5 ms·

As someone approaching 40, who was a techno-optimist back then and still generally techno-optimistic today, I'm feeling increasingly out of place in the tech wo

As someone approaching 40, who was a techno-optimist back then and still generally techno-optimistic today, I'm feeling increasingly out of place in the tech world. As evidenced by this blog post and the vast majority of comments here, I'd say the HN-adjacent space is majority negative on technology. But I wonder how many people have had a change of heart, and how much is just the influx of younger people and others with different opinions. Now that tech went through a "glamorous" phase, and is still in a "lucrative" phase, it certainly has a much broader draw. It's fine for people to update their beliefs with their experiences, I'm just curious if the cause is that vs new people with different beliefs. I haven't really been on social media (other than curated subreddits and HN, I suppose), and I have a lovely wife and children and lots of real life time, too, so I feel like I don't doom scroll or anything. I wonder how much that's colored people's opinions vs first hand experiences. As a simple example, the tech ethics question du jour when I was coming of age was whether it was okay to pirate music. Of course it was, it's free to copy bits! "You wouldn't download a car" etc. But I don't see a ton of daylight between that and training those songs on an AI model, but now generative AI is destroying those industries and musicians, etc. And HN these days seems largely against the AI training, while it was for pirating back then. Or another example, slightly before that was the Clipper Chip and the government trying to regulate encryption for the safety and security of citizens, and the PGP guys being folk heroes for printing their source code in a book to take advantage of free speech protections and get around it. Whereas these days a good chunk of HN wants the government to regulate AI models for our own safety. This one is a bit of a stretch, but it feels like the problems "rhyme" at least.

