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By this definition, making anything that CAN be used for surveillance is normalizing surveillance. I'm tired of this stupid debate and the way its framed. Ove

By this definition, making anything that CAN be used for surveillance is normalizing surveillance. I'm tired of this stupid debate and the way its framed. Over the last decade we have made absolutely incredible leaps in technology by any standard. By nature all new technology comes with the potential to do both good and bad, and usually it does a bit of both. But making technology on its own is not a bad thing. Lying about it and/or actively ignoring the impact it has on society the way Google and Facebook did is. Conflating technology itself with shitty morals is dumb. When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked. It has nothing to do with technology. Go look at the salary threads here or discords full of new grads gaming out total compensations in excruciating detail instead of even considering for a second what impact the company has on the world. They have been taught nothing but capitalism, they know nothing but chase money. Some of them will not flinch in doing the same shit again at some other company 10 years down the line. Even speaking about morality is preaching, old-fashioned, religious, uncool, and dumb now so what do you expect. The best answer the media converged on last time was "hire more humanities students/ teach engineers more literature" as if anyone needs a college course to be taught that lying is wrong.

azangru 5y ago
> When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked Some people will maximize the $$$ in any society. It's how to make the strive for the $$$ the most beneficial and the least destructive that is the challenge.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Simple solution - make being rich a crime punishable by death. It worked pretty well for 18th century France.
fundad 5y ago
Warby Parker normalizes surveillance and who makes pencils? Them too.
smoldesu 5y ago
The issue is that Apple has no accountability, unlike Google and Facebook. The only people supposed to keep Apple in line (the SEC and other three-letter agencies) have a mutual interest in maintaining an Apple monopoly. Plus, it's not like Apple's been caught lying before. Remember when they had to take down their M1 graphs because they were so obviously deceptive? Or how about that time when they said 'political slave labor is not used to build iPhones!' and then we found out that political slave labor is used to build iPhones? Unless Apple adopts some form of transparency, I don't think I have the capability of trusting them. I agree though, I'm tired of this arguement too which is why I'd really appreciate if Apple gave us something other than a whitepaper of how things should work with no way for security researchers or the common person to verify if that's actually true.
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  Accountability does not work when society as a whole loses its moral compass. The people who were supposed to keep Google/FB accountable were negligent or complicit for a decade. You may say slave labor is wrong but will you pay $500 more for an iPhone? Most people won't. They will point the finger at Apple while shopping for the cheapest deal on Amazon produced by yet more slave labor in China. Anything to avoid taking on personal responsibility and score a few more $$ for the retirement account. Only widespread personal responsibility works, but it can only arise within a culture that respects and rewards those who take it on and judges people a little more broadly than "success" and $$$.
  - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    Where is the option for me to spend $500 more for this ethically manufactured iPhone? Or even just one manufactured in the USA?
    - gruez 5y ago
      Fairphone?
      - 5y ago
amelius 5y ago
> By nature all new technology comes with the potential to do both good and bad, and usually it does a bit of both. But technology can be made without doing bad, see Librem or Pine64. If you subtract Librem from Apple, what you're left with is anti-consumer surveillance stuff.
- Vinnl 5y ago
  Well, until you get into conflict minerals, depletion of natural resources, environmental pollution, exploitation of workers, ... (None of that is specific to Librem/Purism or Pine64, but mostly applies to the tech industry at large, of course.)
  - fsflover 5y ago
    The resources problem is worse with Apple, since they strongly hinder repair/reuse of their devies.
  - stinos 5y ago
    I honestly think even those can be made better, if the will is there to do so. At a cost, of course, which is the main problem.
    - inkblotuniverse 5y ago
      In the long run, it becomes profitable to dig up landfills and recycle everything (see aluminium cans). Eventually, they'll dig up landfills to recover the old materials.
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
Over the last decade we have made absolutely incredible leaps in technology by any standard. I don't think things are really that much different now compared to late 2011. At least not different enough to be considered an "absolutely incredible leap"
- curioushacking 5y ago
  I think it may be hard to see technology changes in the moment, but over the last decade alone I think we've had a number of large changes that are starting to be taken for granted. We have the proliferation of electric vehicles and (at least in the US) a large charging network. There is also a massive difference in the wearable markets. The watches are getting so good that health monitoring and early warning signs are either already here or on the horizon. Cell phones are significantly better. A decade ago a video call would be a novelty and now it is done without a second thought. We finally have the futuristic edge to edge screens and foldables are now on the market. There are others but they may not fall into the technology that we interact with daily. Things such as the drug technology used to make the covid vaccine. There are also changes in ML with the significant improvements in deep learning and model training. I'm not sure if any of those count as an incredible leap, I think each one was developed incrementally, but when looking over the course of a decade it feels like a large leap to me.
  - f6v 5y ago
    Changing a feature phone for smartphone with two cameras(front and back), internet, and general computing capacity was a leap(circa 2009). Having a better camera, faster CPU, bigger screen - doesn’t feel like much. I haven’t had a desire to get a new one in half a decade(I’d keep my iPhone 7 if it wasn’t suffocating thanks to megabytes for JS on every page).
- headShrinker 5y ago
