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Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess one for the more common reason that it’s displacing humanity with technology, but the second r

• api 2y ago
  Replacing human labor with technology is usually a wonderful thing if the gains are generally realized. It means less time spent in 'toil' and more time to pursue one's true interests and desires. The reason it feels depressing is that if recent history is any guide, 0.0001% of the human race will receive almost all the benefit. A tiny number of richer-than-rich will get even richer and everyone else will stay the same or get poorer.
  • elzbardico 2y ago
    The rest (and most of us will see included on the rest category) will get soylent, if we are lucky.
  • decGetAc 2y ago
    Agreed,only the super rich will get cars err electricity err I mean refrigerators err I mean personal computers err I mean mobile devices To be fair I think there's a lot of truth in your statement in the short term (and arguably in the long). But in the 'long' term , it sure does look like revolutionary technology makes everyday peoples life better (I didn't even go into transportation or health care/life expectency)
    • exe34 2y ago
      How will you pay for the cars err electricity err I mean refrigerators err I mean personal computers err I mean mobile devices when you have no income?
    • jajko 2y ago
      There will be soon new type of stuff only for rich - clean air, safe healthy food, beautiful nature, stable climate location, safe from warfare... we are not heading for a rosy future. Sure everybody can be addicted to some crappy social service on their phones, but that's not a mark of progress in 2025 nor definition of life fulfillment/happiness, some would say in contrary. Obesity was also for a long time mark of wealth (and in some 3rd world countries it still is), and now its a sign of low social status and failure for various reasons. Btw life expectancy i starting to decline again in developed countries, its just 3rd world that has so much gap to cross that they still go up.
    • api 2y ago
      When I said recent history I meant the last roughly 20 years, when the trend has been for gains to go to a smaller and smaller number of people. Of course historically this does seem to be a cycle. Usually it goes gilded age, revolution, broad-based growth, emergence of a new elite, repeat cycle. Unfortunately the revolution period is often very chaotic and destructive.
    • gruntbuggly 2y ago
      Sure, we have more consumer goods available to us, but I don’t know if that’s a great measure of a better life. We have supercomputers in our pockets but can’t talk to our neighbors, AI with a warming planet, etc. It’s all tradeoffs. A flourishing human life is independent of technology.
    • Terr_ 2y ago
      Let's be careful not to conflate (A) general technological-progress with (B) changes in economic organization and wealth distribution. The nice things from (A) don't necessarily require what co-occurred with (B). There is nothing in the physics or materials of a refrigerator which requires the assembler to have been paid less than the CEO.
    • abenga 2y ago
      It is possible for luxuries to become easier to have, but still have entire generations unable to buy homes or retire.
  • eikenberry 2y ago
    Recent history is a poor guide that will give you a highly skewed view and won't really help you anticipate and plan for the future. You need to look at real history to get perspective. You don't even have to go back very far to see an tiny group of richer-than-rich people that didn't retain their power, an economic loop where this all happened before.
    • kingkongjaffa 2y ago
      > Recent history is a poor guide Wrong, It’s the most important prior. Technology is vastly different now since your supposed “last time”, to the point where it’s an entirely different landscape for events to unfold. Look at the state of mass apathy and lack of accountability we have in society now. That tiny group has never been more unaccountable.
  • signatoremo 2y ago
    Can you be specific? Which technology only benefit the 0.0001%?
    • api 2y ago
      I was referring to the economic benefits being concentrated. AI and other automation allows more to be done with less labor which increases corporate profits, and all that is pocketed by a very small number of people. Meanwhile everyone else is unemployed. There is no mechanism to distribute these benefits to anyone. The money goes to inflate stock and other financial bubbles and asset prices, including housing, which makes living even more unaffordable. Long term this eventually collapses since the economy doesn’t work with no customers.
  • treis 2y ago
    Median income in constant dollars in the US was about 60k 40 years ago and now is about 80k. We can buy a lot better stuff with those dollars too.
    • api 2y ago
      Now check housing prices over that time.
