20 ms·

Why Technology Favors Tyranny

120 points by winterismute 8y ago

doombolt 8y ago
If you as a society ignore it and let it loose, why won't it? See GDPR as a solid example of trend reversal.
- BjoernKW 8y ago
  The jury is still out on if GDPR will actually be beneficial to consumers and citizens in general or if it’ll rather end up benefiting exactly those companies that don’t respect user privacy it supposedly was targeted at. The intent behind GDPR certainly is good. I’m worried about the implementation though. In that respect I don’t really consider it a solid effort.
  - mar77i 8y ago
    Besides being worded clearly against a certain kind of data-driven dystopia, it's also a start in the right direction. I, for one, do not expect EU to completely turn this policy upside down in the next years to come.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    The rather intense fines should solve the tragedy of the commons aspect, so long as the courts remain powerful and reasonably uncorrupt.
  - dasil003 8y ago
    I’ve heard this argument a lot from startup people, but it rings of envy of being late to the gold rush. The only reason to be more worried about Google/Facebook is because of the power they have, small startups are not inherently more ethical, and I’ve met enough small SV founders to know that as a group they don’t hold any kind of moral high ground. Framing the conversation as tech company winners and losers is to totally miss the point. The real question is whether GDPR will actually help stem data abuses, and frankly I don’t see how it can’t be at least a marginal net positive.
    - BjoernKW 8y ago
      I'm not worried at all about consumer-data-driven startups who are "late to the game". I'm concerned about the impact GDPR has on small businesses. GDPR applies to every business regardless of size. This is how it should be in a state under the rule of law, after all. For small businesses, however, the effort required for implementing GDPR is considerably larger in relative terms than it is for larger companies. Even if you don't process any data beyond what's necessary due to legitimate interest such as for accounting purposes the effort required for properly documenting your processes and third-party data processing can be quite considerable. Larger companies already do have lawyers to deal with this. As a small business owner you usually don't. This in itself isn't all that bad. It's mostly a one-time effort and as an added benefit it allows you to rethink and streamline your processes. However, some aspects of GDPR have been left rather open and ambiguous in terms of how to actually implement them (sometimes intentionally so to make the regulation somewhat future-proof). Please see this earlier comment on some issues that small business owners are faced with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17099878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17099878 Some of that ambiguity and uncertainty opens up new opportunities for the practice of sending a certain type of cease-and-desist letters that already incurs a fine at first notice (e.g. for supposedly not meeting legal requirements such as having a properly worded privacy statement on your website). This practice is rampant in some areas and industries. So far unfortunately, neither the EU nor the member states this applies to have undertaken significant steps to fight this. What really irks me is that EU officials dismissed these concerns on several occasions. It's almost as if for them SMBs simply don't exist and the world is all about Google and Facebook.
- toss1 8y ago
  GDPR does sem like a good (albeit small) step of trend reversal, attempting to limit the power of data accumulators for the general good. In contrast, a not so good step is the recent partisan calls by Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Laura Ingram, etc. to nationalize Google, Facebook, etc. because "the results are rigged against Trump", attempting to seize the power in service of a particular party currently with authoritarian tendencies, just as TFA warned. That said, I doubt this will get far soon.
mar77i 8y ago
"The growing fear of irrelevance"? Well duh. First of all, get that out of the way. You are irrelevant, the universe at a greater scale indeed doesn't even hint a proper damn about you. I'm more concerned with all those snowflakes out there losing touch with reality insisting that they are who is relevant when in fact any attention you give them whatsoever is a waste of time, and stolen from you and just not worth it. I've about had it with this civilization, and phrasings like that... oh look, technology enables a new kind of totalitarianism. Yeah. Well. If that's what you make of it, fine. Of course it doesn't need to be that way, but now that you said it out loud, it'll become more true among your kin. I'll just stay in my little bubble that thinks technology can help increasing the awesomeness in everyone's life, at least this 300 foot pole away from your orwellian dystopias - far enough for government work.
- swift532 8y ago
  I wouldn't personally want to help create tyranny powered by advanced technology, but I don't think that's to say I shouldn't be worried about it. I'm worried about what others will make of it, so I don't think we should be too idealistic about it.
  - mar77i 8y ago
    If you have concerns, please add your concerns to the license and contracts around your product. Also, for someone who says "I don't think that's to say I shouldn't be worried about it", you sure seem to take a liberal - maybe even a bit contradicting? - stance not wanting to be too idealistic about it.
    - swift532 8y ago
      English is not my first language, sorry, I think I didn't express myself well. I meant that we shouldn't be too naive when considering what other people might make of technology, just because we're idealistic.
      - mar77i 8y ago
gonvaled 8y ago
The trend can not be reversed anymore. The culprit is "The American Dream": by convincing voters that all of them can become millionaires, we have ensured that the small minority of those who actually make it have concentrated all economic and political power. It is now much too late to react. It is in fact impossible to react to this kind of situation: you actually have to forecast it and take preventive steps. It was forecast long ago, by the theorists of Communism, in another context, in another era. And the preventive steps that humanity took were badly implemented (totalitarianism) and not very effective. The battle was fought against the wrong enemy (personal liberty), and lost against an ideology using the defense of personal liberty as a pawn to advance a completely different, covert agenda: no limits to the accumulation of capital. That's where we are now, and there is no going back, since we are travelling at fast speed towards the cliff, still completely convinced that we are all going to become millionaires.
