6 ms·

All these articles are saying the same few things in different words now. I am a little burnt out on this topic at this point. I've felt this and said this for

by rblion 7y ago

All these articles are saying the same few things in different words now. I am a little burnt out on this topic at this point. I've felt this and said this for almost a decade now. Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. Being mindful and having empathy are not just good habits but foundational to being healthy and happy in the 21st century.

joeyrideout 7y ago
I agree, with an elaboration from Marshall McLuhan's theory that technology is an extension of parts of the human body - cognition and memory extending our brain; communication extending our eyes, ears, and mouths; sexuality; transportation, consumption, and trade that used to be limited by walking distance, etc. It has simply extended "us" as humans.
- rblion 7y ago
  Accurate. People assume that more technology will fix everything but it will have to as much an 'inside job' too if we are too keep progressing as a civilization.
- r4ltman 7y ago
  you'll find this intersting, https://youtu.be/mq2mcwtyjEA https://youtu.be/mq2mcwtyjEA Peter Medwar said the most human thing about us is our technology. Civilization on the other hand is merely a by product of the phonetic (Phoenician) alphabet. The ability to translate (hoick) the acoustic (thought, dance, poems) into the visual (writing) etc
hasbroslasher 7y ago
Yeah, this is one tired trope. I'm especially bored of the "Facebook causes the rise of nationalism/fascism" rhetoric - I think it's pretty convenient to scapegoat the Zuck (who is an asshole, oblivious, naive, etc.) with something so complex and fueled by so many factors outside of the internet. "Russians made us do it because Facebook" is such a wonderful cop out because it means we can't really do anything to fix it, and it's totally not our fault. And we're addicted to such messages - that the terrorists hate our freedom, that poor people are just jealous losers, that scientists are moralizing assholes for telling us not to eat steak every day - and we even prefer these messages because they let us be the victim of the cruel outside world, rather than understanding how our own complacency, ignorance, or greed has worsened situations. None of these articles place as much emphasis on the selling-off of our regulatory systems, the dismantling of election law, the homogenization of American thought in the televisual era, or the truly rampant epidemics of complacency, addiction, hedonism, and consumerism as possible catalysts behind a nation rapidly declining into total social schism.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- igor47 7y ago
  > Yeah, this is one tired trope. this sentiment is illustrative of the world that the internet has created. on the internet, you never have to deal with something that bores you -- you can always open a new tab and do something else. in the real world, unfortunately, the same old annoying stuff keeps coming up, and you have to keep dealing with it. like... i'm going to have to brush my teeth twice a day for the rest of my life, there will never come a time when i can just stop watching what i eat, and i'm going to have to keep dealing with the consequences of social media, including talking about it's effects, making choices about it, and convincing my friends and anyone who will listen to make choices about it, no matter how old and annoying it may have become. one thing that gives me energy on stuff like this (by stimulating my brain) is to use my imagination. what i mean is, it seems like we've talked this subject to death, but nothing's really changed so far. maybe a slight shift in public opinion, maybe people don't assume technology must be good quite so readily as before. but try to imagine what the world could look like. reality has this oppressive weight that restricts your thinking. "this is how the world is, so this is how it must be; in fact, this is good simply for existing. anyone who questions it doesn't get it.". it's much harder to imagine a counterfactual better world. for instance, what if instead of clumping into like-minded herds that re-enforce each other's ideas even when wrong, people on the internet connected with others who are really unlike them most of the time (maybe through something like airbnb)? or, what if there was a group/agency charged with maintaining factual accuracy on the internet (this idea comes from a novel called infomacracy). or, what if you could get people to connected better in real life (like the bash' in "too like the lightning"). imagining different worlds gives you a lens through which to critique the current one, and also gives you something to work towards.
  - scottlegrand2 7y ago
    I think one of the subtle problems here is all the pay walls on the more reputable news sites. Yes I know they need to make money but by closing themselves off to people unwilling to pay for their material, that increases the chance that sites like Twitter and Facebook become their only source of news. Nothing good comes from that. That's not blaming Facebook by the way.
ryukafalz 7y ago
>Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. On the whole, and in general, I agree. But I think it's worth digging in a bit deeper here. Technology can amplify the nature of its users, if it's designed to do so. The extent to which this will or won't happen, however, also depends on design decisions made by its creators, whether intentionally or not. Technology in the abstract may be a neutral force, but specific technologies in practice very much are not; its creators have an outsized influence on what ends up happening on the platform. (See Facebook's surfacing of posts in the News Feed by "engagement" for example.)
- rblion 7y ago
  I agree. I'm not a fan of Facebook at all for this reason. They have a sociopathic ethos, it's been that way from the start and will stay that way no matter how much PR spin they try to put out there. It's baked in at this point. What's concerning is how much reddit has gone downhill in the last few years. I used to swear by it but you can see how the Chinese investment in it has changed it. Also, the political atmosphere has made it very one-sided as a whole instead of balanced. I always think of 'E=mc^2' could be used to build a bomb or a reactor, it comes down to the intent and focus of the creator.
  - Loughla 7y ago
    >but you can see how the Chinese investment in it has changed it. How so? I use reddit (and as a side note am pissed that my username was already taken) daily and it hasn't really changed, in my estimation. What do you see that makes you say this?
fullshark 7y ago
It's on overcorrection to the naive optimism that surrounded the internet for 10+ years. I also think all these journalists have this dream that their story/essay is going to be the one that makes everyone come back to craving long form journalism / newsprint again which is even more naive.