      • treis 2y ago
        People don't buy houses by writing checks for the purchase price. They get a mortgage and pay monthly which is dependent on both housing price and interest. With a lot of hand waving that number isn't much worse than the 70s/80s because interest rates were high then. However, that's cyclical and we're in a really crappy local minima for affordability due to a rapid increase in interest rates.
• gruntbuggly 2y ago
  IMO that disillusionment is rooted in identifying the myth of progress. But I tend towards Schopenhauer over Hegel
• henry2023 2y ago
  Only when looking at this through our common understanding of how societies work. Broad automation of tasks can be great for society if and only if the product of that automation is not treated as some kind of private property. I’m not hyped on an automated future because I find it quite unlikely but if it were to happen it has the potential to be transforming beyond expectations.
  • Swizec 2y ago
    > Broad automation of tasks can be great for society if and only if the product of that automation is not treated as some kind of private property. Star Trek or Bladerunner? That’s a choice we can make.
    • elzbardico 2y ago
      No. Most of the time WE can't make this choice. It is imposed on us by the elites.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • onemoresoop 2y ago
        We still have a lot of power to decide what we want, the problem is that this power is not well leveraged yet.
    • AlecSchueler 2y ago
      Do we have the choice? It feels like the market makes such decisions and regulation is not only a taboo but impossible with competition between states.
• NAHWheatCracker 2y ago
  Yea. Watch a sci-fi film - nifty gadgets, robots taking care of chores, and widespread spaceflight. Real life is some unreliable chat bots. Then there's the depressing practical stuff. AI being forced down our throats. AI as an excuse lay people off. AI as an excuse for massive data hoarding. AI flooding the internet, making it harder to find good content.
  • therein 2y ago
    I find it extra surprising that people are advocating for transitioning to using AI while their proof of concept looks like this: do { resp = callAI(input); } while (!isOutputSane(resp) && attempts++ < MAX_RETRY)
    • jajko 2y ago
      Nobody sane and smart I know is advocating for AI now. All keep saying 'one day', 'soon' etc. Our megacorp very effectively blocked all of this and we don't have anything internal yet, but we are in specific market. And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro... well no, show me some hard facts and we can start building trust. Sure assistants are nice but thats about it. Its just too flawed now to be dependable and reliable, it feels like typical 80/20 or 90/10 situation where inexperienced juniors are all over their head how future is now, and seniors just meh and go and do some work.
      • surgical_fire 2y ago
        > All keep saying 'one day', 'soon' etc. The parallels with crypto are amazing. > And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro... Cue some dude chiming in on how they are 1000% more productive now and wrote 100 apps in a weekend with Claude, etc. It is very tiresome indeed.
        • pjmlp 2y ago
          Except this time is quite real for some jobs, maybe programming will take a few more years, but for artistic fields, it is already here. Indie devs now using AI generated assets instead of hiring artists is quite common.
• cratermoon 2y ago
  The word you're looking for is 'dystopian'
  • fuzzfactor 2y ago
    And thats the "optimistic" outlook :\ There's also a negative side . . .
• rqtwteye 2y ago
  Technical progress would be fantastic if the benefits didn't go mainly to the top. I am pretty sure in the not too far future we will have enough technology that you can live off the land somewhere with the help of some robots. Or have them do all your housework. In principle, this is great, but our society is not set up for a lot of people not working while the technology is progressed by a relatively small number of highly qualified people. I am not sure where this is going but there will be some large changes to society needed if technology keeps progressing at current speed.
  • sterlind 2y ago
    I wanted fully-automated luxury communism, but I got fully-automated neo-feudalism instead. It feels bad.
    • VladVladikoff 2y ago
      Pretty much every piece of technology we have known so far which had creator restrictions has been jailbroken. Sure the future might be Elon & Bezos androids, but what’s stopping us from jailbreaking them and using them off grid?