- frockington 8y ago
  Its relatively easy if you regularly contribute to your 401k starting at 18 to become a millionaire. It won't be what people think of when they hear millionaire but still enjoyable and attainable
  - frockington 8y ago
    if anyone wants to play around with a calculator try: https://www.investor.gov/additional-resources/free-financial-planning-tools/compound-interest-calculator https://www.investor.gov/additional-resources/free-financial... Starting at 18 you would only need to contribute $500 a month assuming 6% annual returns
oblio 8y ago
> Currently, humans risk becoming similar to domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful. I have a problem with this premise. Anyone that knows history knows that humans were as tame, if not tamer, in the past. Plus uneducated. Most of humanity has never been agile, curious and resourceful. Historically a handful of people were, and they tried to steer everyone around them. I'd say we are less cow-like than we've ever been. A ton more people have access to education than they ever did. The only thing the new technologies (like the internet) are exposing is the depth of the veneer of education the vast majority of people had, and that depth was very shallow. I'd say that in some regards this is actually better. Transparency tends to help and now a lot more people can see through the covers. It will just take time to adjust. Nota bene: I still believe that most people, most of the time, are passive. Being active is a lot of work and truly active people will be always the outliers. It's just that we can increase the percentage of active people by making it easier for them to be active.
- Treegarden 8y ago
  Also humanity in the past was far more violent and gruesome. So if being tame means not slaughtering each other it seems like a good thing. This book from Steven Pinker talks about this topic and its one of the best books I have read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...
  - Balero 8y ago
    Personally the idea of being tame revolts me. Maybe even more so than our violent and gruesome past. I also don't think they are linked. There is a definite difference to being civilised and being tame. MLK and Gandhi were civilised, and non-violent, but were certainly not tame.
    - throwawayperson 8y ago
      Being tame means won't have the desire to revolt against tyranny. You might can't imagine that, coz you probably didn't live under one. Currently in China, there are tons of people (personally I'd say most) prefer to live inside the "protection against malicious misinformation" of the great firewall. They have "everything they want" there, they listen to authoritative info and fend off doubts spontaneously.
evrydayhustling 8y ago
Articles like this often risk conflating many distinct concerns about tech in a way that makes the whole set feel alarmist rather than actionable. This author does a good job of cataloguing each risk separately. His closing prescription deserves a place in the article's tl;dr: > ...if you dislike the idea of living in a digital dictatorship or some similarly degraded form of society—then the most important contribution you can make is to find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands, and also find ways to keep distributed data processing more efficient than centralized data processing. These will not be easy tasks. But achieving them may be the best safeguard of democracy.
matt4077 8y ago
Among dystopias, this one is remarkably well-argued... It is rather frustrating to see how illiberality and strive have come back. In the nineties, the "End of History" made for a convincing hypothesis: Market economies in functioning democracies had proven that they were capable of providing decent quality of life for everyone. Competition had moved on from natural resources to human ingenuity, rendering the supposed motivation for all the wars of history irrelevant. Contrary to orthodox left-wing opinion, poorer countries were not exploited; instead, they had a standing invite to this future of plenty, and Asia took them up on it. But China's economic rise didn't effect any democratic change. It seemed that democracy did not, after all, win the cold war. Communism merely lost it. Dictatorships can be as productive as open societies, as long as you don't saddle them with too much incompetence or self-defeating ideology. So we are now in this new battle of the systems, and too often, we're loosing: China and Russia are obvious. But Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines, and Poland are more recent converts to the prosperity gospel of strongman leadership. With Trump, Brexit, and several recent election results in Europe, the hits keep coming closer. Maybe humans never actually liked democracy. They just enjoyed its spoils. Now that there's an option to both eat and hate, they're overjoyed.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > Contrary to orthodox left-wing opinion, poorer countries were not exploited Apart from the literal carve-up of colonialism, and businesses like the United Fruit Company? Asia very much did not have a "standing invite". Japan was explicitly rebuilt. China had a number of false starts with mass death before settling on export-led state capitalism. Vietnam tried to escape colonialism and was bombed flat. Cambodia was bombed for being next to Vietnam. South Korea and Singapore are probably closest to this ideal, which both relied on the state "picking winners" for support. Philippines exports people, and was once a byword for corruption under Marcos. Indonesia .. is never in the news? > Now that there's an option to both eat and hate, they're overjoyed. There's a minority for whom this is very much true, unfortunately. (WRT Russia, there's a strong case for what happened being "democracy" and "capitalism" but without rule of law, resulting in a gangster takeover)
  - lubonay 8y ago
macawfish 8y ago
The article is much better than the headline suggests
pjc50 8y ago
Recently I saw a comment that the real "hostile AI" threat was not something like Skynet, but more like Youtube algorithmic video recommendations and their fondness for conspiracy and far-right material. The perceived threats of "irrelevance" and "uselessness" get easily diverted against other humans, especially through "othering". As jobs are taken by automation or offshoring it's easy to blame "immigrants". Keep up the social division for long enough and this can escalate to actual violence. Amartya Sen's Nobel-prize-winning work on famine was to demonstrate that it was rarely due to an absolute shortage of food, but a deficiency in "entitlement" to it: both purely economic (not having the cash) and political (not being able to secure famine relief). That's the potential worse case of being "irrelevant and useless": starving to death because you can't get food from the "system" somehow.