human20190310 7y ago
> Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. Technology might be morally neutral, but since amplification can bring things to an unrecoverable limit, it isn't neutral in the sense of producing balanced outcomes. If we manage to cure cancer, and blow up the world, we're all still dead.
disease 7y ago
Having empathy also seems to be foundational in building a civilization that is successful over the long term. Unfortunately these days it seems it is viewed as weakness.
SuperFerret 7y ago
In principal you're right. People can also use technology to manipulate others. So we could create technology to encourage and manipulate being mindful and having empathy.
rorykoehler 7y ago
It does amplify our nature but the distribution is uneven.
undershirt 7y ago
> It is a neutral force. This is a common myth that ignores a century of philosophical thought[1] on the subtle interplay between technology and behavior. Good parts and bad parts—often unintended—but certainly not neutral: - Jacques Ellul insists that 'technique carries with it its own effects quite apart from how it is used... No matter how it is used, it has of itself a number of positive and negative consequences. This is not just a matter of intention' - Don Ihde, the philosopher, has argued that particular tools unavoidably select, amplify and reduce aspects of experience in various ways - Abbe Mowshowitz, a computer scientist, argues that 'tools insist on being used in particular ways' - Neil Postman insists that 'the printing press, the computer, and television are not therefore simply machines which convey information. They are metaphors through which we conceptualize reality in one way or another... we do not see the world as it is. We see it as our coding systems are.' [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190215155149/http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/tecdet/tdet08.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190215155149/http://visual-mem...
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  The UI/UX concept of "affordances" is an example where people understand the concept - a device may afford particular use, while discouraging a different use. That said, "technology" is a term that covers a lot of things, essentially creating a spectrum of neutrality. For instance, on a direct level, a gun affords killing and coercing with threats of violence. Second-order effects, however, involve complex implications on politics, society and economy. Still, you may declare it "mostly bad". But then let's look at its component - gunpowder, chemicals used in modern ammunition, or explosives in general. Are they force of bad? They don't afford killing as much. Then look at the theoretical chemistry and engineering knowledge around those substances. Those have as much if not more clearly benign applications as they have malicious ones. Similarly, targeted advertising on-line may be evil, cookies less so. TCP? Ethernet? Those are all "technologies".
amelius 7y ago
> Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. Being mindful and having empathy are not just good habits but foundational to being healthy and happy in the 21st century. But does technology amplify mindfulness and empathy? It seems to me that technology is a one-sided amplifier. It only amplifies the aspects that are, in the end, profitable for big companies.
- 0_gravitas 7y ago
  are we mindful and emphatic by nature?
  - groby_b 7y ago
    Most people, left to their own devices, yes - in the small. It gets problematic in the large.
    - goatlover 7y ago
      > Most people, left to their own devices, yes - in the small. As long as people are part of the same tribe. Plenty of small communities who aren't terribly empathetic to outsiders, minorities or foreigners.
  - Qwertystop 7y ago
    Some people are mindful and/or empathetic, and it's not inconceivable that more people would be if society/technology/whatever was more encouraging of it. "By nature" is not a useful qualifier here. Maybe it's nature, maybe it's nurture; either way, I for one think it would be better if more people were "mindful and empathetic", regardless of whether you attribute that gain to societal encouragement or the removal of societal discouragement.
dragontamer 7y ago
> Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. A nuclear bomb is just technology, and is very decidedly not a neutral force. EDIT: Another counter-example that they used all the time in my Ethics Engineering class was the low-hanging bridge, which served to segregate white-folk from black-folk in New York City. City Busses cannot pass a low-hanging bridge. So by carefully crafting neighborhoods surrounded by low-hanging bridges, you can prevent bus-traffic, and therefore African Americans from visiting certain neighborhoods. If you were a Civil Engineer and you were expected to build an anti-bus bridge today, should you, or should you not, build the bridge? This is a fundamental ethics question. As the engineer, your ethics are marked upon the products you make.
paggle 7y ago
> Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. No, that is not correct. The "gain" of the amplification is VERY unevenly distributed. For example, nuclear weapons only amplify the force of the biggest and most powerful countries. Outside of thermonuclear warfare, technologies like social media greatly advantage hucksters and propagandist over the calm and rational.
frgtpsswrdlame 7y ago
>Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. I don't think the second assertion follows from the first. This is a tech forum, right? What do we talk about all the time? "Scalability." Can this business scale up & can this tech scale up are eternal questions here and it's commonly understood that some techs don't scale and you'll have to change if growth continues. The same applies for many of the business models discussed here, no one bats an eye at a discussion involving a company where it jumpstarts growth with one strategy and then transitions to another strategy as it grows. But, but but! We come to humans and there seems to be a faith in our infinite scalability. And not just that we can scale infinitely but that we can do it without changing. That seems incorrect. Seen this way it's not just a question of how far we can push the 'mindfulness' and 'empathy' of humans but whether they will have to give way to other traits as we push them. How far they go, what they morph into, all of this plays into the value of the 'force' and maybe it is neutral, but it's far from a given.
cj 7y ago
Agreed. I think the fact that it comes up so frequently is a symptom of no one fixing the problem. (I don't mind these articles, because I think this topic should be constantly on the mind of anyone building consumer tech services - but maybe thinking that anything will happen as a result is wishful, I hope not)