      • wahnfrieden 2y ago
        Police and military
      • stego-tech 2y ago
        Police forces protecting the interests of capital first, citizens second, e.g. private police forces (Pinkertons) and strikebreaking. Militaries being used by Governments to protect the interests of capital at the expense of citizens, e.g. the Battle of Blair Mountain. Government legislation enshrining the rights of capital and profit over the rights of citizens, e.g. copyright laws and DRM protections. Centralization of systems and dependency of products on remote compute, e.g. public cloud service providers, social media networks, shifting from wired to wireless home ISPs and networks to reduce stability of private hosting. They made it illegal to break DRM on their devices, send the police to protect their property, leverage the military to annihilate opposition, and now use modern technologies to prohibit end user control by requiring remote dependencies for operation. That's how they stop you.
• adamnemecek 2y ago
  > unlikely to manifest Over what time period? 5 years? 100 years?
  • techpineapple 2y ago
    I think a lot of cool shit will happen in the next hundred years, but the “end of scarcity unlimited money/tech points hack” is unlikely to happen in the next 100 years. And this is the core of my argument, let’s talk more about the cool shit.
    • adamnemecek 2y ago
      I can see it happening in the next 30 years.
• ajb 2y ago
  Yeah The historic benefits of technology come from eliminating the waste of human effort: - Motors and engines removed the waste of using our muscles as an energy source - Computers removed the waste of people's time doing calculations and admin manually - Electronic Communications removed the waste of carrying information in physical form What's the most prevalent form of waste today? I think it's dishonesty and corruption. And AI seems set to make more of it.
  • sadeshmukh 2y ago
    Does AI not also automate away repetitive tasks? This seems to be a disingenuous comparison.
    • bluefirebrand 2y ago
      AI is strictly worse at automating repetitive tasks than traditional software, because AI output is non-deterministic If a task is repetitive then the output is predictable so it should be automated deterministically, not with fuzzy AI bullshit
      • datadrivenangel 2y ago
        LLMs are often worse, yes, but there are decision tree based machine learning models that can learn to be deterministic for classification if your training data accurately reflects the actual problem data.
        • bluefirebrand 2y ago
          This sounds so stupidly over engineered for a majority of problems spaces Like teaching an AI model to learn arithmetic instead of just building a calculator
• beau_g 2y ago
  I personally think it's polarized, and either the Pentti Linkola/Ted K way of thinking that the industrial revolution (or maybe even the agricultural revolution) were a detriment to humanity is correct and there is no turning it around within that framework, or all tech progress will reach an ultimately good equilibrium, though will be unstable and have mistakes along the way. I definitely lean towards the latter. What I do not think at all is we should purposely delay tech progress through the use of violence (which is what laws/regulations effectively are) while doing some type of wait and think about it exercise. I definitely don't think anything (good or bad) that does not break the laws of physics is unlikely to manifest, quite the opposite, most things we imagine now will come to fruition in our lifetimes and many others we haven't even imagined yet both good and bad.
  • yarekt 2y ago
    Regulation is violence? sorry for putting my socialist hat on, but free market is efficient, so efficient that without regulation it’ll optimise away human happiness and find a way to turn tears into profits. Regulation is basically saying that you can make money in ways that benefits the humanity also, at least in theory. Lobbying and corrupt regulators muddy the waters
    • beau_g 2y ago
      Of course, laws/regulations are enforced by the party in a country that has a monopoly on violence, and use the threat of violence to enforce (either imprisonment or a monetary fine, monetary fines are a derivative of kidnapping as money takes time to accumulate). Of course I'm not arguing against these functions in general, they should be used in ways that prevent an even worse act of violence (ex. a corporation wasting the time and money of millions of people by selling them a dangerous product). The application layer is where I believe laws and regulations are appropriate though, not preventing the development of the technology (ex. trying to limit who, how, and when someone/some company can do a large training run for an AI video model, because AI video models will be leveraged by scammers down the line).
      • 2y ago
• diordiderot 2y ago
  Feels like early industrial revolution vibes. Some of the hype turned real, just not how and a lot later than anyone expected. Same thing happened in the post-atomic age. But the gaps between revolutions are getting shorter.
