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People have a good reason to be cynical. At the early horizon of the Internet, people believed utopia was right around the corner. What they found was more inco

People have a good reason to be cynical. At the early horizon of the Internet, people believed utopia was right around the corner. What they found was more income inequality while the biggest payouts in Silicon Valley went to people sucking up more of our information to sell us more ads. So yes, we certainly can do amazing things, but more often than not, someone in the boardroom will eventually ask: "where's the profit?" Just think of Facebook's Open Basics. They could afford to provide the extreme poor with the full internet, but they chose not to, since using Facebook at least would help the company collect more data and sell more ads. That was a deliberate choice.

Thriptic 11y ago
> So yes, we certainly can do amazing things, but more often than not, someone in the boardroom will eventually ask: "where's the profit?" That's because these entities are businesses, not charities. Their primary purpose is to generate profit, and the board is there to ensure that they do that. To expect a business to act like a charity is not reasonable.
- ProAm 11y ago
  > To expect a business to act like a charity is not reasonable. This is why we fear such leaps of technology, because the people doing it lack empathy and sympathy in place for profits.
stcredzero 11y ago
At the early horizon of the Internet, people believed utopia was right around the corner. Here's the thing. What one generation imagined as "Utopia" keeps on happening in limited contexts. But by the time it becomes reality, the conception of "Utopia" has changed. It's a moving target much in the same way hard AI is a moving target. Today, I live in a world where I not only have to worry about getting enough to eat, I even have to worry about getting too many calories. In my society, poor people worry about that more! I don't have to worry about physical safety. I don't worry about disease. I have access to almost any information I want, including entertainments that even kings and queens could never have imagined. Pick some level of baseline security for some 1st world industrialized nation. If you described that to Sir Thomas More or John Stuart Mill, and told them how many millions have it, they'd think you were talking a pipe dream. Inequality is always the big problem, of course.

Thriptic 11y ago

> So yes, we certainly can do amazing things, but more often than not, someone in the boardroom will eventually ask: "where's the profit?" That's because these entities are businesses, not charities. Their primary purpose is to generate profit, and the board is there to ensure that they do that. To expect a business to act like a charity is not reasonable.

ProAm 11y ago
> To expect a business to act like a charity is not reasonable. This is why we fear such leaps of technology, because the people doing it lack empathy and sympathy in place for profits.

stcredzero 11y ago

At the early horizon of the Internet, people believed utopia was right around the corner. Here's the thing. What one generation imagined as "Utopia" keeps on happening in limited contexts. But by the time it becomes reality, the conception of "Utopia" has changed. It's a moving target much in the same way hard AI is a moving target. Today, I live in a world where I not only have to worry about getting enough to eat, I even have to worry about getting too many calories. In my society, poor people worry about that more! I don't have to worry about physical safety. I don't worry about disease. I have access to almost any information I want, including entertainments that even kings and queens could never have imagined. Pick some level of baseline security for some 1st world industrialized nation. If you described that to Sir Thomas More or John Stuart Mill, and told them how many millions have it, they'd think you were talking a pipe dream. Inequality is always the big problem, of course.