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If you read Thiel’s internal emails with Mark Zuckerberg, it’s clear he thinks a lot about public perception and how to frame tech to the masses. The antichris

If you read Thiel’s internal emails with Mark Zuckerberg, it’s clear he thinks a lot about public perception and how to frame tech to the masses. The antichrist stuff strikes me as a debate tactic. Public sentiment has been trending toward, “maybe tech is kinda bad” so to shift the frame, Thiel says something extreme he knows will get headlines like, “if you regulate tech you might be the antichrist.” He also sprinkles in “or maybe there’s a 1% chance tech kills everyone” to deflate tech criticism from the other angle. My 2c is that most tech is actually good and 90% of public disdain comes from social media and phone addiction (Thiel apparently limits his kid to one hour of screen time per week) and that because social media’s downsides caught nearly everyone by surprise we’re overcorrecting with AI safety stuff. https://www.techemails.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-peter-thiel-millennials https://www.techemails.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-peter-thiel-mil...

piva00 1y ago
> My 2c is that most tech is actually good and 90% of public disdain comes from social media and phone addiction That's a huge part of it but not only. Tech is being used to remove humans from the loop of interactions, people feel disdain to have to answer a robot when trying to call somewhere to get support (banks, telcos, etc.), they also disdain being surveilled all the time, online or offline, it's enabled by "tech"; there's disdain for applications to jobs, grants (scientific or cultural) being triaged by robots, one just feel swallowed by a system they have no power to appeal, the robots decided and there's no one to talk to about it. There's a lot of tech that is useful, I don't disagree with that, but I don't think the disdain comes only from social media/phone addiction, those are just the more visible, talked about parts of it. In my immediate circle of the non-tech people they just constantly feel the encroaching of tech mediating real humans, we're being herded by a multitude of systems working on their own programming, and people just defer to those systems. A prime example of such systems going haywire was the British Horizon Post Office scandal, a system to automate detection of fraud was trusted more than any human, causing untold suffering to postmasters flagged as criminals, pushing some to the point of suicide. The trend for now is for this to only increase, more automated systems taking over decision-making roles, people who would be making decisions just blindly deferring to the system, with no recourse or way out for anyone affected. It's bleak, it's understandable that people don't like this. I've been working in the tech industry for 20+ years and I don't like what it is now.

piva00 1y ago

> My 2c is that most tech is actually good and 90% of public disdain comes from social media and phone addiction That's a huge part of it but not only. Tech is being used to remove humans from the loop of interactions, people feel disdain to have to answer a robot when trying to call somewhere to get support (banks, telcos, etc.), they also disdain being surveilled all the time, online or offline, it's enabled by "tech"; there's disdain for applications to jobs, grants (scientific or cultural) being triaged by robots, one just feel swallowed by a system they have no power to appeal, the robots decided and there's no one to talk to about it. There's a lot of tech that is useful, I don't disagree with that, but I don't think the disdain comes only from social media/phone addiction, those are just the more visible, talked about parts of it. In my immediate circle of the non-tech people they just constantly feel the encroaching of tech mediating real humans, we're being herded by a multitude of systems working on their own programming, and people just defer to those systems. A prime example of such systems going haywire was the British Horizon Post Office scandal, a system to automate detection of fraud was trusted more than any human, causing untold suffering to postmasters flagged as criminals, pushing some to the point of suicide. The trend for now is for this to only increase, more automated systems taking over decision-making roles, people who would be making decisions just blindly deferring to the system, with no recourse or way out for anyone affected. It's bleak, it's understandable that people don't like this. I've been working in the tech industry for 20+ years and I don't like what it is now.