- qudat 8y ago
  Interesting. The point of the recommendation system is to infer what you like based on a slew of metrics. I think plenty of people would argue the same but favoring left ideology. So where does that leave us?
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Pretending that a system is morally neutral when it treats truth and lies as equivalent value? "This person likes lies, I'm going to give them more lies" is a terrible system that ends up with the computer teaching the blood libel to children and raising them as cheerful genocidists. Note: I'm not saying this is the same as the left/right axis, just that a lot of the horrendously dangerous material is dangerous lies being presented as fact. (A personal example I was confronted with was watching a game-related video, where the entire sidebar was videos relating to the same game .. plus a livestream of Tommy Robinson. Why was that there? Does that imply there's a crossover between games videos and far-right videos? The system is too opaque to even tell me why it wrongly thought I would like it.)
- 21 8y ago
  Be careful not to fall into your own filter bubble. The other side uses "othering" as well. If the right blames "immigrants" for everything, the left blames "nazis". Which would not be a bad thing, except that today you are a "nazi" if you just carry an american flag, even if you are a true Bernie supporter: > However, as he marched with fellow progressives, he says members of Antifa saw that he was carrying an American Flag and immediately ordered him to drop the flag, calling it a "fascist symbol". When Welch refused to comply, he says they tried to rip the flag from his hands, and then hit him in the back of his head with a club that was hidden in black fabric.
jeandejean 8y ago
Yet another post about some frightening scenarios, imagined by people technologically illeterate, that has little chance to happen...
- crazynick4 8y ago
  That are already happening
msiyer 8y ago
If we look closely, we will soon realize that everything favors tyranny. Religious institutions, political institutions, educational institutions... The problem is humanity has a tendency to pick or gravitate to morally weak specimens for leadership. We also have a tendency to "believe" authority which often leads us astray. Would a wolf pack pick a weak leader? Would a wolf pack let a weak leader remain in position once weaknesses are exposed?
- MisterTea 8y ago
  You have to define weak first.
  - msiyer 8y ago
    Look at "leaders" all around the world. Past and present. And look at condition of the world around you. It is people's fault that they become our "leaders". It is a crime that we let them remain in position.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      Has there ever been a leader that you would approve of?
      - falcolas 8y ago
        Probably the ones you hear very little about. The ones who rebuilt after a famous leader's wars, whose only recorded achievements were to create an environment of relative riches that later leaders could exploit or fight over.
- mercurysmessage 8y ago
  There is no such thing as an alpha wolf, btw. That study was actually showing parents leading wolf pups.
- Angostura 8y ago
  > political institutions, educational institutions... So democracy and schooling favors tyranny? I'd like to see your working.
indigochill 8y ago
Perhaps programming needs to become the new "literacy" standard. Writing human languages isn't enough any more. By learning to read and write computer code, people can become active users of technology rather than merely consumers bound to the creations of others.
- chosenbreed 8y ago
  Basic understanding of programming might be useful. But perhaps critical thinking/reasoning would be even more so. Not sure how this could be developed. Maybe subjects such as philosophy, history, logic, classical literature, etc...
  - indigochill 8y ago
    I'd agree that would be sufficient if we didn't see stories like this one about people overwhelmingly feeling left behind by technological progress. As it is, there's something missing between where education is and where it needs to be. Maybe it's just that the general quality of education is poor so people don't know how to use what they've learned. Or maybe there are new topics that need to be introduced to keep people functionally literate in the modern world. Or both.
- apocalypstyx 8y ago
  Over the decades, every time I have heard some variant on 'everyone needs to learn to code' there is always a subtle unsettling feeling that arises in the back of my mind around the notion of linguistic imperialism, and that the promulgator instinctively believes or realizes, whether it actually exists or not, that the framing of any given, non-generalized technology inherently carries a ideological supposition that, as with all suppositions, the bearers want to spread to totality.
  - indigochill 8y ago
    How about a comparison to modern education? Back before public education gave everyone the knowledge necessary to write for themselves, would it have been imperialist to advocate for that goal? If so, does it matter?
jancsika 8y ago
> Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about excitedly in ted Talks, at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences—globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, AI, machine learning—and common people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about them. globalization - by definition effects billions of people genetic engineering - in 2016 GM crops, according to Wikipedia, make up 12% of global cropland blockchain - digital time-stamping service that scales to the unfathomable rate of 7 transactions per second It tells me the author is unable to separate wheat from chaff, as if writing this: > Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about excitedly in ted Talks, at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences—globalization, HDMI to VGA adapters, genetic engineering, AI, machine learning—and common people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about them.
- CuriouslyC 8y ago
  Except that you don't have meetups where people get all excited about the HDMI-enabled future. I completely agree with you about the current state of blockchain, but it has captured people's imaginations.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    So it would make for some fun dated art in 30 or so years? (since it hasn't captured much anything else)
