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.
We are already having tons of filters in place trying to serve us information we are interested in, knowledgeable enough to digest, not-spammy, in the correct language, not porn or gore, etc... He is just proposing another interesting dimension. For instance, I am following AI news and news about the Ukraine conflict but I prefer to keep them separate and to not be distracted by the other when I get my fill on one.
The only way I found with Twitter (and now Mastodon) to do it is to devote twitter only to tech news.
I don't think he is proposing another dimension, but rather another scale. As you already said, we already filter the information that reaches us.
He seems to take this idea of filtering/censorship to an extreme. Where I see filtering mostly as a matter of convenience, he portrays information as a threat that people need to be protected from. He implies that being presented with information that challenges your world view is something bad, and I disagree with that.
I am not saying that filtering is bad. I too have blocked some communities here on Lemmy. I am saying that it is important not to put yourself in a bubble, where every opinion you see is one you agree with, and every news article confirms your beliefs.
Emotion != information
You can know that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is going on without having to put pictures of maimed bodies inside your news feed. Actually I have blocked people I actually agree with just because they could not stop spamming angrily about it. I have also a militant ecologist friend who thinks saving the planet implies pushing the most anxiety inducing news as much as possible. Blocked.
I don't think that blocking the content that focus on pathos locks us up in a bubble, that's quite the opposite. Emotions block analysis.