  Good technology is transparent. If advancements are done right, you would notice much difference. The truth is, not that much was different between 2000 and 2010 or 1990 and 2000. But 2010 and 2020? This last decade has marked such massive improvements in ways we aren't noticing, and in things we aren't using. Everything from cameras with resolutions and ISOs that are off the charts, OLED, LiPo Battery density, robotics with walking and flight, guidance, wireless transmission and encoding/decoding, Machine learning in everything including your phone, and our phones... they are amazing pieces of kit. Oh, reusable rockets that land themselves! Cars that literally drive themselves. Spot, the robot dog? Right in my office right now, ultra-thin laptops, compact high quality microphones, headphones with unbelievable noise-canceling, 3-axis gimbals, 10-bit n-log external recorders, wireless solar powered remote security cameras, drones with amazing stabilized video quality that you used to need a helicopter to shoot, and on and on and on. The last decade has been insane, turning future dream tech in to Walmart black-friday super sale items. You may not appreciate or even notice the tech advancements in the last 10 years but they have been monstrous compared to any other decade.
lallysingh 5y ago
Agreed. The article is a giant stretch of logic from the start. There's this at the bottom, though, that I think is worth reading: > All tech giants share a desire to digitise the world. What is left unsaid by Apple and others is that digitising the world entails surveilling it: recording everything, making it taggable, trackable, searchable – and hackable. Of course, asking tech companies not to digitise the world is like asking builders not to pave over natural areas. Unless society sets limits, that is not going to happen. That’s why governments create protected areas when it comes to building.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  That last sentence is key. Of course governments are concerned, Big Tech is nudging gov out of the way. BT is becoming the collecting and controlling force. I'm not suggesting one is better or worse than the other. But there is a subplot, and it's about control.
boringg 5y ago
Capitalism is what got us to where we are today. It is a powerful form to deploy resources in a country. Is it abused in its current form? Yes. Laying the blame to all the woes on a generation of humanity at the feet of capitalism is a lazy argument at best. I would argue that we shouldn't destroy the capital system but deploy it in a more equitable way. Also your comment strikes me as someone who doesn't actually engage with anyone under 30 in any real world way but only what is written on the internet. That would create a bias because all the people who might want to talk online to game out their compensation is probably a specific subset of individuals who would reinforce your worldview. Society is made up of many people and it isn't built by select few. I suggest you reach out to different communities and find people who aren't as jaded as this rant post or offer a way put your energy into engaging and changing the trajectory of society towards where your values lie. Change takes work instead of arm chair quarterbacking a straw man.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > I would argue that we shouldn't destroy the capital system but deploy it in a more equitable way. So you actually do want to destroy the capitalist system.
  - boringg 5y ago
    No thats not destroying the capitalist system thats using the levers of the system to redistribute within the system structure. This would allow us to take better care of those who are left behind.
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  I am stating the truth as I see it, that's all. It's not some ideological screed against capitalism, it is literally just me describing reality. Reality does have sucky parts and I try to see them as clearly as I see the good parts. Some people call it "ranting", i just call it seeing clearly. It doesn't mean I have a solution to the problem I described, or that I don't engage with the real world. It literally just means I do so while making an attempt to see things as clearly and truthfully as possible. I don't want to get into the tired old debate of "capitalism good or capitalism bad", it is simply too narrow a lens to view everything through. In my view, the problem isn't even about capitalism, its just a manifestation of some of the uglier sides of human nature and competition for social status in the face of actual resource constraints in the world that mean we have to compete for who gets how many resources. Of course the root problems exist no matter what economic system we use.
LurkingPenguin 5y ago
> But making technology on its own is not a bad thing. Lying about it and/or actively ignoring the impact it has on society the way Google and Facebook did is. Conflating technology itself with shitty morals is dumb. Even if you believe that Apple is somehow different from Google and Facebook, I think you're missing a key part of the argument made in the article: the technology not only can be used for unethical purposes, it almost certainly will be. Apple itself doesn't need to be evil. The technology it's pushing is inherently vulnerable and given the value of what it enables to bad actors, will almost inevitably be hijacked for nefarious purposes eventually. Pretending that your technology isn't vulnerable and imminently capable of causing great harm to people is indeed unethical. > When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked. It has nothing to do with technology. Have you ever considered that technology has played and is playing a key role in the development of our money and fame-obsessed society? Money and fame have existed in some form for millennia, but thanks to the web and social media, for example, people are now bombarded with a previously unfathomable amount of media that glamorizes it in ways never before possible. This exposure now starts at a very early age and therefore almost certainly shapes how children relate to money, fame, their impressions of themselves, etc.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
> When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked. It has nothing to do with technology. Money and fame are self-propagating, you're able to sell more products with fame and make more money with money. Kindness, sincerity, and moral virtues are better than their absence, I agree, but being kind to one person doesn't have the capability of exponential growth, you can't expect that the one act of kindness will allow you later to be kind to 100, then 10,000, then 1,000,000 people. Technology is a blessing and a curse, it's a Pandora's box that allows scalable ideas to scale to previously unimaginable levels. There was an article here yesterday about how WhatsApp scaled to 1 billion users with just 50 engineers. That kind of action - and its effects on society - would not be possible without technology.
- joedevon 5y ago