api 8y ago
Hammers don't favor one kind of architecture over another. Hammers do what the people holding them make them do. The way we use our technology is a reflection of our ideas. Since the 1990s I've watched the ideas that are popular within the culture shift in an increasingly authoritarian direction on both the "right" and "left" of the conventional political spectrum. We are seeing the ascent of strong man rule and other types of authoritarianism around the world for democratic reasons: it's what people want, or what people think we need. I think the largest single factor is push-back against globalization. Personally I think globalization in some form and to some degree is both desirable (to prevent war and increase wealth) and inevitable (due to travel and communication), but I also think it's been pushed perhaps a little too quickly and in ways that are profoundly insensitive to the needs of the middle classes in the developed world. That's created a massive anti-globalization backlash where people are elevating strongmen and demagogues to re-assert national borders and national independence. There are other factors too. I think a similar kind of reaction is occurring against global social liberalization.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  Hammers favors the kinds of architectures that one can create with nails. Every technology have some inherent biases. Electricity favored decentralization about as much as steam power favored concentration.
jkingsbery 8y ago
This article mentions a lot of things that "might" or "may" happen, without really any convincing arguments for why these predictions will come to fruition. It's true that dictators make use of centralized knowledge, but it's also true that many of the assumptions of market capitalism assume perfect knowledge and no transaction costs, two assumptions which have never been true in practice but today are much more applicable (knowledge is faster to attain, and transaction costs are smaller today and more directly measurable). So, it seems just as likely to me that markets could be on the verge of being more useful mechanisms than ever.
zekevermillion 8y ago
I'm with Kasparov, that the best method of combining human and machine will always beat the best machine or the best human individually. I submit that Google's AI progress does not disprove this assertion, because (a) even if Google's AI is self-trained in chess or go, a human team is required to select a game and set up the training, as well as to update the algo or meta-algorithm in competition against the guys from IBM and Xinhua, etc; and (b) chess, although a very large and, for most purposes nearly infinite, game, ultimately is not open-ended or infinite in the way that nature life is, or human life decision-space is. Go is perhaps a better contender as a life simulation but I think still falls well short of the complexity of even a simple natural system. One could counter that a meta training algorithm could define rulesets for a alpha-like AI to self-train-upon, and at sufficient generality this would take humans out of the equation. Well, if humans are entirely removed, then the problem is no longer interesting. If humans are involved at any point in the process, we could still view AI through the lens of a human-centered tool. What if AGI does in fact evolve its own goals as primary and decides that humans and/or human self-determination are an impediment? Would humans eventually fall down the food chain, or outside of it, say as raccoons living on the city streets? Well, I don't view the world that way. But, even if non-human life forms gain supremacy of intellect and capabilities, I would note that even raccoons have a place -- and despite the fervent desires of many a suburban homeowner, the little pests are amazingly resilient to attempts at extermination or control.
CM30 8y ago
As per the last time this was posted, here are my thoughts on this article and its premise: Firstly, I feel everyone gets something wrong about AI and jobs, and I believe that makes things a little less dire on that front than you may otherwise believe. Namely, people are not purely 'rational' economic actors, and don't purely make decisions on 'quality' or 'price'. For instance, art and media isn't all about what's the 'best' work out there, but the one with name recognition, sentimental value, an existing fandom, etc. It doesn't matter if an AI can create 'art', because whether that art sells depends on more than technical competence. Will Mario or Star Wars or Lord of the Rings be threatened by AI and technology? Probably not, the name sells regardless of whether a competitor product/brand may be objectively better. So I believe artistic and creative fields may be the thing remaining after AI takes most other jobs, since your creativity can make a market that competitors legally can't compete in. If all fails, a personal brand can do much the same way. Sell yourself, not the 'product'. There's also the fact many 'worse' businesses still do well either through word of mouth, location, advertising, etc. Not everything will be a one horse race ala Uber or Airbnb, and whether AI/tech/whatever can outperform humans won't really matter than much regardless. In that sense, things aren't quite as dire as some people would have you believe. Secondly, while technology and AI may help those in power consolidate it further, it also democraticises power too, by making the means of getting it available to more people than ever before. For example, for as much as emotional manipulation and fake news is pointed out as an issue online, the internet has also made it easier to verify anything, to get around government censorship and to make your own mind up about current events and the situation at hand. If the old school media got things wrong (or were told to shut up by those in power), what could you do? How could you disprove their claims? With great difficulty that's how. But now we've got a world when anyone can call out anyone, where finding alternative viewpoints on major topics is trivial and where doing research on advanced topics is easier than ever. Narratives have been destroyed, official statements disproved by average Joes taking photos and recording videos, and pseudoscience has been debunked. Is that really worse than a world where publishing information is tightly controlled and regulated? Technology can be used for the purposes of tyranny, but it can also be used to fight against it just as well. And that'll only get more true when more aspects of everyday life involve computers and networking. So while technology may 'favour' tyranny, in some ways it also favours democracy and a more equal society too.

