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Thing is, you can't trust that the take over of a technological innovation will actually improve people's lives, the economic incentives for their use lining u
by forgetfulness 3y ago
Thing is, you can't trust that the take over of a technological innovation will actually improve people's lives, the economic incentives for their use lining up can lead to a local maximum where some balance sheets look better but in every other way people's lives got a little worse, or much worse.
We already saw the web drastically go down in quality when guided by the invisible hand of PageRank and ad networks, content was optimized to appear on the frontpage of Google searches and bring in ad revenue, while being of low quality, extremely sparse in useful content, and melting your computer as your browser renders the ungodly amount of ads that are bundled with it.
That's a very direct precedent already, no need even to make analogies to historical developments happening in entirely different contexts or to other industries.
- newswasboring 3y agoSo what you are saying is, the problem wasn't the internet, it was capitalism. Only half joking.
- forgetfulness 3y agoAny sufficiently large system will have measurable incentives and disincentives, ceilings and floors, in place of personal loyalties and trust as you would in small groups of people. The unfortunate outcomes of them of course would be different with different political and economic systems, we know the ones that socialism created in the XX century, we are still getting slapped by the ones created by capitalism and representative democracy now, with new ones coming up hot.