Paul GrahamVerified account

It may be inevitable that in the limit case, what you want and what makes you happy diverge completely, simply because x can be optimized more effectively if you're not also trying to optimize some orthogonal y.

If so, we'll need (and we'll surely develop) social antibodies to protect us. E.g. we'll have to teach kids explicitly to avoid the kind of things you want, but don't make you happy.

Parents already warn kids about drugs, but few realize yet that this is just one instance of a more general lesson.

Hard to say how it plays out in the long term. Do we end up with a society that's 95% addicts and 5% people who understand the danger and resist it? Or does it play out like smoking, where the addiction spreads wildly at first, then shrinks?