120 points by winterismute 8y ago

doombolt 8y ago

If you as a society ignore it and let it loose, why won't it? See GDPR as a solid example of trend reversal.

BjoernKW 8y ago
The jury is still out on if GDPR will actually be beneficial to consumers and citizens in general or if it’ll rather end up benefiting exactly those companies that don’t respect user privacy it supposedly was targeted at. The intent behind GDPR certainly is good. I’m worried about the implementation though. In that respect I don’t really consider it a solid effort.
- mar77i 8y ago
  Besides being worded clearly against a certain kind of data-driven dystopia, it's also a start in the right direction. I, for one, do not expect EU to completely turn this policy upside down in the next years to come.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  The rather intense fines should solve the tragedy of the commons aspect, so long as the courts remain powerful and reasonably uncorrupt.
- dasil003 8y ago
  I’ve heard this argument a lot from startup people, but it rings of envy of being late to the gold rush. The only reason to be more worried about Google/Facebook is because of the power they have, small startups are not inherently more ethical, and I’ve met enough small SV founders to know that as a group they don’t hold any kind of moral high ground. Framing the conversation as tech company winners and losers is to totally miss the point. The real question is whether GDPR will actually help stem data abuses, and frankly I don’t see how it can’t be at least a marginal net positive.
  - BjoernKW 8y ago
    I'm not worried at all about consumer-data-driven startups who are "late to the game". I'm concerned about the impact GDPR has on small businesses. GDPR applies to every business regardless of size. This is how it should be in a state under the rule of law, after all. For small businesses, however, the effort required for implementing GDPR is considerably larger in relative terms than it is for larger companies. Even if you don't process any data beyond what's necessary due to legitimate interest such as for accounting purposes the effort required for properly documenting your processes and third-party data processing can be quite considerable. Larger companies already do have lawyers to deal with this. As a small business owner you usually don't. This in itself isn't all that bad. It's mostly a one-time effort and as an added benefit it allows you to rethink and streamline your processes. However, some aspects of GDPR have been left rather open and ambiguous in terms of how to actually implement them (sometimes intentionally so to make the regulation somewhat future-proof). Please see this earlier comment on some issues that small business owners are faced with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17099878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17099878 Some of that ambiguity and uncertainty opens up new opportunities for the practice of sending a certain type of cease-and-desist letters that already incurs a fine at first notice (e.g. for supposedly not meeting legal requirements such as having a properly worded privacy statement on your website). This practice is rampant in some areas and industries. So far unfortunately, neither the EU nor the member states this applies to have undertaken significant steps to fight this. What really irks me is that EU officials dismissed these concerns on several occasions. It's almost as if for them SMBs simply don't exist and the world is all about Google and Facebook.
toss1 8y ago
GDPR does sem like a good (albeit small) step of trend reversal, attempting to limit the power of data accumulators for the general good. In contrast, a not so good step is the recent partisan calls by Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Laura Ingram, etc. to nationalize Google, Facebook, etc. because "the results are rigged against Trump", attempting to seize the power in service of a particular party currently with authoritarian tendencies, just as TFA warned. That said, I doubt this will get far soon.

mar77i 8y ago

"The growing fear of irrelevance"? Well duh. First of all, get that out of the way. You are irrelevant, the universe at a greater scale indeed doesn't even hint a proper damn about you. I'm more concerned with all those snowflakes out there losing touch with reality insisting that they are who is relevant when in fact any attention you give them whatsoever is a waste of time, and stolen from you and just not worth it. I've about had it with this civilization, and phrasings like that... oh look, technology enables a new kind of totalitarianism. Yeah. Well. If that's what you make of it, fine. Of course it doesn't need to be that way, but now that you said it out loud, it'll become more true among your kin. I'll just stay in my little bubble that thinks technology can help increasing the awesomeness in everyone's life, at least this 300 foot pole away from your orwellian dystopias - far enough for government work.

swift532 8y ago
I wouldn't personally want to help create tyranny powered by advanced technology, but I don't think that's to say I shouldn't be worried about it. I'm worried about what others will make of it, so I don't think we should be too idealistic about it.
- mar77i 8y ago
  If you have concerns, please add your concerns to the license and contracts around your product. Also, for someone who says "I don't think that's to say I shouldn't be worried about it", you sure seem to take a liberal - maybe even a bit contradicting? - stance not wanting to be too idealistic about it.
  - swift532 8y ago
    English is not my first language, sorry, I think I didn't express myself well. I meant that we shouldn't be too naive when considering what other people might make of technology, just because we're idealistic.
    - mar77i 8y ago

gonvaled 8y ago

The trend can not be reversed anymore. The culprit is "The American Dream": by convincing voters that all of them can become millionaires, we have ensured that the small minority of those who actually make it have concentrated all economic and political power. It is now much too late to react. It is in fact impossible to react to this kind of situation: you actually have to forecast it and take preventive steps. It was forecast long ago, by the theorists of Communism, in another context, in another era. And the preventive steps that humanity took were badly implemented (totalitarianism) and not very effective. The battle was fought against the wrong enemy (personal liberty), and lost against an ideology using the defense of personal liberty as a pawn to advance a completely different, covert agenda: no limits to the accumulation of capital. That's where we are now, and there is no going back, since we are travelling at fast speed towards the cliff, still completely convinced that we are all going to become millionaires.