by rblion 7y ago

joeyrideout 7y ago

I agree, with an elaboration from Marshall McLuhan's theory that technology is an extension of parts of the human body - cognition and memory extending our brain; communication extending our eyes, ears, and mouths; sexuality; transportation, consumption, and trade that used to be limited by walking distance, etc. It has simply extended "us" as humans.

rblion 7y ago
Accurate. People assume that more technology will fix everything but it will have to as much an 'inside job' too if we are too keep progressing as a civilization.
r4ltman 7y ago
you'll find this intersting, https://youtu.be/mq2mcwtyjEA https://youtu.be/mq2mcwtyjEA Peter Medwar said the most human thing about us is our technology. Civilization on the other hand is merely a by product of the phonetic (Phoenician) alphabet. The ability to translate (hoick) the acoustic (thought, dance, poems) into the visual (writing) etc

hasbroslasher 7y ago

Yeah, this is one tired trope. I'm especially bored of the "Facebook causes the rise of nationalism/fascism" rhetoric - I think it's pretty convenient to scapegoat the Zuck (who is an asshole, oblivious, naive, etc.) with something so complex and fueled by so many factors outside of the internet. "Russians made us do it because Facebook" is such a wonderful cop out because it means we can't really do anything to fix it, and it's totally not our fault. And we're addicted to such messages - that the terrorists hate our freedom, that poor people are just jealous losers, that scientists are moralizing assholes for telling us not to eat steak every day - and we even prefer these messages because they let us be the victim of the cruel outside world, rather than understanding how our own complacency, ignorance, or greed has worsened situations. None of these articles place as much emphasis on the selling-off of our regulatory systems, the dismantling of election law, the homogenization of American thought in the televisual era, or the truly rampant epidemics of complacency, addiction, hedonism, and consumerism as possible catalysts behind a nation rapidly declining into total social schism.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
igor47 7y ago
> Yeah, this is one tired trope. this sentiment is illustrative of the world that the internet has created. on the internet, you never have to deal with something that bores you -- you can always open a new tab and do something else. in the real world, unfortunately, the same old annoying stuff keeps coming up, and you have to keep dealing with it. like... i'm going to have to brush my teeth twice a day for the rest of my life, there will never come a time when i can just stop watching what i eat, and i'm going to have to keep dealing with the consequences of social media, including talking about it's effects, making choices about it, and convincing my friends and anyone who will listen to make choices about it, no matter how old and annoying it may have become. one thing that gives me energy on stuff like this (by stimulating my brain) is to use my imagination. what i mean is, it seems like we've talked this subject to death, but nothing's really changed so far. maybe a slight shift in public opinion, maybe people don't assume technology must be good quite so readily as before. but try to imagine what the world could look like. reality has this oppressive weight that restricts your thinking. "this is how the world is, so this is how it must be; in fact, this is good simply for existing. anyone who questions it doesn't get it.". it's much harder to imagine a counterfactual better world. for instance, what if instead of clumping into like-minded herds that re-enforce each other's ideas even when wrong, people on the internet connected with others who are really unlike them most of the time (maybe through something like airbnb)? or, what if there was a group/agency charged with maintaining factual accuracy on the internet (this idea comes from a novel called infomacracy). or, what if you could get people to connected better in real life (like the bash' in "too like the lightning"). imagining different worlds gives you a lens through which to critique the current one, and also gives you something to work towards.