dmafreezone 2y ago
HN is a bubble within a bubble. It’s where Kagi rules the search world and Google is all but a dessicated corpse. It’s also a place with a karma system, encouraging only the most bubbleworthy discussion and discouraging any posts from dissidents. I would put a negative weight on sentiments here when averaging them with those elsewhere.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Welcome green commenter! I regularly see "posts from dissidents" here on HN, but I do notice that they are all strongly written, well-argued and often contain citations to support their position. Is there an asymmetry in the way karma is awarded to "bubble" and "non-bubble" positions? Probably, but that doesn't mean non-bubble never makes it. Could it be that karma rewards different things than you believe?
  - dmafreezone 2y ago
    So it takes strong writing, good arguments, and citations for a dissident to have any hope of being seen. Since that doesn’t describe every upvoted HN comment, what are you really saying here?
    - gtsop 2y ago
      Not saying you are wrong, but let's not dismiss the need for good argumentation when you say something out of the norm. Dissidence with arguments does a great service to everyone involved. Having said that, people here do downvote based on opinion allignment, which is very hurtful. I've seen perfectly legit comments (with sources) that are out of the norm being downvoted because people just don"t agree with them
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      > what are you really saying here? that expecting to see the full range of human opinion on any even vaguely controversial topic in a single context is foolish, and that i'm tired of people complaining about "dissidents" not showing up on HN when they clearly do (even if they are (surprise!) in a minority of top-ranked comments. ps. I never downvote on HN unless someone has actually made a grievous factual error or is being personally abusive.
      - bitcharmer 2y ago
        [dead]
  - 2y ago
CPLX 2y ago
I’m an old guy (older than you at least) who’s been working in and around tech since the 90s. What’s happened is the utopian future turned into the dystopian present. The technology created by Silicon Valley has profoundly harmed people and society in really visible ways. That’s not all it’s done, it’s absolutely undeniable that it’s also been a driver of some extremely positive things. But many people feel increasingly unable to live in this economy, take care of their children, find meaning, and achieve a state of balanced mental health. Many of these people place blame for at least some of this, correctly in my view, on the corrosive effects of the technology sector on the financial and labor markets as well as our personal day to day lives.
- smokel 2y ago
  How is this different from previous periods in which technology companies harmed people and society as well? (Think coal mines, cars, television, what have you). I fail to see what is so special about our current day and age, apart from us living in it.
  - spencerflem 2y ago
    Nothing? Do you expect people to be coal mine optimistic too?
  - timeon 2y ago
    Relevant question for this thread is if let say those coal mines promoted Utopia.
- ghiculescu 2y ago
  > profoundly harmed people and society in really visible ways such as?
  - spencerflem 2y ago
    Here's a nice article exploring some of the ways tech is visibly negative: https://blog.avas.space/tech-utopia-fantasy/ https://blog.avas.space/tech-utopia-fantasy/
riehwvfbk 2y ago
One cause of the mismatch is that tech did not turn out to be "lucrative" for the vast majority of techies.
- crummy 2y ago
  Didn't lots of us get six figure salaries?
  - riehwvfbk 2y ago
    In the Bay Area six figures ($100000) is poverty level even for a single person. Officially. An average software developer supporting a family on a single income in the Bay means a below median family income. No, it's not starvation. But I would hardly call living paycheck-to-paycheck "lucrative".
    - Jare 2y ago
      There's a lot of 6-figure salaries in tech outside of the Bay Area, and even outside the US.
      - riehwvfbk 2y ago
        But you see the contrast between "you are a valuable and well-compensated knowledge worker" and "you have to move somewhere more appropriate for your working-class income"? And how can anyone continue to say this is lucrative with a straight face?
johnfn 2y ago
> As someone approaching 40, who was a techno-optimist back then and still generally techno-optimistic today, I'm feeling increasingly out of place in the tech world. As evidenced by this blog post and the vast majority of comments here, I'd say the HN-adjacent space is majority negative on technology. I think this is because 10 or 20 years ago, when tech wasn't a particularly prestigious or high-paying career, you got into tech because you really believed in it, and so other people who were in tech also really believed in it - hence the optimism. Today, most people in tech are in it because it pays well. Not only do they not believe in it - I suspect they begin to dislike it because they feel "forced" into it, as you might when doing anything you don't particularly enjoy for an extremely long amount of time.
- abhiyerra 2y ago
  I am one of those people who got into tech as a teen in the late 90s when Microsoft was the capitalist bad guy, Google was the underdog, and Linux was socialism. Things were largely contained to the tech ecosystem. What I find interesting is as tech has grown and people enter it who are not that interested in tech is you see tech’s influence seems to have gone further and further away from our industry niche. Do I think VCs should be making decisions for millions of Americans so they can get more rich? No. Do I think tech workers should push a progressive narrative that the rest of the country should ascribe to? No. Tech has an undue influence on the world on both the left and right. All of us mistakenly ascribe our unique situation as how the world should work. Maybe we should just focus on what we are good at?
mitthrowaway2 2y ago
To help with your wonderings, I was a tech optimist who became pessimistic. I enjoy working on and thinking about technology problems, but it's so hard to keep my own creations from going on to become harmful. Perhaps my pessimism began with Jevons paradox. If I got a redo, I'd pick a different field.
threeseed 2y ago
The two biggest advancements in tech in recent years: Crypto and AI have had major negative impacts for society in particular the vulnerable. And arguably have done far more harm than good. Compare this with advancements before then: Personal Computers, Internet, Smart Phones and they have had overwhelmingly positive impacts for the world. So I see there being a completely legitimate reason to be negative about tech today but optimistic about its future.
- aetherson 2y ago
  I don't see any real evidence that either AI or crypto have had "major negative impacts for society."
  - timeon 2y ago
    That was addressed to those that do not deny climate change.
    - aetherson 2y ago
      The energy consumption of both crypto and AI are way overstated. Total energy budget of crypto is less than a percent of world electricity consumption (not energy consumption, electricity). And a ton of that electricity is particularly no-carbon. AI is harder to get numbers for and obviously is a moving target, but plausibly half of the consumption that crypto is.
      - CaptainFever 2y ago
        For more information: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-going-to-wreak-havoc-on-the-power-grid/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...
- ghiculescu 2y ago
  > have had major negative impacts for society in particular the vulnerable such as?
fuzzy2 2y ago
I still love technology. It's only getting more amazing all the time. If you view just that, we're not just living in the future, but way beyond. The application though, both by others and what I do at work? Meh. So am I pessimistic about technology now? I think that's a valid way to put it. And yet I also feel "out of place in the tech world" with my viewpoint. Sure there's others with similar positions, but I feel this is not a majority.
moosey 2y ago
I want to be a techno optimist, and my feelings are that the potential that tech could be an enormous positive utility for humanity. This falls apart not because of tech, but because of human flaws: desire for individual power, categorical error (cultivated in an extreme way in the drive for engagement), and a slew of other human weaknesses that leave many without the critical and emotional facilities necessary to live in the current world facing the onslaught of misinformation. It was possible to build tools that increased human happiness and connection, but by definition such tools would ultimately lead to each fulfilled person reducing engagement in the interest of actual face to face connection with others. There is no profit to be made in producing such a utility. It doesn't help that the human brain is addicted to novelty, meaning that a technical utility that did this cannot compete with utilities that are work primarily towards engagement. Ultimately, we need critical faculties, emotional intelligence, and real community to negate the negative effects of engagement driven tech, but these are extremely difficult to develop when this technology is already driving the population towards the easy path: categorical "reasoning", emotional content, or just feeding vanity. Ultimately, I think we had a small window when Facebook did a study in 2012, where it manipulated the emotions of a number of people (60k) and wrote a paper on it, to declare this practice of algorithmically managing content to be illegal psychological human experimentation. We didn't, and now I really do feel we suffer under its shadow.
Eridrus 2y ago
I don't think this actually has anything to do with tech itself. Society in general is in a more pessimistic mood than a decade ago, driven on by all sorts of institutions pumping out content that everything is bad, so you should upend the world in their vision. Maybe I was just too young and inattentive 16 years ago, but before the GFC and Occupy, I don't think there was such a pessimistic narrative overall, and it only got worse over time.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  Same. What the author writes seems more of a consequence of economic anxiety and the resulting populism (e.g. "big corporations bad, profit bad") than tech itself. A lot of people who criticize tech, like the author, would often excuse non-commercial or personal actors for doing the same thing (e.g. "regular people using LLMs are fine, big corporations using LLMs are bad"), which shows that they believe that "doing it for a profit" makes the moral difference. So it has nothing to do with tech at all, but rather whether or not the actor is doing it for a commercial purpose.
cempaka 2y ago
I'm an erstwhile techno-optimist who was disabused of his Panglossian views by the Utah Data Center, drone warfare (now advanced to the point of remotely piloted rifles gunning people down on the streets of Gaza), crypto ponzis, AI enclosing and monetizing decades of humanity's collective mental efforts, and the general indifference or even embrace by most of the tech community of all of the above. Technology has liberatory potential, but not in the hands currently wielding it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
simonster 2y ago
If you're not on social media, you might be missing part of what has changed people's minds. Social media is the biggest consumer-facing technological innovation of the last two decades, and it's financially lucrative, but also net-bad for society. I have a sense that we should do something about it, but as you say, doing something would require repudiating the values I held when I was younger.

