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There is no possible path for advancement that doesn't threaten people and the things they hold dear. It never worked that way in the past, and it won't now.
by fallingknife 3y ago
There is no possible path for advancement that doesn't threaten people and the things they hold dear. It never worked that way in the past, and it won't now.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoTech is like a fission reactor: powerful, elegant, delivering value through leverage, but requires strong controls and protections (moderators, containment) for humans so it doesn’t ruin us all. People worry about AI paperclip maximizing, but Tech is already that in some ways (find or build moats, blitz scaling, no concerns for the harm incurred). It’s just fuzzy cohorts of tech workers and management doing the paperclip maximizing, for comp and shareholder value respectively. Not much different than AI reward functions.
- JohnFen 3y agoYes, but there's a critical difference now. Now, the tech industry breaks many things at an unprecedented pace, and largely doesn't offer a reasonable replacement for the things that have been broken. People can only handle a limited amount of loss within a given period of time before they start pushing back hard against further loss and consider those causing them harm to be forces of evil. There's also another factor that the tech industry is largely blind to: tech people tend to think that "we know best" and that pushing our ideas on the general public against their will is a Good Thing. But it's not a Good Thing, it's a Bad Thing. Another thing we need to be doing is allying with the general public rather than dictating to them.
- fallingknife 3y agoWho is pushing anything on the public? The tech industry wouldn't exist in the form that it does now except that it gives people something they want, not the other way around. Disruption from tech advancement is caused by tech changes displacing existing industries and it hurts the people currently making money from those industries. But to be against that disruption you would have to believe that those people have some sort of right to make that money and continue doing the things that make them those profits when the public wants the more efficient tech. So really it's the anti tech people who are pushing things on the public. E.g. people often complain about Amazon displacing small retailers, but really it's just that given the choice, most people choose Amazon.
- JohnFen 3y ago> except that it gives people something they want, not the other way around. That used to be true. Now, though, a very common thing I've noticed with people is that they use tech not because they want to or because it solves a problem for them, but because they are disadvantaged if they don't. It's an important difference. If people willingly choose to use a thing, then they'll be inclined to think about it positively. If they use a thing because they feel they have no choice, then that thing is more likely to be viewed as adversarial, because it is. I think that's largely where the tech industry has arrived at. Further, the tech industry shows little to no empathy to those whose lives are worse because of what it does.
- fallingknife 3y agoPeople may feel that way, and I'm sure in some cases they really mean it. But the reason they always give for why they have to use it is some form of "because every one else does." And it had to get to that point because people wanted it in the first place. Otherwise it just wouldn't have sold in the market when it came out.
- bluefirebrand 3y agoYou're very close to describing the "enshittification" process. Things start out good quality, high effort. Useful. Then once they achieve a certain amount of inertia they start cutting stuff out. Adding new tiers of payment plans, or injecting advertising into existing plans. Lowering caps. Whatever else they can get away with to cut costs but keep your money. But people have invested in them by that point. Invested enough that changing off is painful and potentially expensive. They want to barrier to leave to be high, even as they give you less reason to stay using their product.
- saltcured 3y agoNot sure you even need this product cycle to explain the parent poster's observation. What I see here is your basic Tragedy of the Commons at multiple levels. Consumers adopt the new thing to disadvantage their peers, who then have to do the same, to the detriment of all. And the vendors are doing the same thing. This whole thread reminds me how much "tech" as a meme has come to conflate technology and business. People don't even seem to recognize that "move fast and break things" expressed a business philosophy, not some fundamental truth of technology, R&D, or science.
- itishappy 3y agoKinda the point, no? If history shows progress is disruptive, then accelerationism seems likely to accelerate disruptions. Many people can connect these dots, and not everyone sees this as positive.
- hooverd 3y agoLeaded gasoline is a good example of an advancement where the naysayers were right.
- cvalka 3y agoOne of the very very very few. Asbestos is another one. Would you be able to provide another example?
- eep_social 3y agoHow about glyphosate (roundup)? Also, plastic is looking far worse now than twenty years ago though I think the net is quite complicated and therefore ambiguous at the moment. There is an ongoing discussion about “forever chemicals” and, again, not unambiguous but the balance seems to be tilting toward them being a bad idea. I’m not personally seeing much of a dividend from nuclear weapons given how difficult nuclear power turns out to be under capitalism in practice. But I suppose it gets a pass because otherwise my father might have died in a land war. Remains to be seen what the net will be on oil but I’ll happy speculate that if you consider a sufficiently long timeline that one turns out bad too. I’m still pretty mad about the “food pyramid” but I can’t offer any particular study that tries to quantify its role in the decline of american health outcomes. Certainly modern food processing techniques look like a slow moving disaster but it’s really hard to sort our cause and effect. Social media was neat for a few years but I would consider it a net negative. I guess you’re right.
- itishappy 3y agoCFCs, PFAS, BPA, phthalates, thalidomide, leaches, bloodletting, lobotomies, pretty much the entire history of mental health treatment, hydrogen airships, vermillion pigment, mercury felt stabilizer, radium water... If I were feeling particularly spicy I might even suggest things like weapons research, communism, or suburbia.
- Vecr 3y agoHow bad actually are hydrogen airships? At this point trying to make tiltrotors any safer is not working out, so airships could be better. Though, if you have a real airport, passenger jets are unbeatably safe.
- jwond 3y ago"Advancement" implies improvement. Just because things are changing does not mean they are improving.
- the_snooze 3y agoYeah, it's a misguided and naive way of thinking. Deciding whether a technological development is good (and for whom, and to what extent, and with what trade-offs, and on what time horizons) is a really difficult task. So some folks will replace it with a much easier question: "Is this new?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution
- iraqmtpizza 3y agoIf what people hold dear is controlling the way people live hundreds or thousands of miles away, then you're right. But that is a deliberately obtuse definition designed to justify any behavior. If you let people continue their traditions, don't deliberately bankrupt them, and allow them make their own local laws, that's enough for most.