  If you build digital products that serve millions or billions of people, you can scale kindness. One easy change is to spend a bit of time learning about accessibility and incorporating it into your work.
- skrebbel 5y ago
  "But kindness doesn't scale!"
  - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    I'm not proposing that as a reason for taking an action; it's nothing like a justification for greed or cruelty. Instead, I'm proposing that as an explanation for the shape of the world as we observe it. Technology, capitalism, and human nature combine to make actors who prioritize money more powerful and visible than those who prioritize kindness. Likewise, I believe that dishonest, wealthy, power-hungry sociopaths make poor political leaders, and yet we seem to elect a lot of those. Power and morality are not well correlated - they might be orthagonal to each other, or even inversely correlated!
todd3834 5y ago
Assuming that everyone who wants to maximize their income is a brainwashed capitalist drone is a mistake. There are many reasons why someone might want to maximize their income. Learning techniques and collecting information from your peer group is not immoral. Several people I know want to make as much money as they can so that they can pay off their house and have enough reserve cash to dedicate the rest of their lives to making an impact where money doesn’t matter to them anymore. Others have massive student loans and the pressure to get out of that debt is enormous. Also, to suggest these companies are not making an impact on the world is insane. We are talking about companies like Apple and Google and yes… Facebook. Sure, they are not perfect moral companies but they have made massive impacts on the world.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  Yes, there is massive downside to not maximizing for money to some extent. It can make the difference between being able to retire while one still has some fragment of youth or not, as well as determine whether you’re just keeping your head above water month to month or are solidly in the black. If you have kids and a significant other, this becomes even more true as you then want to ensure their comfort and wellbeing as well. It’s less that morality isn’t taught in college and more that the system is structured such that those who don’t do the song and dance lose out big time. No that’s not great, but it’s no fault of the majority of individuals. The system itself needs to be changed. Make sure that people don’t have to work the majority of their waking lives just to have a chance of getting ahead and morality will become a more practical consideration.
whimsicalism 5y ago
> anyone needs a college course to be taught that lying is wrong. I think the moral issues around a lot of tech is more than just "lying is bad" - to conflate it to that means that subtler moral issues will go unnoticed. What are the moral issues people have with advertising? Is it that lying is wrong? No, I don't think so. What are the moral issues people have around the rentier structure of modern "App stores"? Likewise, it's not just about lying. I also can't tell if your comment is suggesting that this moral breakdown is a break from the old, or a continuation. Most of the historical evidence seems indicative of a continuation.
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  Call me crazy but I don't believe everything is best taught directly like just crank out a college course. Ethics is one such subject. If you are truly interested in ethics, you can learn about it everywhere - in the news, on TV shows and movies, in novels, watching your friends and just reflecting on all that you see. If not, you can see all the same things without learning anything about ethics. Developing a sense of ethics is a natural by product of being constantly thoughtful and reflective about how your actions impact the world. It's the sort of thing you learn implicitly from your parents & peers & what gets rewarded in the world. In more concrete terms, honoring those who do good and punishing those who don't is a pretty good way to "teach" ethics. Ethics are more a matter of enforcement than teaching maybe.
rangerdan 5y ago
> By this definition, making anything that CAN be used for surveillance is normalizing surveillance. What a dumb argument. So cameras I use to take pictures of flowers normalize surveillance? Stop defending the Church of Apple - you sound like a brainwashed cult member.
skrebbel 5y ago
This has got to be the best rant I've seen on HN in a long time.
cudgy 5y ago
The last decade has produced very few significant technological jumps in my opinion. Electric vehicles have been around for over a century and the iterations on devices has been largely targeted toward better cameras so people can take selfies to post on the ubiquitous social networks. The mRNA technology is interesting but unproven as we are seeing with the relative ineffectiveness of the Covid vaccines. Software technology has been largely focused on new iterations of web frameworks and languages that target the young developers du jour who think that 5 year old frameworks are old school. Mainly, small iterations of the same stuff is what has been dominating the technology space the last decade. My guess is that we are poised for some interesting new technologies, since it has been a largely ho-hum period for the last decade. If only the efforts could be focused more toward actually making our lives better instead of focusing only on scraping our lives and diverting our eyes for the benefit of mega tech corporations and their wannabe startups.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> making anything that CAN be used for surveillance is normalizing surveillance It is. Anything that can be abused will be abused, especially by governments. Companies rolling out clearly problematic technology adds legitimacy to them, it makes them normal. > They have been taught nothing but capitalism, they know nothing but chase money. Nobody is "taught" capitalism, it is imposed on them. We want to live comfortable, happy lives. We want to have influence in this world. It's not like some trillionaire is gonna come to me and just give me all that.
travisparker 5y ago
Well, in regard to your opening point, anything that CAN be used for surveillance WILL be used for surveillance.
ben_palaskas 5y ago
This is the most based thing I have ever seen on hacker news. The lack of nuance ( or in the other direction, the lack of genuine consideration in general ) around the moral/spiritual implications of technology in the last hundred years or so is truly sad. Very grateful that this is top comment
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  Thank you, it is an honor to be called based :) Usually people just call it like "hey you're kinda weird you must have aspergers or be a sociopath" (except they don't even call it that, they just think it and i have to guess).

