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As my age slowly starts to creep into the earliest phases of "Old Man Yells At Cloud", I find that I'm not distrusting new technologies because they're just amb

by jerf 3y ago

As my age slowly starts to creep into the earliest phases of "Old Man Yells At Cloud", I find that I'm not distrusting new technologies because they're just ambiently bad because I didn't grow up with them. I find I'm distrusting new technologies... and a generous helping of old ones too... because I don't trust the people behind them. Not quite the same thing as the traditional "I just don't like anything new". A good AR toolset sounds like fun. But am I so arrogant as to believe I can resist all the "nudges" that will inevitably be applied to everyone using the tech? There's simply no way the nudges are for my benefit; claims that they are are just part of the marketing campaign. It's seriously annoying because I'd love to play more with these technologies and figure out how to use them. But it's clear rather a lot of them come with implicit clauses in the contract I'm not willing to sign. I'm not interested in running my political opinions past Silicon Valley AIs. I've got a finite amount of tolerance to poke through with-malice-aforethought uses of addiction mechanics against me to try to figure out how to use technologies to my advantage. And so on. The more amazing the technology, the shittier the deal on offer it seems.

api 3y ago
This isn't "old man yells at cloud." This is a subset of a larger realization that dawns on all engineers over time: A lot of the things you thought were technology problems are actually people problems. I've come to this realization about a lot of what's bad about the Internet's architecture. It's not because we can't do it differently. It's because there are human social and especially economic incentives that make it this way, and introducing better tech won't change those.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  This gets poo-pooed here on HN a lot, but it's also because a lot of software engineers don't have much training in ethics or even a basic ethical framework they can use to say yes or no to a questionable project. For a lot of people "This project is technically interesting to me" is all the justification they need. How the higher-ups end up using the technology is "not my problem as long as I get to develop a cool new algorithm or publish a paper about it!" We engineers are actively building this cyberpunk dystopia. It's not just springing out of the ether.

by jerf 3y ago

api 3y ago

This isn't "old man yells at cloud." This is a subset of a larger realization that dawns on all engineers over time: A lot of the things you thought were technology problems are actually people problems. I've come to this realization about a lot of what's bad about the Internet's architecture. It's not because we can't do it differently. It's because there are human social and especially economic incentives that make it this way, and introducing better tech won't change those.

ryandrake 3y ago
This gets poo-pooed here on HN a lot, but it's also because a lot of software engineers don't have much training in ethics or even a basic ethical framework they can use to say yes or no to a questionable project. For a lot of people "This project is technically interesting to me" is all the justification they need. How the higher-ups end up using the technology is "not my problem as long as I get to develop a cool new algorithm or publish a paper about it!" We engineers are actively building this cyberpunk dystopia. It's not just springing out of the ether.