narcissism that is currently feasible for the wealthy on Earth. Whatever the fate of Earth, that will at least postpone the onset of a cultural coma for our species.

I tend to think that if this happens, then complete culture death at the hands of artificial pleasure is no longer possible. Once we're out of the deep gravity well of Earth, the marginal cost of establishing additional colonies elsewhere is very much lower; if even a very very small minority of the population keeps the spirit of evolution alive, then that will be sufficient to spread through the universe.

So, I don't really see this as a good solution for the Fermi paradox, since it seems highly improbable that EVERY civilisation would succumb to video games before becoming multi-planetary.

That's a very interesting observation. I almost wonder if their focus on physical reality is a symptom of whatever it is that makes them such good business people...

"At that point, why bother exploring the universe?"

Greg Egan's novel Diaspora has significant number of people choosing to live in fully uploaded virtual environments - the problem being that you do have to start paying attention to the outside universe when it tries to kill you by destroying the hardware running your environment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28novel%29

Iain M Bank's Feersum Enjin covers some of the same ground:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn

Iain M Banks also has the similar concept of "subliming" in several novels:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sublimed

Not to mention the construction of virtual Hells in Surface Detail:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail

(A truly ghastly concept).

And don't forget about his most recent book, Surface Detail, that is entirely about simulated realities for the dead.

>> At this very moment a large percentage of the brightest minds in the world are working on getting people to click on internet ads and building products that monetize well but are honestly a net loss to humankind.

Strictly speaking, it's a very small percentage of the world's brightest minds. To imply otherwise reflects a stunning amount of hubris.

If we do some very rough back of the envelope calculations :

There are roughly 1.3 million software developers in the U.S, out of a population of ~306m (0.4%).

Extrapolating that against the global population of ~7 billion, we can round up to ~30 million developers worldwide.

If we define "brightest minds" as those holding IQ scores in the 99th percentile (135+), there are 70 million people with genius level intellect.

While I don't have numbers measuring the IQ distribution across developers, I think we can safely assume that no more than 10% (3m) have an IQ in the top 1%.

Therefore, no more than 4.2% of the world's brightest minds are in fact developing software of any kind. The number can be further pared down to reflect the number of "geniuses" working on generating ad-clicks.

I could have sworn I included the financial sector in that list but obviously I did not, must have been a different comment. Not that it makes much of a difference to the point.

For a realistic calculation you would definitely have to take access to education and enough wealth to pursue some field of study into account. That certainly falls under the definition of "brightest minds" by any fair definition since IQ on it's own isn't very meaningful. I would argue that you would also want to take motivation into account as well as the opportunity/temperment to work in an organized fashion with a good team if you wanted good numbers but I never mentioned that.

Still, I don't really take issue with your ballpark numbers. Let's just assume that's close for the sake of argument.

I could have been more clear and less flippant I suppose but I certainly didn't mean "a majority", I think 5% is a large percentage.

So pedantry aside, the idea is to consider the enormous waste of talent going on at places like google, facebook, yahoo and the majority of internet or mobile app startups. Very little of that effort will have any actual long term impact (other than the relatively small team at google working on search).

I agree with your sentiment. However, I do feel the need to awkwardly defend ad-clicks on a purely philosophical level.

While not a particularly impressive raison d'étre, connecting buyers to sellers is a legitimate market function.

This lies on contrast to several revenue generation tools employed by the financial sector. For instance, high frequency trading is practically indefensible and arguably destructive.

This sadly does not change the fact that a legitimate contribution is not necessarily meaningful. I'm curious to see what the legacy of our current tech boom will be.

But by having people click on those ads, the companies that are advertising (which could be and are companies actively engaged in "physical" products) are acquiring paying customers and thus have greater ability to fund their products.

SpaceX, Boeing, GM, and Victoria Secret need revenue sources to create their 'non-virtual-reality' products, and marketing/advertising creates a revenue source. If they had a net loss from advertising they simply wouldn't do it.

That's definitely partly true. You can't argue that market capitalism doesn't move some resources to useful and productive things.

Maybe you are right and this is just a horrible inefficiency that will be corrected as soon as we figure out how to make ad optimization and ultra addictive time wasting games more efficiently.

It doesn't seem likely to me at all though, the only arguments I've seen for it are just ideological commitments to our current economic/political system.

The statement that modern global captialism is the best system for productive human endevour we have come up with and the statement that modern global capitalism and the systems it will spawn are enough to continue the upward trajectory of civilization are not the same thing.

> If they had a net loss from advertising they simply wouldn't do it.

I have little faith in the non-scientific philosophies that this kind of statement is based on given modern neuroscience and human irrationality. There are too many counter examples. We are not self interested rational actors, it's way more complicated than that.

You are right, in theory.

But I get this feeling, more and more, that big, world changing companies, don't need ads revenue. The number of visits on the internet is less relevant for them.

You picked some companies randomly, but out of them SpaceX and Boeing are not selling stuff over the internet.

There is this hunch, that what we do, doesn't matter. It's mostly self congratulatory friend/social app. Yes, you might make some money out of it from VC but it doesn't change the world.

I have some hope that the maker/3d printer/home fabrication sector could combine the profitable small startup business that we all seem to love with some progress that will actually provide substantial benefit to humanity.

I think we need a lot more time to figure out how to organize and motivate and fund large projects as well as evolve culturally before any interesting large scale space exploration will be done. SpaceX type experiments might be the first step, even if it's just a data point about what doesn't work.

> Yes, you might make some money out of it from VC but it doesn't change the world.

Sounds like a plan: make a lot of money and then spend it to turn us into a real spacefaring civilization.

That's, apparently, what Elon Musk is trying to do.

Anyone wants to join in?

The companies that buy Boeings products very much are selling stuff over the Internet.

Yes. We could argue that people would still buy tickets even if they weren't available online, since flying beats car / ship traveling even if you have to walk to a store to buy your ticket.

That's not the point.

Selling and advertising tickets online is at least as good as the offline alternative at the same cost (presumably cheaper). Otherwise, why bother?

Thus, better/cheaper online advertising -> more tickets sold -> higher demand for air planes.

There's a plausible case that advertising is a negative-sum game (in the game theory sense). If no one advertised, they wouldn't be worse off since we would still buy the stuff, but if one player defects and advertises, they gain an advantage so the Nash equilibrium involves wasting lots of money on advertising to no net gain.

The best advertising educates the receiver, rather than just trying to persuade to buy one product over another.

Advertising can thus be a positive-sum interaction.

Unfortunately, it's usually easier to target the other product, rather than promote one's own (see political advertising).

That's only because we live in a world that's built around the principles of commerce and capitalism where activities are lubricated by money. There's no reason to expect that the same system exists in alien worlds.