azangru 5y ago

> When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked Some people will maximize the $$$ in any society. It's how to make the strive for the $$$ the most beneficial and the least destructive that is the challenge.

onion2k 5y ago
Simple solution - make being rich a crime punishable by death. It worked pretty well for 18th century France.

fundad 5y ago

Warby Parker normalizes surveillance and who makes pencils? Them too.

smoldesu 5y ago

The issue is that Apple has no accountability, unlike Google and Facebook. The only people supposed to keep Apple in line (the SEC and other three-letter agencies) have a mutual interest in maintaining an Apple monopoly. Plus, it's not like Apple's been caught lying before. Remember when they had to take down their M1 graphs because they were so obviously deceptive? Or how about that time when they said 'political slave labor is not used to build iPhones!' and then we found out that political slave labor is used to build iPhones? Unless Apple adopts some form of transparency, I don't think I have the capability of trusting them. I agree though, I'm tired of this arguement too which is why I'd really appreciate if Apple gave us something other than a whitepaper of how things should work with no way for security researchers or the common person to verify if that's actually true.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago
Accountability does not work when society as a whole loses its moral compass. The people who were supposed to keep Google/FB accountable were negligent or complicit for a decade. You may say slave labor is wrong but will you pay $500 more for an iPhone? Most people won't. They will point the finger at Apple while shopping for the cheapest deal on Amazon produced by yet more slave labor in China. Anything to avoid taking on personal responsibility and score a few more $$ for the retirement account. Only widespread personal responsibility works, but it can only arise within a culture that respects and rewards those who take it on and judges people a little more broadly than "success" and $$$.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  Where is the option for me to spend $500 more for this ethically manufactured iPhone? Or even just one manufactured in the USA?
  - gruez 5y ago
    Fairphone?
    - 5y ago

amelius 5y ago

> By nature all new technology comes with the potential to do both good and bad, and usually it does a bit of both. But technology can be made without doing bad, see Librem or Pine64. If you subtract Librem from Apple, what you're left with is anti-consumer surveillance stuff.