dmafreezone 2y ago

HN is a bubble within a bubble. It’s where Kagi rules the search world and Google is all but a dessicated corpse. It’s also a place with a karma system, encouraging only the most bubbleworthy discussion and discouraging any posts from dissidents. I would put a negative weight on sentiments here when averaging them with those elsewhere.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
Welcome green commenter! I regularly see "posts from dissidents" here on HN, but I do notice that they are all strongly written, well-argued and often contain citations to support their position. Is there an asymmetry in the way karma is awarded to "bubble" and "non-bubble" positions? Probably, but that doesn't mean non-bubble never makes it. Could it be that karma rewards different things than you believe?
- dmafreezone 2y ago
  So it takes strong writing, good arguments, and citations for a dissident to have any hope of being seen. Since that doesn’t describe every upvoted HN comment, what are you really saying here?
  - gtsop 2y ago
    Not saying you are wrong, but let's not dismiss the need for good argumentation when you say something out of the norm. Dissidence with arguments does a great service to everyone involved. Having said that, people here do downvote based on opinion allignment, which is very hurtful. I've seen perfectly legit comments (with sources) that are out of the norm being downvoted because people just don"t agree with them
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    > what are you really saying here? that expecting to see the full range of human opinion on any even vaguely controversial topic in a single context is foolish, and that i'm tired of people complaining about "dissidents" not showing up on HN when they clearly do (even if they are (surprise!) in a minority of top-ranked comments. ps. I never downvote on HN unless someone has actually made a grievous factual error or is being personally abusive.
    - bitcharmer 2y ago
      [dead]
- 2y ago