frockington 8y ago
Its relatively easy if you regularly contribute to your 401k starting at 18 to become a millionaire. It won't be what people think of when they hear millionaire but still enjoyable and attainable
- frockington 8y ago
  if anyone wants to play around with a calculator try: https://www.investor.gov/additional-resources/free-financial-planning-tools/compound-interest-calculator https://www.investor.gov/additional-resources/free-financial... Starting at 18 you would only need to contribute $500 a month assuming 6% annual returns

oblio 8y ago

> Currently, humans risk becoming similar to domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful. I have a problem with this premise. Anyone that knows history knows that humans were as tame, if not tamer, in the past. Plus uneducated. Most of humanity has never been agile, curious and resourceful. Historically a handful of people were, and they tried to steer everyone around them. I'd say we are less cow-like than we've ever been. A ton more people have access to education than they ever did. The only thing the new technologies (like the internet) are exposing is the depth of the veneer of education the vast majority of people had, and that depth was very shallow. I'd say that in some regards this is actually better. Transparency tends to help and now a lot more people can see through the covers. It will just take time to adjust. Nota bene: I still believe that most people, most of the time, are passive. Being active is a lot of work and truly active people will be always the outliers. It's just that we can increase the percentage of active people by making it easier for them to be active.

Treegarden 8y ago
Also humanity in the past was far more violent and gruesome. So if being tame means not slaughtering each other it seems like a good thing. This book from Steven Pinker talks about this topic and its one of the best books I have read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...
- Balero 8y ago
  Personally the idea of being tame revolts me. Maybe even more so than our violent and gruesome past. I also don't think they are linked. There is a definite difference to being civilised and being tame. MLK and Gandhi were civilised, and non-violent, but were certainly not tame.
  - throwawayperson 8y ago
    Being tame means won't have the desire to revolt against tyranny. You might can't imagine that, coz you probably didn't live under one. Currently in China, there are tons of people (personally I'd say most) prefer to live inside the "protection against malicious misinformation" of the great firewall. They have "everything they want" there, they listen to authoritative info and fend off doubts spontaneously.

evrydayhustling 8y ago

Articles like this often risk conflating many distinct concerns about tech in a way that makes the whole set feel alarmist rather than actionable. This author does a good job of cataloguing each risk separately. His closing prescription deserves a place in the article's tl;dr: > ...if you dislike the idea of living in a digital dictatorship or some similarly degraded form of society—then the most important contribution you can make is to find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands, and also find ways to keep distributed data processing more efficient than centralized data processing. These will not be easy tasks. But achieving them may be the best safeguard of democracy.

matt4077 8y ago

Among dystopias, this one is remarkably well-argued... It is rather frustrating to see how illiberality and strive have come back. In the nineties, the "End of History" made for a convincing hypothesis: Market economies in functioning democracies had proven that they were capable of providing decent quality of life for everyone. Competition had moved on from natural resources to human ingenuity, rendering the supposed motivation for all the wars of history irrelevant. Contrary to orthodox left-wing opinion, poorer countries were not exploited; instead, they had a standing invite to this future of plenty, and Asia took them up on it. But China's economic rise didn't effect any democratic change. It seemed that democracy did not, after all, win the cold war. Communism merely lost it. Dictatorships can be as productive as open societies, as long as you don't saddle them with too much incompetence or self-defeating ideology. So we are now in this new battle of the systems, and too often, we're loosing: China and Russia are obvious. But Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines, and Poland are more recent converts to the prosperity gospel of strongman leadership. With Trump, Brexit, and several recent election results in Europe, the hits keep coming closer. Maybe humans never actually liked democracy. They just enjoyed its spoils. Now that there's an option to both eat and hate, they're overjoyed.

pjc50 8y ago
> Contrary to orthodox left-wing opinion, poorer countries were not exploited Apart from the literal carve-up of colonialism, and businesses like the United Fruit Company? Asia very much did not have a "standing invite". Japan was explicitly rebuilt. China had a number of false starts with mass death before settling on export-led state capitalism. Vietnam tried to escape colonialism and was bombed flat. Cambodia was bombed for being next to Vietnam. South Korea and Singapore are probably closest to this ideal, which both relied on the state "picking winners" for support. Philippines exports people, and was once a byword for corruption under Marcos. Indonesia .. is never in the news? > Now that there's an option to both eat and hate, they're overjoyed. There's a minority for whom this is very much true, unfortunately. (WRT Russia, there's a strong case for what happened being "democracy" and "capitalism" but without rule of law, resulting in a gangster takeover)
- lubonay 8y ago

macawfish 8y ago

The article is much better than the headline suggests

pjc50 8y ago

Recently I saw a comment that the real "hostile AI" threat was not something like Skynet, but more like Youtube algorithmic video recommendations and their fondness for conspiracy and far-right material. The perceived threats of "irrelevance" and "uselessness" get easily diverted against other humans, especially through "othering". As jobs are taken by automation or offshoring it's easy to blame "immigrants". Keep up the social division for long enough and this can escalate to actual violence. Amartya Sen's Nobel-prize-winning work on famine was to demonstrate that it was rarely due to an absolute shortage of food, but a deficiency in "entitlement" to it: both purely economic (not having the cash) and political (not being able to secure famine relief). That's the potential worse case of being "irrelevant and useless": starving to death because you can't get food from the "system" somehow.