- scottlegrand2 7y ago
  I think one of the subtle problems here is all the pay walls on the more reputable news sites. Yes I know they need to make money but by closing themselves off to people unwilling to pay for their material, that increases the chance that sites like Twitter and Facebook become their only source of news. Nothing good comes from that. That's not blaming Facebook by the way.

ryukafalz 7y ago

>Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. On the whole, and in general, I agree. But I think it's worth digging in a bit deeper here. Technology can amplify the nature of its users, if it's designed to do so. The extent to which this will or won't happen, however, also depends on design decisions made by its creators, whether intentionally or not. Technology in the abstract may be a neutral force, but specific technologies in practice very much are not; its creators have an outsized influence on what ends up happening on the platform. (See Facebook's surfacing of posts in the News Feed by "engagement" for example.)

rblion 7y ago
I agree. I'm not a fan of Facebook at all for this reason. They have a sociopathic ethos, it's been that way from the start and will stay that way no matter how much PR spin they try to put out there. It's baked in at this point. What's concerning is how much reddit has gone downhill in the last few years. I used to swear by it but you can see how the Chinese investment in it has changed it. Also, the political atmosphere has made it very one-sided as a whole instead of balanced. I always think of 'E=mc^2' could be used to build a bomb or a reactor, it comes down to the intent and focus of the creator.
- Loughla 7y ago
  >but you can see how the Chinese investment in it has changed it. How so? I use reddit (and as a side note am pissed that my username was already taken) daily and it hasn't really changed, in my estimation. What do you see that makes you say this?

fullshark 7y ago

It's on overcorrection to the naive optimism that surrounded the internet for 10+ years. I also think all these journalists have this dream that their story/essay is going to be the one that makes everyone come back to craving long form journalism / newsprint again which is even more naive.

human20190310 7y ago

> Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. Technology might be morally neutral, but since amplification can bring things to an unrecoverable limit, it isn't neutral in the sense of producing balanced outcomes. If we manage to cure cancer, and blow up the world, we're all still dead.

disease 7y ago

Having empathy also seems to be foundational in building a civilization that is successful over the long term. Unfortunately these days it seems it is viewed as weakness.

SuperFerret 7y ago

In principal you're right. People can also use technology to manipulate others. So we could create technology to encourage and manipulate being mindful and having empathy.

rorykoehler 7y ago

It does amplify our nature but the distribution is uneven.

undershirt 7y ago

> It is a neutral force. This is a common myth that ignores a century of philosophical thought[1] on the subtle interplay between technology and behavior. Good parts and bad parts—often unintended—but certainly not neutral: - Jacques Ellul insists that 'technique carries with it its own effects quite apart from how it is used... No matter how it is used, it has of itself a number of positive and negative consequences. This is not just a matter of intention' - Don Ihde, the philosopher, has argued that particular tools unavoidably select, amplify and reduce aspects of experience in various ways - Abbe Mowshowitz, a computer scientist, argues that 'tools insist on being used in particular ways' - Neil Postman insists that 'the printing press, the computer, and television are not therefore simply machines which convey information. They are metaphors through which we conceptualize reality in one way or another... we do not see the world as it is. We see it as our coding systems are.' [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190215155149/http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/tecdet/tdet08.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190215155149/http://visual-mem...