CPLX 2y ago

I’m an old guy (older than you at least) who’s been working in and around tech since the 90s. What’s happened is the utopian future turned into the dystopian present. The technology created by Silicon Valley has profoundly harmed people and society in really visible ways. That’s not all it’s done, it’s absolutely undeniable that it’s also been a driver of some extremely positive things. But many people feel increasingly unable to live in this economy, take care of their children, find meaning, and achieve a state of balanced mental health. Many of these people place blame for at least some of this, correctly in my view, on the corrosive effects of the technology sector on the financial and labor markets as well as our personal day to day lives.

smokel 2y ago
How is this different from previous periods in which technology companies harmed people and society as well? (Think coal mines, cars, television, what have you). I fail to see what is so special about our current day and age, apart from us living in it.
- spencerflem 2y ago
  Nothing? Do you expect people to be coal mine optimistic too?
- timeon 2y ago
  Relevant question for this thread is if let say those coal mines promoted Utopia.
ghiculescu 2y ago
> profoundly harmed people and society in really visible ways such as?
- spencerflem 2y ago
  Here's a nice article exploring some of the ways tech is visibly negative: https://blog.avas.space/tech-utopia-fantasy/ https://blog.avas.space/tech-utopia-fantasy/

riehwvfbk 2y ago

One cause of the mismatch is that tech did not turn out to be "lucrative" for the vast majority of techies.

crummy 2y ago
Didn't lots of us get six figure salaries?
- riehwvfbk 2y ago
  In the Bay Area six figures ($100000) is poverty level even for a single person. Officially. An average software developer supporting a family on a single income in the Bay means a below median family income. No, it's not starvation. But I would hardly call living paycheck-to-paycheck "lucrative".
  - Jare 2y ago
    There's a lot of 6-figure salaries in tech outside of the Bay Area, and even outside the US.
    - riehwvfbk 2y ago
      But you see the contrast between "you are a valuable and well-compensated knowledge worker" and "you have to move somewhere more appropriate for your working-class income"? And how can anyone continue to say this is lucrative with a straight face?

johnfn 2y ago

> As someone approaching 40, who was a techno-optimist back then and still generally techno-optimistic today, I'm feeling increasingly out of place in the tech world. As evidenced by this blog post and the vast majority of comments here, I'd say the HN-adjacent space is majority negative on technology. I think this is because 10 or 20 years ago, when tech wasn't a particularly prestigious or high-paying career, you got into tech because you really believed in it, and so other people who were in tech also really believed in it - hence the optimism. Today, most people in tech are in it because it pays well. Not only do they not believe in it - I suspect they begin to dislike it because they feel "forced" into it, as you might when doing anything you don't particularly enjoy for an extremely long amount of time.

abhiyerra 2y ago
I am one of those people who got into tech as a teen in the late 90s when Microsoft was the capitalist bad guy, Google was the underdog, and Linux was socialism. Things were largely contained to the tech ecosystem. What I find interesting is as tech has grown and people enter it who are not that interested in tech is you see tech’s influence seems to have gone further and further away from our industry niche. Do I think VCs should be making decisions for millions of Americans so they can get more rich? No. Do I think tech workers should push a progressive narrative that the rest of the country should ascribe to? No. Tech has an undue influence on the world on both the left and right. All of us mistakenly ascribe our unique situation as how the world should work. Maybe we should just focus on what we are good at?

mitthrowaway2 2y ago

To help with your wonderings, I was a tech optimist who became pessimistic. I enjoy working on and thinking about technology problems, but it's so hard to keep my own creations from going on to become harmful. Perhaps my pessimism began with Jevons paradox. If I got a redo, I'd pick a different field.