qudat 8y ago
Interesting. The point of the recommendation system is to infer what you like based on a slew of metrics. I think plenty of people would argue the same but favoring left ideology. So where does that leave us?
- pjc50 8y ago
  Pretending that a system is morally neutral when it treats truth and lies as equivalent value? "This person likes lies, I'm going to give them more lies" is a terrible system that ends up with the computer teaching the blood libel to children and raising them as cheerful genocidists. Note: I'm not saying this is the same as the left/right axis, just that a lot of the horrendously dangerous material is dangerous lies being presented as fact. (A personal example I was confronted with was watching a game-related video, where the entire sidebar was videos relating to the same game .. plus a livestream of Tommy Robinson. Why was that there? Does that imply there's a crossover between games videos and far-right videos? The system is too opaque to even tell me why it wrongly thought I would like it.)
21 8y ago
Be careful not to fall into your own filter bubble. The other side uses "othering" as well. If the right blames "immigrants" for everything, the left blames "nazis". Which would not be a bad thing, except that today you are a "nazi" if you just carry an american flag, even if you are a true Bernie supporter: > However, as he marched with fellow progressives, he says members of Antifa saw that he was carrying an American Flag and immediately ordered him to drop the flag, calling it a "fascist symbol". When Welch refused to comply, he says they tried to rip the flag from his hands, and then hit him in the back of his head with a club that was hidden in black fabric.

jeandejean 8y ago

Yet another post about some frightening scenarios, imagined by people technologically illeterate, that has little chance to happen...

crazynick4 8y ago
That are already happening

msiyer 8y ago

If we look closely, we will soon realize that everything favors tyranny. Religious institutions, political institutions, educational institutions... The problem is humanity has a tendency to pick or gravitate to morally weak specimens for leadership. We also have a tendency to "believe" authority which often leads us astray. Would a wolf pack pick a weak leader? Would a wolf pack let a weak leader remain in position once weaknesses are exposed?

MisterTea 8y ago
You have to define weak first.
- msiyer 8y ago
  Look at "leaders" all around the world. Past and present. And look at condition of the world around you. It is people's fault that they become our "leaders". It is a crime that we let them remain in position.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Has there ever been a leader that you would approve of?
    - falcolas 8y ago
      Probably the ones you hear very little about. The ones who rebuilt after a famous leader's wars, whose only recorded achievements were to create an environment of relative riches that later leaders could exploit or fight over.
mercurysmessage 8y ago
There is no such thing as an alpha wolf, btw. That study was actually showing parents leading wolf pups.
Angostura 8y ago
> political institutions, educational institutions... So democracy and schooling favors tyranny? I'd like to see your working.

indigochill 8y ago

Perhaps programming needs to become the new "literacy" standard. Writing human languages isn't enough any more. By learning to read and write computer code, people can become active users of technology rather than merely consumers bound to the creations of others.

chosenbreed 8y ago
Basic understanding of programming might be useful. But perhaps critical thinking/reasoning would be even more so. Not sure how this could be developed. Maybe subjects such as philosophy, history, logic, classical literature, etc...
- indigochill 8y ago
  I'd agree that would be sufficient if we didn't see stories like this one about people overwhelmingly feeling left behind by technological progress. As it is, there's something missing between where education is and where it needs to be. Maybe it's just that the general quality of education is poor so people don't know how to use what they've learned. Or maybe there are new topics that need to be introduced to keep people functionally literate in the modern world. Or both.
apocalypstyx 8y ago
Over the decades, every time I have heard some variant on 'everyone needs to learn to code' there is always a subtle unsettling feeling that arises in the back of my mind around the notion of linguistic imperialism, and that the promulgator instinctively believes or realizes, whether it actually exists or not, that the framing of any given, non-generalized technology inherently carries a ideological supposition that, as with all suppositions, the bearers want to spread to totality.
- indigochill 8y ago
  How about a comparison to modern education? Back before public education gave everyone the knowledge necessary to write for themselves, would it have been imperialist to advocate for that goal? If so, does it matter?

jancsika 8y ago

> Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about excitedly in ted Talks, at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences—globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, AI, machine learning—and common people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about them. globalization - by definition effects billions of people genetic engineering - in 2016 GM crops, according to Wikipedia, make up 12% of global cropland blockchain - digital time-stamping service that scales to the unfathomable rate of 7 transactions per second It tells me the author is unable to separate wheat from chaff, as if writing this: > Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about excitedly in ted Talks, at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences—globalization, HDMI to VGA adapters, genetic engineering, AI, machine learning—and common people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about them.

