722

LESSWRONG
LW

721
FuturismPhilosophyPsychologyAI

1

How Too Much Comfort Erodes Human Meaning

by nickgpop
25th Sep 2025
1 min read
0

1

This post was rejected for the following reason(s):

  • No LLM generated, heavily assisted/co-written, or otherwise reliant work. LessWrong has recently been inundated with new users submitting work where much of the content is the output of LLM(s). This work by-and-large does not meet our standards, and is rejected. This includes dialogs with LLMs that claim to demonstrate various properties about them, posts introducing some new concept and terminology that explains how LLMs work, often centered around recursiveness, emergence, sentience, consciousness, etc. (these generally don't turn out to be as novel or interesting as they may seem).

    Our LLM-generated content policy can be viewed here.

  • Insufficient Quality for AI Content. There’ve been a lot of new users coming to LessWrong recently interested in AI. To keep the site’s quality high and ensure stuff posted is interesting to the site’s users, we’re currently only accepting posts that meet a pretty high bar. 

    If you want to try again, I recommend writing something short and to the point, focusing on your strongest argument, rather than a long, comprehensive essay. (This is fairly different from common academic norms.) We get lots of AI essays/papers every day and sadly most of them don't make very clear arguments, and we don't have time to review them all thoroughly. 

    We look for good reasoning, making a new and interesting point, bringing new evidence, and/or building upon prior discussion. If you were rejected for this reason, possibly a good thing to do is read more existing material. The AI Intro Material wiki-tag is a good place, for example. 

  • We are sorry about this, but submissions from new users that are mostly just links to papers on open repositories (or similar) have usually indicated either crackpot-esque material, or AI-generated speculation. It's possible that this one is totally fine. Unfortunately, part of the trouble with separating valuable from confused speculative science or philosophy is that the ideas are quite complicated, accurately identifying whether they have flaws is very time intensive, and we don't have time to do that for every new user presenting a speculative theory or framing (which are usually wrong).

    Separately, LessWrong users are also quite unlikely to follow such links to read the content without other indications that it would be worth their time (like being familiar with the author), so this format of submission is pretty strongly discouraged without at least a brief summary or set of excerpts that would motivate a reader to read the full thing.

1

New Comment
Moderation Log
More from nickgpop
View more
Curated and popular this week
0Comments
FuturismPhilosophyPsychologyAI

I recently gave a TEDx talk titled “AI and the Hidden Price of Comfort”.
It’s not about AGI doom, but about something more subtle: how removing struggle and effort through automation might strip life of meaning.
I touch on psychology (MIT’s “Your Brain on ChatGPT” study), philosophy (Nietzsche), and experiments like Universe-25

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK0-2ZakDyI

Summary:
The talk begins with a vision of 2050: a paradise of comfort where AI handles everything. But I argue that by outsourcing all effort, we risk losing struggle — and with it, growth, purpose, and meaning. I explore how this plays out at the individual level (boredom, passivity), and at the societal level (a world where humans are no longer needed for work).

For those who prefer reading, the full transcript (PDF) is available here:
LINK

Discussion:
What strategies could individuals and societies use to preserve purpose in an automated future?
Do you see comfort as liberation — or as a hidden risk to meaning?