• pjmlp 2y ago
  I am as optimistic as a factory worker about to replaced by robots. Hence why I can't stand such techno-optmism, apparently most folks live in an ideal world free of economics.
  • toogan 2y ago
    Has the last 70 years of productivity increases led to a reduction in weekly work hours? No. Some jobs will be automated away. Good thing. Braindead stuff that a machine can do should be done by a machine. Doesn't mean we'll all soon be just picking our noses. There will be other work to be done, and if unregulated capitalism has its say then it can easily lead to even more worker exploitation.
    • oblio 2y ago
      Industrial work was really bad for workers at least during the early period. Arguably worse than equivalent agricultural work.
    • tordanik 2y ago
      > Has the last 70 years of productivity increases led to a reduction in weekly work hours? Yes, it has led to a significant reduction in hours worked: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever Of course, the effects aren't equally distributed across all countries. For example, annual work hours per worker have almost halved in Germany since 1950, but only seen a more modest decrease in the US. So political factors still play a role in how the benefits of increased productivity are used by society. But it's a strong effect. And those numbers don't even consider other factors such as how increased life expectancy combined with mostly unchanged retirement age, and being older when we first start working, give people an extra decade or two of not being part of the workforce at all.
      • toogan 2y ago
        The 40-hour workweek was introduced in Germany in the mid-1960s. 60 years later, it's still standard. A few 39-, 38- or 37.5-hour weeks here and there, but even those are by and large 40-hour weeks. The number of vacation week and public holidays has increased, which explains the majority of the difference in "annual work hours". The 10x in productivity is in no way reflected by the number of work hours.
• pseudocomposer 2y ago
  My last two roles have involved automating detection of cancers and other disease in biopsies (eliminating pathologists’ jobs in hospitals), and now automating invoice payment and statement settlement in the global freight sector (eliminating accountants’/operators’ jobs in these companies). I’m honestly very excited about this type of work. The benefits to society - better healthcare for less money, humans with their beautiful, creative brains not spending 40 hours a week looking at documents unnecessarily - are incredibly obvious. The flipside of this progress is, of course, that we have to overthrow the extractive capitalist system we have in place. We’re able to do this work in spite of that wasteful, inefficient system, not because of it. I think the only thing that will actually push people to overthrow it is exactly the type of work I’m doing. Much like the first industrial revolution begat our first efforts at creating a more socialist, just, and democratic society (eg, like Fiorello La Guardia for instance). The benefits to this the first time were extremely tangible.
  • 857593936464 2y ago
    > humans with their beautiful, creative brains not spending 40 hours a week looking at documents unnecessarily What should they be doing once all the meaningful jobs are automated away? > The flipside of this progress is, of course, that we have to overthrow the extractive capitalist system we have in place. > I think the only thing that will actually push people to overthrow it is exactly the type of work I’m doing. Stripping people of their livelihoods is one way to encourage them to overthrow the system, yes. Make no mistake though: the revolution will not be kind to you.
    • pseudocomposer 2y ago
      > What should they be doing once all the meaningful jobs are automated away? My point is that looking at patient's biopsy slides or invoices, for 40-80 hours a week, to find known cancers/viruses, or to make sure numbers match up with statements, is not meaningful work. In fact, I'd argue that any work that can be automated without performance degradation isn't meaningful work for humans. For the case of pathologists, this frees them up to look more carefully at cases where patients are experiencing symptoms and the cause can't be automatically. That means better patient care for both common and exceptional cases. And, perhaps, when put into use globally, it frees some pathologists up to take other roles in medical or scientific fields, doing something that isn't easily automated. For accountants, it frees them up to only look at cases where things mismatch, or, well... science, teaching, art, local farming, carpentry, really anything that isn't staring at invoices and statements 40 hours a week. It seems particularly silly to me that anyone would argue "comparing numbers on documents" is "meaningful work." A pretty popular quote by Stephen Jay Gould: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." I'd assert that many of our world's pathologists and accountants are doing the equivalent of living and dying in those cotton fields and sweatshops, if they're doing work that could be automated. > Stripping people of their livelihoods is one way to encourage them to overthrow the system, yes. Make no mistake though: the revolution will not be kind to you. Chill, dude. It's not like I'm making millions building these things. It's all just SaaS software, a sector where profit margins generally always trend downwards as the market for the product matures. Put another way, these companies are nowhere near as profitable as companies that extract our psychological profiles, target content and ads to make us feel miserable, and then use that to sell us stuff (Meta, Google, et al). I could easily go to Meta and make twice what I do now. Plus, I contribute time and labor to organizations like the DSA, JVP, and local nonprofits, volunteer at my local food bank and for other local organizations, choose to shop at local co-ops and farmer's markets, and more to build the type of economy that can support actual meaningful, not-easily-automated work for humans to do.