CuriouslyC 8y ago
Except that you don't have meetups where people get all excited about the HDMI-enabled future. I completely agree with you about the current state of blockchain, but it has captured people's imaginations.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  So it would make for some fun dated art in 30 or so years? (since it hasn't captured much anything else)

api 8y ago

Hammers don't favor one kind of architecture over another. Hammers do what the people holding them make them do. The way we use our technology is a reflection of our ideas. Since the 1990s I've watched the ideas that are popular within the culture shift in an increasingly authoritarian direction on both the "right" and "left" of the conventional political spectrum. We are seeing the ascent of strong man rule and other types of authoritarianism around the world for democratic reasons: it's what people want, or what people think we need. I think the largest single factor is push-back against globalization. Personally I think globalization in some form and to some degree is both desirable (to prevent war and increase wealth) and inevitable (due to travel and communication), but I also think it's been pushed perhaps a little too quickly and in ways that are profoundly insensitive to the needs of the middle classes in the developed world. That's created a massive anti-globalization backlash where people are elevating strongmen and demagogues to re-assert national borders and national independence. There are other factors too. I think a similar kind of reaction is occurring against global social liberalization.

marcosdumay 8y ago
Hammers favors the kinds of architectures that one can create with nails. Every technology have some inherent biases. Electricity favored decentralization about as much as steam power favored concentration.

jkingsbery 8y ago

This article mentions a lot of things that "might" or "may" happen, without really any convincing arguments for why these predictions will come to fruition. It's true that dictators make use of centralized knowledge, but it's also true that many of the assumptions of market capitalism assume perfect knowledge and no transaction costs, two assumptions which have never been true in practice but today are much more applicable (knowledge is faster to attain, and transaction costs are smaller today and more directly measurable). So, it seems just as likely to me that markets could be on the verge of being more useful mechanisms than ever.

zekevermillion 8y ago

I'm with Kasparov, that the best method of combining human and machine will always beat the best machine or the best human individually. I submit that Google's AI progress does not disprove this assertion, because (a) even if Google's AI is self-trained in chess or go, a human team is required to select a game and set up the training, as well as to update the algo or meta-algorithm in competition against the guys from IBM and Xinhua, etc; and (b) chess, although a very large and, for most purposes nearly infinite, game, ultimately is not open-ended or infinite in the way that nature life is, or human life decision-space is. Go is perhaps a better contender as a life simulation but I think still falls well short of the complexity of even a simple natural system. One could counter that a meta training algorithm could define rulesets for a alpha-like AI to self-train-upon, and at sufficient generality this would take humans out of the equation. Well, if humans are entirely removed, then the problem is no longer interesting. If humans are involved at any point in the process, we could still view AI through the lens of a human-centered tool. What if AGI does in fact evolve its own goals as primary and decides that humans and/or human self-determination are an impediment? Would humans eventually fall down the food chain, or outside of it, say as raccoons living on the city streets? Well, I don't view the world that way. But, even if non-human life forms gain supremacy of intellect and capabilities, I would note that even raccoons have a place -- and despite the fervent desires of many a suburban homeowner, the little pests are amazingly resilient to attempts at extermination or control.

CM30 8y ago

As per the last time this was posted, here are my thoughts on this article and its premise: Firstly, I feel everyone gets something wrong about AI and jobs, and I believe that makes things a little less dire on that front than you may otherwise believe. Namely, people are not purely 'rational' economic actors, and don't purely make decisions on 'quality' or 'price'. For instance, art and media isn't all about what's the 'best' work out there, but the one with name recognition, sentimental value, an existing fandom, etc. It doesn't matter if an AI can create 'art', because whether that art sells depends on more than technical competence. Will Mario or Star Wars or Lord of the Rings be threatened by AI and technology? Probably not, the name sells regardless of whether a competitor product/brand may be objectively better. So I believe artistic and creative fields may be the thing remaining after AI takes most other jobs, since your creativity can make a market that competitors legally can't compete in. If all fails, a personal brand can do much the same way. Sell yourself, not the 'product'. There's also the fact many 'worse' businesses still do well either through word of mouth, location, advertising, etc. Not everything will be a one horse race ala Uber or Airbnb, and whether AI/tech/whatever can outperform humans won't really matter than much regardless. In that sense, things aren't quite as dire as some people would have you believe. Secondly, while technology and AI may help those in power consolidate it further, it also democraticises power too, by making the means of getting it available to more people than ever before. For example, for as much as emotional manipulation and fake news is pointed out as an issue online, the internet has also made it easier to verify anything, to get around government censorship and to make your own mind up about current events and the situation at hand. If the old school media got things wrong (or were told to shut up by those in power), what could you do? How could you disprove their claims? With great difficulty that's how. But now we've got a world when anyone can call out anyone, where finding alternative viewpoints on major topics is trivial and where doing research on advanced topics is easier than ever. Narratives have been destroyed, official statements disproved by average Joes taking photos and recording videos, and pseudoscience has been debunked. Is that really worse than a world where publishing information is tightly controlled and regulated? Technology can be used for the purposes of tyranny, but it can also be used to fight against it just as well. And that'll only get more true when more aspects of everyday life involve computers and networking. So while technology may 'favour' tyranny, in some ways it also favours democracy and a more equal society too.