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I can't tell if I'm just getting old, but the last 2 major tech cycles (cryptocurrency and AI) have both seemed like net negatives for society. I wonder if this

• throwaway22032 1y ago
  They are both force multipliers. The issue of course is that technology almost always disproportionately benefits the more intelligent / ruthless.
  • computerthings 1y ago
    [dead]
  • podgietaru 1y ago
    I think the biggest problem with both technologies is how many people seem to think this. Crypto was a way that people who think they’re brilliant can engage in gambling. AI is a way for “smart” people to create language to make their opinions sound “smarter”
• tudorizer 1y ago
  This parallel is something that I've been mulling over for the better part of this year. Are we simply getting old and bitter? Personally, I would add a previous cycle to this: social media. Although people were quick to point at the companies which were sparked and empowered by having unprecedented distribution. Are we really better or worse off than a few decades ago?
  • tines 1y ago
    > Are we simply getting old and bitter? No, we are getting wiser. It's not bitterness to look at a technology with a critical eye and see the bad effects as well as the good. It's not foolish to judge that the negative effects outweigh the positive. It's a mark of maturity. "But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil."
    • im3w1l 1y ago
      We know that people can easily end up irrational either way. Some people more naively positive and others more cynical and bitter. Maybe it's even possible to make both mistakes at once: The same person can see negatives that aren't there, positives that won't happen, miss risks, and miss opportunities. We cannot say "I'm criticial therefore I'm right", neither "I'm optimist therefore I'm right". Right conclusion comes from right process: gathering the right data, and thinking it over carefully while trying to be as unbiased and realist as possible.
      • tines 1y ago
        Your comment is, strictly speaking, correct, but not very useful, because nobody is saying either of those things. The reality is that 90% of people are totally oblivious to the danger of any technology, and they scorn the 9% who say "Let's examine this carefully and see if we can separate the bad from the good." There is the 1% of people who will oppose any change, but they're not dominating the conversation like the people are who say that this technology is unmitigated good (or at least that the bad is so minor that it isn't worth thinking about or changing for). (Also strictly speaking, "I'm critical therefore I'm right" isn't always valid, but "I'm uncritical therefore I'm right" is always invalid.)
        • tines 1y ago
          > (Also strictly speaking, "I'm critical therefore I'm right" isn't always valid, but "I'm uncritical therefore I'm right" is always invalid.) I can't edit my comment any more, but I should have said, "The opposite of being 'critical' isn't being 'optimistic,' it's being 'uncritical.'"
  • risyachka 1y ago
    > Are we simply getting old and bitter? Maybe, but it has nothing to do with change itself. Change can be either positive or negative. Often it is objectively negative and can stay that way for decades.
    • tudorizer 1y ago
      My theory is that bitterness, at least this particular flavour, stems from seeing this negative impact, more than anything. Change itself is a must. It's nature's law.
  • RicoElectrico 1y ago
    Low interest rates favor parasite middlemen, not those who actually do stuff
  • marcosdumay 1y ago
    > Are we simply getting old and bitter? For crypto, no. It's basically only useful for illegal actions, so if you live in a society where illegal is well correlated with "bad", you won't see any benefit from it. The case for LLM is more complicated. There are positives and negatives. And the case for social networks is even more complicated, because they are objectively not what they used to be anymore.
    • walterbell 1y ago
      > It's basically only useful for illegal action Blockchain assets ("controllable electronic records") are defined in the UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) Article 12 that regulates interstate commerce, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33949680#33951026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33949680#33951026. Some states have already ratified the changes, others are in progress. U.S. federal stablecoin legislation was passed earlier this year.
      • conception 1y ago
        Being legal and being useful are different.
        • walterbell 1y ago
          The legality is new. Time will determine the success of legal + useful applications.
  • rolandog 1y ago
    > Are we simply getting old and bitter? It depends, maybe 20 years ago — a couple of years after the dot com bubble — we thought we were not gonna repeat the same mistakes as we did before, and I do believe we blindly drank the kool-aid thinking we were gonna solve all problems with tech. Now, we're another year old another year wiser times 20. I don't think having one's eyes open is synonymous with bitterness... but, it is what we do with the information and knowledge we have acquired that defines that trait: do we sit and grumble and shake our fists at the cloud (providers?), or do we seek others to try to prevent problems from escalating. > Are we really better or worse off than a few decades ago? While technologic progress in several fields has been amazing, it would be naïve of us to not recognize the areas where we have regressed. Looking back, I think we should have normalized caution, not moving fast and breaking things; normalized interoperability, and not walled gardens; and we should have been more wary about the dangers of not having solved business models instead of normalizing tracking and targeted advertising, which enabled personalized propaganda... ... we should have also paid more attention at the unchecked power of monopolies and media conglomerates and done more to foster a healthier economy as well as improve the quality of life and rights protection of people, including access to education and the strengthening of institutions. So, to finally answer your question, I think we are in general a bit worse off. Why? Well, I look back to 20 years ago when our outlook on the future was that the sky was the limit if you worked and studied hard; and now the outlook on the future 20 years from now... seems uncertain.
