I found that idea interesting. Will we consider it the norm in the future to have a “firewall” layer between news and ourselves?
I once wrote a short story where the protagonist was receiving news of the death of a friend but it was intercepted by its AI assistant that said “when you will have time, there is an emotional news that does not require urgent action that you will need to digest”. I feel it could become the norm.
EDIT: For context, Karpathy is a very famous deep learning researcher who just came back from a 2-weeks break from internet. I think he does not talks about politics there but it applies quite a bit.
EDIT2: I find it interesting that many reactions here are (IMO) missing the point. This is not about shielding one from information that one may be uncomfortable with but with tweets especially designed to elicit reactions, which is kind of becoming a plague on twitter due to their new incentives. It is to make the difference between presenting news in a neutral way and as “incredibly atrocious crime done to CHILDREN and you are a monster for not caring!”. The second one does feel a lot like exploit of emotional backdoors in my opinion.
Either it’s you deciding as you see it (ie there is no filter), or it’s past you who’s deciding in which case it’s a different person. I’ve grown mentally and emotionally as I’ve got older and I certainly don’t want me-from-10-years-ago to be in control of what me-right-now is even allowed to see
Or you can update it when you see fit, or go periods without filters to ensure you are still seeing something approximating reality, or base it on people you know personally and currently who you trust, or half a dozen other things that aren’t off the top of my head. The point was it’s less black and white than you’re painting it.
If you’re never allowed to see things you don’t like, how will you grow and change? If you never grow and change, why would you update your filters?
Then you should probably allow yourself to see some things you don’t like. I guess the answer lies somewhere in a middle ground where you both see things you don’t agree with and also filter out people known to spout untrue information or unnecessarily emotion-fueled sentiments? I don’t like genocide, but that doesn’t mean my options are fully head-in-the-sand or listen to non-stop Holocaust deniers…
Pretty close to exactly what we do right now, really but supercharged for the fast-approaching/already here world of supercharged fake news.