• worldsayshi 2y ago
  We should also be displacing hierarchies. Why does it only benefit the very few? Because they get to somehow keep their moats. So how can we displace those moats?
  • geysersam 2y ago
    > So how can we displace those moats? Abolish private property I guess?
  • aksbfjdjsbabs 2y ago
    [flagged]
• ohgr 2y ago
  The depressing bit is it’s a corporate dystopia where you are a constant cash cow driven on hype and hope that never materialises. Like fuck me someone was trying to sell my company an AI todo list the other day. What problem does it even solve?!?!? Go out, buy a new iPhone. AI will come tomorrow and tell you when your mother gets to the airport and add it to your calendar and hire you a robotaxi to shovel your obsolete meat corpse into the worker ant distribution hub to escort her back to your techno-panopticon.
• 4b11b4 2y ago
  I've recently been stuck on the idea that speculation is akin to computation... the moment we depart from the reality before us.
• SequoiaHope 2y ago
  Well: though we are not particularly likely to I do think that replacing people with machines would be fantastic if we actually just let people relax and work less, and so rather than lament the state of things I tend to focus on the need to promote the value of social systems which support human thriving. On the second point, I guess I would say that most of the marketing talk we see is unlikely to manifest but the future will in fact bring fantastic and fanciful advances in technology - it just won’t be what the marketers are trying to tell us.
  • wolfcola 2y ago
    right, and we all got to work 20 hour weeks bc of the industrial revolution.
    • lukevp 2y ago
      Huh? 40 hr work weeks are a recent thing, many people in history worked 12 hr days 6 days a week. Technology and social progress definitely leads to fewer work hours.
      • SequoiaHope 2y ago
        I’m not so sure. Unions (social progress) brought us the 40 hour work week more so than technology. Factory workers could potentially work more hours than farmers who had very busy periods mixed with slower times. I suppose they exist, maybe you have seen them, but I’ve not seen a real study of the hours worked by subsistence farmers in history. Though technology brings many other benefits, it’s not clear to me how it plays in to work hours.
        • AlecSchueler 2y ago
          It was factories that brought people together enough working as a single unit that allowed unions to flourish.
        • myaccountonhn 2y ago
          Before the machines there were guilds of cloth-makers and weavers that would work less than five days a week and at less strict hours, but they lost their jobs to automation. I can really recommend the book Blood in the machine if anyone is interested in how automation early on affected workers.
• dogcomplex 2y ago
  We've had a long history of technological improvements being widespread distributed to the people. There's not a particularly bleak reason to believe the latest AI automation won't be too. Look around your desk or your house and just count all the effort-saving devices that have made their way down to you. Look at the price of TVs cratering. Tech that can be recreated easily spreads far and wide. AI can too. It's dropped 1000x in costs the last 2 years. This stuff will be running on old tech everywhere - and speedier and cheaper new chips, bots and other hardware are on their way. Unless there's a new world war or draconian regulation, we're good. It's pretty much locked in.
  • oblio 2y ago
    Progress is not guaranteed. Humanity has been around in basically the same form for 2 million years (and the same form for probably 200 000 years) yet life for the average person on the planet really started improving circa 1950.
    • aksbfjdjsbabs 2y ago
      2 million years is a long time. It’s quite a stretch to say life only started improving in the last 50. An asteroid could hit today and nearly all evidence of our existence would be gone in 10k years.