TeMPOraL 7y ago
The UI/UX concept of "affordances" is an example where people understand the concept - a device may afford particular use, while discouraging a different use. That said, "technology" is a term that covers a lot of things, essentially creating a spectrum of neutrality. For instance, on a direct level, a gun affords killing and coercing with threats of violence. Second-order effects, however, involve complex implications on politics, society and economy. Still, you may declare it "mostly bad". But then let's look at its component - gunpowder, chemicals used in modern ammunition, or explosives in general. Are they force of bad? They don't afford killing as much. Then look at the theoretical chemistry and engineering knowledge around those substances. Those have as much if not more clearly benign applications as they have malicious ones. Similarly, targeted advertising on-line may be evil, cookies less so. TCP? Ethernet? Those are all "technologies".

amelius 7y ago

> Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. Being mindful and having empathy are not just good habits but foundational to being healthy and happy in the 21st century. But does technology amplify mindfulness and empathy? It seems to me that technology is a one-sided amplifier. It only amplifies the aspects that are, in the end, profitable for big companies.

0_gravitas 7y ago
are we mindful and emphatic by nature?
- groby_b 7y ago
  Most people, left to their own devices, yes - in the small. It gets problematic in the large.
  - goatlover 7y ago
    > Most people, left to their own devices, yes - in the small. As long as people are part of the same tribe. Plenty of small communities who aren't terribly empathetic to outsiders, minorities or foreigners.
- Qwertystop 7y ago
  Some people are mindful and/or empathetic, and it's not inconceivable that more people would be if society/technology/whatever was more encouraging of it. "By nature" is not a useful qualifier here. Maybe it's nature, maybe it's nurture; either way, I for one think it would be better if more people were "mindful and empathetic", regardless of whether you attribute that gain to societal encouragement or the removal of societal discouragement.

dragontamer 7y ago

> Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. A nuclear bomb is just technology, and is very decidedly not a neutral force. EDIT: Another counter-example that they used all the time in my Ethics Engineering class was the low-hanging bridge, which served to segregate white-folk from black-folk in New York City. City Busses cannot pass a low-hanging bridge. So by carefully crafting neighborhoods surrounded by low-hanging bridges, you can prevent bus-traffic, and therefore African Americans from visiting certain neighborhoods. If you were a Civil Engineer and you were expected to build an anti-bus bridge today, should you, or should you not, build the bridge? This is a fundamental ethics question. As the engineer, your ethics are marked upon the products you make.

paggle 7y ago

> Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. No, that is not correct. The "gain" of the amplification is VERY unevenly distributed. For example, nuclear weapons only amplify the force of the biggest and most powerful countries. Outside of thermonuclear warfare, technologies like social media greatly advantage hucksters and propagandist over the calm and rational.

frgtpsswrdlame 7y ago

>Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. I don't think the second assertion follows from the first. This is a tech forum, right? What do we talk about all the time? "Scalability." Can this business scale up & can this tech scale up are eternal questions here and it's commonly understood that some techs don't scale and you'll have to change if growth continues. The same applies for many of the business models discussed here, no one bats an eye at a discussion involving a company where it jumpstarts growth with one strategy and then transitions to another strategy as it grows. But, but but! We come to humans and there seems to be a faith in our infinite scalability. And not just that we can scale infinitely but that we can do it without changing. That seems incorrect. Seen this way it's not just a question of how far we can push the 'mindfulness' and 'empathy' of humans but whether they will have to give way to other traits as we push them. How far they go, what they morph into, all of this plays into the value of the 'force' and maybe it is neutral, but it's far from a given.

cj 7y ago

Agreed. I think the fact that it comes up so frequently is a symptom of no one fixing the problem. (I don't mind these articles, because I think this topic should be constantly on the mind of anyone building consumer tech services - but maybe thinking that anything will happen as a result is wishful, I hope not)