Vinnl 5y ago
Well, until you get into conflict minerals, depletion of natural resources, environmental pollution, exploitation of workers, ... (None of that is specific to Librem/Purism or Pine64, but mostly applies to the tech industry at large, of course.)
- fsflover 5y ago
  The resources problem is worse with Apple, since they strongly hinder repair/reuse of their devies.
- stinos 5y ago
  I honestly think even those can be made better, if the will is there to do so. At a cost, of course, which is the main problem.
  - inkblotuniverse 5y ago
    In the long run, it becomes profitable to dig up landfills and recycle everything (see aluminium cans). Eventually, they'll dig up landfills to recover the old materials.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

Over the last decade we have made absolutely incredible leaps in technology by any standard. I don't think things are really that much different now compared to late 2011. At least not different enough to be considered an "absolutely incredible leap"

curioushacking 5y ago
I think it may be hard to see technology changes in the moment, but over the last decade alone I think we've had a number of large changes that are starting to be taken for granted. We have the proliferation of electric vehicles and (at least in the US) a large charging network. There is also a massive difference in the wearable markets. The watches are getting so good that health monitoring and early warning signs are either already here or on the horizon. Cell phones are significantly better. A decade ago a video call would be a novelty and now it is done without a second thought. We finally have the futuristic edge to edge screens and foldables are now on the market. There are others but they may not fall into the technology that we interact with daily. Things such as the drug technology used to make the covid vaccine. There are also changes in ML with the significant improvements in deep learning and model training. I'm not sure if any of those count as an incredible leap, I think each one was developed incrementally, but when looking over the course of a decade it feels like a large leap to me.
- f6v 5y ago
  Changing a feature phone for smartphone with two cameras(front and back), internet, and general computing capacity was a leap(circa 2009). Having a better camera, faster CPU, bigger screen - doesn’t feel like much. I haven’t had a desire to get a new one in half a decade(I’d keep my iPhone 7 if it wasn’t suffocating thanks to megabytes for JS on every page).
headShrinker 5y ago
Good technology is transparent. If advancements are done right, you would notice much difference. The truth is, not that much was different between 2000 and 2010 or 1990 and 2000. But 2010 and 2020? This last decade has marked such massive improvements in ways we aren't noticing, and in things we aren't using. Everything from cameras with resolutions and ISOs that are off the charts, OLED, LiPo Battery density, robotics with walking and flight, guidance, wireless transmission and encoding/decoding, Machine learning in everything including your phone, and our phones... they are amazing pieces of kit. Oh, reusable rockets that land themselves! Cars that literally drive themselves. Spot, the robot dog? Right in my office right now, ultra-thin laptops, compact high quality microphones, headphones with unbelievable noise-canceling, 3-axis gimbals, 10-bit n-log external recorders, wireless solar powered remote security cameras, drones with amazing stabilized video quality that you used to need a helicopter to shoot, and on and on and on. The last decade has been insane, turning future dream tech in to Walmart black-friday super sale items. You may not appreciate or even notice the tech advancements in the last 10 years but they have been monstrous compared to any other decade.

lallysingh 5y ago

Agreed. The article is a giant stretch of logic from the start. There's this at the bottom, though, that I think is worth reading: > All tech giants share a desire to digitise the world. What is left unsaid by Apple and others is that digitising the world entails surveilling it: recording everything, making it taggable, trackable, searchable – and hackable. Of course, asking tech companies not to digitise the world is like asking builders not to pave over natural areas. Unless society sets limits, that is not going to happen. That’s why governments create protected areas when it comes to building.

chiefalchemist 5y ago
That last sentence is key. Of course governments are concerned, Big Tech is nudging gov out of the way. BT is becoming the collecting and controlling force. I'm not suggesting one is better or worse than the other. But there is a subplot, and it's about control.