• ysavir 1y ago
  A large part of it is that we maxed out a lot of how communication tech can impact daily life, at least in terms of communication, but economically and culturally got in the habit of looking for new and exciting improvements to daily life. The 19th and 20th centuries saw a huge shift in communication. We went from snail mail to telegrams to radio to phones to television to internet on desktops to internet on every person wherever they are. Every 20-30 years some new tech made it easier, cheaper, and faster to get your message to an intended recipient. Each of these was a huge social shift in terms of interpersonal relationships, commerce, and diminishing cycle times, and we've grown to expect these booms and pivots. But there isn't much of where to go past "can immediately send a message to anyone anywhere." It's effectively an endstate. We can no longer take existing communication services and innovate on them by merely offering that service using the new revolutionary tech. By tech sectors are still trying to recreate the past economic booms by pushing technologies that aren't as revolutionary or aren't as promising and hyping them up to get people thinking they're the next stage of the communication technology cycle.
  • bsenftner 1y ago
    > A large part of it is that we maxed out a lot of how communication tech can impact daily life, at least in terms of communication, Perhaps for uneducated casual communications, lacking in critical analysis. The majority of what passes for "communications" are misunderstood, misstated, omit key critical aspects, and speak from an uninformed and unexamined position... the human race may "communicate" but does so very poorly, to the degree much of the human activity in our society is placeholder and good enough, while being in fact terrible and damaging.
  • rightbyte 1y ago
    > Every 20-30 years some new tech made it easier, cheaper, and faster to get your message to an intended recipient. No it has regressed now. We are probably back to the level of 1950s before telephones became common. People don't answer unknown numbers and are not listed in the telephone book. When I was a kid in the 90s I could call almost anyone in my town by looking them up in the phone book.
• j-bos 1y ago
  > Interestingly, both technologies also supercharge scams Similar for internet back in the 90s Nigerian princes were provided a means to reach expinentially more people faster.
• add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  I'm not generally anti-capitalist, but what capitalism has become at this point in history means that technology is no longer for helping people or helping society. Imagine the DVR being invented today. A commercial device that helps you skip ads. It would never be allowed to happen.
  • Refreeze5224 1y ago
    I am generally anti-capitalist, and a big reason is because I don't think capitalism, inherently and fundamentally, can become anything other than what it is now. The benefit its provided is rarely accurately weighed against the harms, and for people who disproportionately benefit, like most here on HN, it's even harder to see the harms. Anti-capitalist sentiment was incredibly widespread in the US during the 19th century through the 1930s, because far more people were personally impacted, and most needed look no further than their own lives to see it. If nothing else, capitalism has become more sophisticated in disguising its harms, and acclimating people to them to such an extent that many become entirely incapable of seeing any harm at all, or even imagining any other way for a society to be structured, despite humanity having exited for 100,000+ years.
    • AlexandrB 1y ago
      Capitalism has many harms, but what's the alternative? Communism is worse - much worse.
      • Refreeze5224 1y ago
        It's really not an either/or proposition. Humans have used a much larger variety of systems of social and economic organization than capitalists would have you believe. We have innovated as a species in so many ways, like putting a man on the moon, AI, the internet, etc. But for some reason (i.e. capitalists like it that way), we don't seem to think we can innovate in the way that we organize our society and economy. Which is total BS in my book. Of course the people who massively and disproportionately benefit from the current arrangement don't want us image an alternative to it. Capitalism is designed to maximize profit, which it does well. It has even improved life for many people. Even the most ardent Marxist acknowledges this fact. But what we really care about (unless you're super rich) is maximizing human well-being overall. So why rely on a system that is not actually meant to maximize, prioritize, or focus on what we actually care about, and only does so occasionally or incidentally? It doesn't make sense, and in almost no other arena of human endeavor is this done. Imagine writing software to maximize x, when you really want it to do y, and just hoping that x makes y happen, and saying it's the least worst way of doing it, without trying any other option. Fundamentally, I think any socioeconomic system should be designed with people in mind as the organizing principle. If we care about human well-being, happiness, flourishing, etc., it makes no sense not to prioritize it from first principles. I imagine some form of economic and political democracy, wherein people have direct control over the things that affect their lives, in the social, political, and economic spheres (the three are inseparable, despite common capitalist dogma to the contrary). And not the usual representative democracy, where you abdicate any real decision-making power to an effectively unaccountable representative every 4 years. The usual objection to this is that it would be impossible to maintain the status quo with an arrangement like this. But that's just more capitalist self-preservation talking. There are clearly tradeoffs required in a new system oriented towards maximal human well-being. Likely tons of dirt-cheap Chinese-made products are out. But those never made us happy to being with!
• rnxrx 1y ago
  I think the progression of sentiment is basically the same. There were lots of folks pushing the agenda that connecting us all would somehow bring about the evolution of the human race by putting information at our fingertips that was eventually followed by concern about kids getting obsessed/porn-saturated. The same cycle happened (is happening) with crypto and AI, just in more compressed timeframes. In both cases the initial period of optimism that transitioned into growing concerns about the negative effects on our societies. The optimistic view would be that the cycle shortens so much that the negatives of a new technology are widely understood before that tech becomes widespread. Realistically, we'll just see the amorality and cynicism on display and still sweep it under the rug.
• adastra22 1y ago
  It’s how I feel about internet and social media now.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• cedws 1y ago
  Civilisation has had the technology to sustain itself and minimise suffering for a while now. There’s no reason to push further, yet we do.