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The main problem with technology in the past (~2) decades, aka modern technology, is that it has been virtually all developed under the business model of advert

by ouid 4y ago

The main problem with technology in the past (~2) decades, aka modern technology, is that it has been virtually all developed under the business model of advertising. I don't care how much of your income comes from advertising, you should be alarmed that so much of the world runs on the ability to efficiently and effectively manipulate people for money. Advertising, and especially the technological improvements to advertising, are a threat. If you are of reasonable intelligence, trying to ignore this threat, or write it off as funding "a lot of good things", will cause cognitive dissonance and you will find yourself feeling "like a crotchety old man" in the face of new technology, even if you are not honest with yourself as to why. I think Doug was reasonably self-aware, and would probably write, today, about how his wisdom about technophobia did not age well.

6510 4y ago
Well put. I would add that successfully targeting groups of people forces technology to serve that group. There as many groups to target as categorically excluded. The target audience of technology is distorted all over the landscape with as much fine detail as there are targeting formulas. Now that we are getting to the era of maximized add revenue there is no more need for social engagement on facebook or for search results on google. Things are changing into pure manipulation now. It is like radio first gave people new songs to sing but then they forgot all of their own songs. Every village and every porch had its own songs. The winning implementation of technology seems to depend much more on how much noise it makes vs how sensible it is. With each upgrade we can move further away from the sensible. If a husky can run 40 miles, if we have fine batteries and fine electric motors, why should we not do our commute with hybrid carts partially pulled by dogs? We have quite reasonable small gen sets, pedal vehicles, at times there is sunlight and there is wind to use? There are so many possible combinations of those 6, how do we tell they are not viable with Musk holding the megaphone? With the complexity of combining those it would take quite a bit of time and effort to perfect. The TV was the ultimate opportunity to bring 1000 channels of education to the masses. We could have done reasonable tests and examination over the phone long ago. But if you can extract money from the TV audience and have people pay rent for phone lines - why bother? We could have spend those hundreds million movie budgets on nice courses which would have given us a huge spectrum of employability with much higher wages AND a much more sophisticated voter. I don't expect the manipulation industry to stop any time soon. With the AI generated imaging it is more likely to reach an ultimate form where those who desire it can directly write desires into people.

by ouid 4y ago

6510 4y ago

Well put. I would add that successfully targeting groups of people forces technology to serve that group. There as many groups to target as categorically excluded. The target audience of technology is distorted all over the landscape with as much fine detail as there are targeting formulas. Now that we are getting to the era of maximized add revenue there is no more need for social engagement on facebook or for search results on google. Things are changing into pure manipulation now. It is like radio first gave people new songs to sing but then they forgot all of their own songs. Every village and every porch had its own songs. The winning implementation of technology seems to depend much more on how much noise it makes vs how sensible it is. With each upgrade we can move further away from the sensible. If a husky can run 40 miles, if we have fine batteries and fine electric motors, why should we not do our commute with hybrid carts partially pulled by dogs? We have quite reasonable small gen sets, pedal vehicles, at times there is sunlight and there is wind to use? There are so many possible combinations of those 6, how do we tell they are not viable with Musk holding the megaphone? With the complexity of combining those it would take quite a bit of time and effort to perfect. The TV was the ultimate opportunity to bring 1000 channels of education to the masses. We could have done reasonable tests and examination over the phone long ago. But if you can extract money from the TV audience and have people pay rent for phone lines - why bother? We could have spend those hundreds million movie budgets on nice courses which would have given us a huge spectrum of employability with much higher wages AND a much more sophisticated voter. I don't expect the manipulation industry to stop any time soon. With the AI generated imaging it is more likely to reach an ultimate form where those who desire it can directly write desires into people.