boringg 5y ago

Capitalism is what got us to where we are today. It is a powerful form to deploy resources in a country. Is it abused in its current form? Yes. Laying the blame to all the woes on a generation of humanity at the feet of capitalism is a lazy argument at best. I would argue that we shouldn't destroy the capital system but deploy it in a more equitable way. Also your comment strikes me as someone who doesn't actually engage with anyone under 30 in any real world way but only what is written on the internet. That would create a bias because all the people who might want to talk online to game out their compensation is probably a specific subset of individuals who would reinforce your worldview. Society is made up of many people and it isn't built by select few. I suggest you reach out to different communities and find people who aren't as jaded as this rant post or offer a way put your energy into engaging and changing the trajectory of society towards where your values lie. Change takes work instead of arm chair quarterbacking a straw man.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> I would argue that we shouldn't destroy the capital system but deploy it in a more equitable way. So you actually do want to destroy the capitalist system.
- boringg 5y ago
  No thats not destroying the capitalist system thats using the levers of the system to redistribute within the system structure. This would allow us to take better care of those who are left behind.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
I am stating the truth as I see it, that's all. It's not some ideological screed against capitalism, it is literally just me describing reality. Reality does have sucky parts and I try to see them as clearly as I see the good parts. Some people call it "ranting", i just call it seeing clearly. It doesn't mean I have a solution to the problem I described, or that I don't engage with the real world. It literally just means I do so while making an attempt to see things as clearly and truthfully as possible. I don't want to get into the tired old debate of "capitalism good or capitalism bad", it is simply too narrow a lens to view everything through. In my view, the problem isn't even about capitalism, its just a manifestation of some of the uglier sides of human nature and competition for social status in the face of actual resource constraints in the world that mean we have to compete for who gets how many resources. Of course the root problems exist no matter what economic system we use.

LurkingPenguin 5y ago

> But making technology on its own is not a bad thing. Lying about it and/or actively ignoring the impact it has on society the way Google and Facebook did is. Conflating technology itself with shitty morals is dumb. Even if you believe that Apple is somehow different from Google and Facebook, I think you're missing a key part of the argument made in the article: the technology not only can be used for unethical purposes, it almost certainly will be. Apple itself doesn't need to be evil. The technology it's pushing is inherently vulnerable and given the value of what it enables to bad actors, will almost inevitably be hijacked for nefarious purposes eventually. Pretending that your technology isn't vulnerable and imminently capable of causing great harm to people is indeed unethical. > When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked. It has nothing to do with technology. Have you ever considered that technology has played and is playing a key role in the development of our money and fame-obsessed society? Money and fame have existed in some form for millennia, but thanks to the web and social media, for example, people are now bombarded with a previously unfathomable amount of media that glamorizes it in ways never before possible. This exposure now starts at a very early age and therefore almost certainly shapes how children relate to money, fame, their impressions of themselves, etc.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago

> When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked. It has nothing to do with technology. Money and fame are self-propagating, you're able to sell more products with fame and make more money with money. Kindness, sincerity, and moral virtues are better than their absence, I agree, but being kind to one person doesn't have the capability of exponential growth, you can't expect that the one act of kindness will allow you later to be kind to 100, then 10,000, then 1,000,000 people. Technology is a blessing and a curse, it's a Pandora's box that allows scalable ideas to scale to previously unimaginable levels. There was an article here yesterday about how WhatsApp scaled to 1 billion users with just 50 engineers. That kind of action - and its effects on society - would not be possible without technology.

joedevon 5y ago
If you build digital products that serve millions or billions of people, you can scale kindness. One easy change is to spend a bit of time learning about accessibility and incorporating it into your work.
skrebbel 5y ago
"But kindness doesn't scale!"
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  I'm not proposing that as a reason for taking an action; it's nothing like a justification for greed or cruelty. Instead, I'm proposing that as an explanation for the shape of the world as we observe it. Technology, capitalism, and human nature combine to make actors who prioritize money more powerful and visible than those who prioritize kindness. Likewise, I believe that dishonest, wealthy, power-hungry sociopaths make poor political leaders, and yet we seem to elect a lot of those. Power and morality are not well correlated - they might be orthagonal to each other, or even inversely correlated!