      • oblio 2y ago
        Life expectancy skyrocketed once we discovered and applied hygiene, plus improved sanitation, and also antibiotics. More or less, modern medicine. The industrial era did a lot of things but it also made cities, famous for being horrible places to live in, even worse. It took the realization of that fact and action against pollution to improve that. Worker's rights movement also had to spring up for 40 hour work weeks, 2 day weekends, sick leave, unemployment benefits, pensions, disability benefits. Slavery was barely abolished 150 years ago, and it's still present in some places. Ditto for serfdom. Hunter gatherers had healthier diets that settled populations thousands of years after the invention of agriculture. MANY things were better for society and neutral or worst for the average person.
• tim333 2y ago
  I'm kind of optimistic, especially fixing mortality seems interesting. I'm not sure which particular hype won't manifest but a lot of the AI progress is kind of inevitable.
• ozim 2y ago
  In Europe we have less and less people. Automation is a must have because we will need those people in areas that cannot be automated. Transformation will be painful as it is hard to re-train people or get people to do stuff that is not really their forte.
  • fock 2y ago
    yes, automation is necessary and from what I see most non-IT companies are far behind what's possible. Something which is not necessary and imho pretty stupid is replacing idiotic workflow components designed to wash-out responsibility with LLMs and now let the bots run amok (which probably is totally ok with the bureaucrats who designed these workflows in the first place). Most of the AI automation crowd supposedly thinks this is a high value activity - while looking down on the bureaucrats. Which is pretty funny to me...
  • abyssin 2y ago
    In Europe we already have the technology for everyone to live and retire comfortably. What we don’t have is the governments whose goal is for everyone to do so. I don’t see how more technology would solve a political issue.
    • ozim 2y ago
      I did not write about need for more technology. What I see is companies failing behind implementing existing well known technologies. It is people who want to keep doing whatever they were doing for years that later will be angry, because whatever they were doing stopped making sense but they don’t understand it. They will not want to understand things that put them out of job…
  • reportgunner 2y ago
    > In Europe we have less and less people. Sorry, what Europe are you talking about ? I don't think that's true.
• qudat 2y ago
  Humans will always value human labor, creative destruction is foundational to economic growth and it has been happening since the discovery of fire.
  • AlecSchueler 2y ago
    They don't, though, they consistently want the cheaper machine made products rather than the artisinal human made versions. Sure it might align with their "values" but when they see the value difference at the cash register their minds will quickly change. It's already happening with AI designed products.
• AlecSchueler 2y ago
  Completely agree. I look at all these predictions, good and bad, but then I look at the global temperature and it feels watching someone in complete denial after a terminal cancer diagnoses talking about their plans for the future, a switch in careers, investments etc. In terms of AI particularly I can only focus on the here and now, and the real world effects that I'm seeing are split between enabling creepy men to produce deepfakes of women they're stalking and enabling bad faith actors with the ability to erode faith in our democratic systems. Om both counts I repeatedly see the "techbros" who develop the tech waving their hands or actively supporting it. All of the benefits right now like being able to code marginally faster or bounce ideas off of aan LLM feel like playing with firecrackers while watching dangerous men develop guns after we got a hold of gunpowder.
• danans 2y ago
  > It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society Your definition of "society" implies that it means "everyone". If you circumscribe the definition more narrowly to the owners of wealth/capital, the benefits to them (and the thin managerial class just below them) are pretty clear.
• renewiltord 2y ago
  I think one of the sad things is that when software went mainstream the culture went mainstream too so now that everyone wants to be “oh woe is me the world sucks” software people have to do the same too instead of being optimists. The degrowther culture of the mainstream comes to push out all nerds eventually.
• paulddraper 2y ago
  This is what the Amish/Luddites would say.
  • techpineapple 2y ago
    I don't think Amish/Luddites would make quite the nuanced point I'm trying to make, but also, I don't have any particular beef with the Amish or the Luddites, in fact the older I get maybe the more I side with them, but again, that's aside from the particular point I'm making now.