threeseed 2y ago

The two biggest advancements in tech in recent years: Crypto and AI have had major negative impacts for society in particular the vulnerable. And arguably have done far more harm than good. Compare this with advancements before then: Personal Computers, Internet, Smart Phones and they have had overwhelmingly positive impacts for the world. So I see there being a completely legitimate reason to be negative about tech today but optimistic about its future.

aetherson 2y ago
I don't see any real evidence that either AI or crypto have had "major negative impacts for society."
- timeon 2y ago
  That was addressed to those that do not deny climate change.
  - aetherson 2y ago
    The energy consumption of both crypto and AI are way overstated. Total energy budget of crypto is less than a percent of world electricity consumption (not energy consumption, electricity). And a ton of that electricity is particularly no-carbon. AI is harder to get numbers for and obviously is a moving target, but plausibly half of the consumption that crypto is.
    - CaptainFever 2y ago
      For more information: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-going-to-wreak-havoc-on-the-power-grid/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...
ghiculescu 2y ago
> have had major negative impacts for society in particular the vulnerable such as?

fuzzy2 2y ago

I still love technology. It's only getting more amazing all the time. If you view just that, we're not just living in the future, but way beyond. The application though, both by others and what I do at work? Meh. So am I pessimistic about technology now? I think that's a valid way to put it. And yet I also feel "out of place in the tech world" with my viewpoint. Sure there's others with similar positions, but I feel this is not a majority.

moosey 2y ago

I want to be a techno optimist, and my feelings are that the potential that tech could be an enormous positive utility for humanity. This falls apart not because of tech, but because of human flaws: desire for individual power, categorical error (cultivated in an extreme way in the drive for engagement), and a slew of other human weaknesses that leave many without the critical and emotional facilities necessary to live in the current world facing the onslaught of misinformation. It was possible to build tools that increased human happiness and connection, but by definition such tools would ultimately lead to each fulfilled person reducing engagement in the interest of actual face to face connection with others. There is no profit to be made in producing such a utility. It doesn't help that the human brain is addicted to novelty, meaning that a technical utility that did this cannot compete with utilities that are work primarily towards engagement. Ultimately, we need critical faculties, emotional intelligence, and real community to negate the negative effects of engagement driven tech, but these are extremely difficult to develop when this technology is already driving the population towards the easy path: categorical "reasoning", emotional content, or just feeding vanity. Ultimately, I think we had a small window when Facebook did a study in 2012, where it manipulated the emotions of a number of people (60k) and wrote a paper on it, to declare this practice of algorithmically managing content to be illegal psychological human experimentation. We didn't, and now I really do feel we suffer under its shadow.

Eridrus 2y ago

I don't think this actually has anything to do with tech itself. Society in general is in a more pessimistic mood than a decade ago, driven on by all sorts of institutions pumping out content that everything is bad, so you should upend the world in their vision. Maybe I was just too young and inattentive 16 years ago, but before the GFC and Occupy, I don't think there was such a pessimistic narrative overall, and it only got worse over time.

CaptainFever 2y ago
Same. What the author writes seems more of a consequence of economic anxiety and the resulting populism (e.g. "big corporations bad, profit bad") than tech itself. A lot of people who criticize tech, like the author, would often excuse non-commercial or personal actors for doing the same thing (e.g. "regular people using LLMs are fine, big corporations using LLMs are bad"), which shows that they believe that "doing it for a profit" makes the moral difference. So it has nothing to do with tech at all, but rather whether or not the actor is doing it for a commercial purpose.

cempaka 2y ago

I'm an erstwhile techno-optimist who was disabused of his Panglossian views by the Utah Data Center, drone warfare (now advanced to the point of remotely piloted rifles gunning people down on the streets of Gaza), crypto ponzis, AI enclosing and monetizing decades of humanity's collective mental efforts, and the general indifference or even embrace by most of the tech community of all of the above. Technology has liberatory potential, but not in the hands currently wielding it.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

simonster 2y ago

If you're not on social media, you might be missing part of what has changed people's minds. Social media is the biggest consumer-facing technological innovation of the last two decades, and it's financially lucrative, but also net-bad for society. I have a sense that we should do something about it, but as you say, doing something would require repudiating the values I held when I was younger.