todd3834 5y ago

Assuming that everyone who wants to maximize their income is a brainwashed capitalist drone is a mistake. There are many reasons why someone might want to maximize their income. Learning techniques and collecting information from your peer group is not immoral. Several people I know want to make as much money as they can so that they can pay off their house and have enough reserve cash to dedicate the rest of their lives to making an impact where money doesn’t matter to them anymore. Others have massive student loans and the pressure to get out of that debt is enormous. Also, to suggest these companies are not making an impact on the world is insane. We are talking about companies like Apple and Google and yes… Facebook. Sure, they are not perfect moral companies but they have made massive impacts on the world.

kitsunesoba 5y ago
Yes, there is massive downside to not maximizing for money to some extent. It can make the difference between being able to retire while one still has some fragment of youth or not, as well as determine whether you’re just keeping your head above water month to month or are solidly in the black. If you have kids and a significant other, this becomes even more true as you then want to ensure their comfort and wellbeing as well. It’s less that morality isn’t taught in college and more that the system is structured such that those who don’t do the song and dance lose out big time. No that’s not great, but it’s no fault of the majority of individuals. The system itself needs to be changed. Make sure that people don’t have to work the majority of their waking lives just to have a chance of getting ahead and morality will become a more practical consideration.

whimsicalism 5y ago

> anyone needs a college course to be taught that lying is wrong. I think the moral issues around a lot of tech is more than just "lying is bad" - to conflate it to that means that subtler moral issues will go unnoticed. What are the moral issues people have with advertising? Is it that lying is wrong? No, I don't think so. What are the moral issues people have around the rentier structure of modern "App stores"? Likewise, it's not just about lying. I also can't tell if your comment is suggesting that this moral breakdown is a break from the old, or a continuation. Most of the historical evidence seems indicative of a continuation.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago
Call me crazy but I don't believe everything is best taught directly like just crank out a college course. Ethics is one such subject. If you are truly interested in ethics, you can learn about it everywhere - in the news, on TV shows and movies, in novels, watching your friends and just reflecting on all that you see. If not, you can see all the same things without learning anything about ethics. Developing a sense of ethics is a natural by product of being constantly thoughtful and reflective about how your actions impact the world. It's the sort of thing you learn implicitly from your parents & peers & what gets rewarded in the world. In more concrete terms, honoring those who do good and punishing those who don't is a pretty good way to "teach" ethics. Ethics are more a matter of enforcement than teaching maybe.

rangerdan 5y ago

> By this definition, making anything that CAN be used for surveillance is normalizing surveillance. What a dumb argument. So cameras I use to take pictures of flowers normalize surveillance? Stop defending the Church of Apple - you sound like a brainwashed cult member.

skrebbel 5y ago

This has got to be the best rant I've seen on HN in a long time.

cudgy 5y ago

The last decade has produced very few significant technological jumps in my opinion. Electric vehicles have been around for over a century and the iterations on devices has been largely targeted toward better cameras so people can take selfies to post on the ubiquitous social networks. The mRNA technology is interesting but unproven as we are seeing with the relative ineffectiveness of the Covid vaccines. Software technology has been largely focused on new iterations of web frameworks and languages that target the young developers du jour who think that 5 year old frameworks are old school. Mainly, small iterations of the same stuff is what has been dominating the technology space the last decade. My guess is that we are poised for some interesting new technologies, since it has been a largely ho-hum period for the last decade. If only the efforts could be focused more toward actually making our lives better instead of focusing only on scraping our lives and diverting our eyes for the benefit of mega tech corporations and their wannabe startups.

deleted 5y ago

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matheusmoreira 5y ago

> making anything that CAN be used for surveillance is normalizing surveillance It is. Anything that can be abused will be abused, especially by governments. Companies rolling out clearly problematic technology adds legitimacy to them, it makes them normal. > They have been taught nothing but capitalism, they know nothing but chase money. Nobody is "taught" capitalism, it is imposed on them. We want to live comfortable, happy lives. We want to have influence in this world. It's not like some trillionaire is gonna come to me and just give me all that.

travisparker 5y ago

Well, in regard to your opening point, anything that CAN be used for surveillance WILL be used for surveillance.

ben_palaskas 5y ago

This is the most based thing I have ever seen on hacker news. The lack of nuance ( or in the other direction, the lack of genuine consideration in general ) around the moral/spiritual implications of technology in the last hundred years or so is truly sad. Very grateful that this is top comment

zaptheimpaler 5y ago
Thank you, it is an honor to be called based :) Usually people just call it like "hey you're kinda weird you must have aspergers or be a sociopath" (except they don't even call it that, they just think it and i have to guess).