Yep, that's why I started working on Indie SaaS and am trying to go live on a farm, and will never work for a FANG (except Apple, because its hardware is mostly neutral), even remotely. I don't want to contribute to the dystopian machine, but I still want the real benefits that technology provides (both for myself, and for others, through the product I build).

The original purpose and true benefit of computing is in math (e.g. accounting), simplifying logistics, and enabling communication at a longer distance. Anything else is dystopian, socially-destructive garbage that I won't touch for the sake of my own well-being, which is why I'm not on any social media (except highly selective communities like HN or strictly for work purposes) and I strictly limit entertainment that arrives through a screen.

My yardstick for determining whether a particular pattern of use of technology is "good" or "bad" is by considering its effects on my base human faculties (eyesight, hearing, memory, physical strength and wisdom), and its effect on my relationships with others. Any pattern of use that improves my bodily faculties or my real-life relationships is good, otherwise I shun it.

I agree with most everything you've said expect:

> will never work for a FANG (except Apple, because its hardware is mostly neutral),

that's very surprising to me because I see it so much differently. Apple may be a "hardware" company in spirit but it's very much a software company these days too, and increasingly push into software domains.

Even then, I think Apple remains the most neutral. Apple “hardware” is synonymous with Apple software at this point - they are vertically integrated to a degree that make the two inseparable.

Missteps like on-device scanning notwithstanding, I feel like I have the most choice in how my Apple stuff behaves if compared to the other members of FAANG.

Time will tell if this remains true.

> Missteps like on-device scanning notwithstanding, I feel like I have the most choice in how my Apple stuff behaves if compared to the other members of FAANG.

Limiting to FAANG, I think you're probably right, although I've been really impressed with the openness and flexibility of much of Google hardware (chromebooks, mobile devices, etc. Not chromecasts, Nest devices, etc).

Isn't Apple UX primarily famous for the fact that it's not particularly configurable and instead focuses on being simple and "just working?"

I think we're on the same page, I see things very similarly!

What sort of product are you working on, or would you work in future, if you don't mind me asking?

Like you said "improves bodily faculties" seems great. Well-designed, efficient, repairable, sustainable "robots" like dishwashers, vacuums, etc from a few years ago could have lasted us a long time. Efficient, safe, maintainable transport is great. We had massive improvements in quality of healthcare without fears of dystopia until recently.

And to keep it simple, even real-life relationships enhanced by tech seems somewhat "bad". I suppose a useful example of tech improving real-life relationships would be LinkedIn: LinkedIn (and others) _might_ help me amplify my achievements and accelerate my career; but somehow that seems unnecessary also.

We don't really need a lot of relationships otherwise, and if we had free time because of other tech, we could spend more time with people or even invest in career. Tho one could argue, the careers have increasingly been about building said dystopian tech.

Where are you looking to buy a farm? I work in tech and love it, and won’t quit anytime soon, but I’d love to own a farm that’s at least break even with the perks that come with it (hiring a farm hand and doing the bits I can).

I used to live in the countryside in rural England, then London & Oxford, now Palo Alto, and that small village was still my favorite place so far. If I’m in tech all day I need that balance of nature outside of it.

> except Apple, because its hardware is mostly neutral

tell that to the uighur factory workers.

“Cybernetics” is the way into exploring this feeling more. There is a lot of high quality research on it, but it doesn’t permeate tech culture a ton except for privacy/cryptography.

I can’t talk you out of your despair, but I can point to resources to flesh the concept out for you that I chased down after feeling similar.

I have not run into many tech-native people realizing and addressing this problem from tech-first except for the cypherpunks and chaotic ways it shows up in some parts of cryptocurrency tech, and then the VPN/ProtonMail places.

I think engineers chasing this feeling is really important, as part of the cause is very much chasing RSUSs or w/e while not realizing the crazy dystopian governance layer our products are stitching together.

Tech-native starting points that address this heads on:

- “who owns the future,” Jaron Lanier, father of VR

- “True Names,” the version with essays at the beginning, Vernor Vinge

- Anything out of the cypherpunks, to include early bitcoin docs. You can disagree with the tech and also this group has really distasteful views around the edges, but they also created encryption that consumers could access, Tor, and similarly hugely impactful technologies based on the premise you have.

Philosophy:

- CCRU, Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher Nick Land is nuts today, but he had good thoughts on tech before the early 2000s.

- “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” Tiqun.

- Leftist or very fringe groups and related papers in the Anarchist Library website or whatever it’s called.

Math or systems theory academics:

- Norbert Wiener, “the father of cybernetics,” out of MIT

- Donna Meadows’ systems books, I think also out of MIT

Fiction:

- Neal Stephenson and William Gibson write books that describe a believable future if the trends you describe continue.

Digging into this area unavoidably leads to more doom-y thinking but awareness in tech is necessary to even attempt to course correct.

Overall, I agree, but cybernetics is practically a regression at this point. In a nutshell, it was an exploration to bridge gaps between the biological and the mechanical. In human terms, it's designing machines for us, and changing our approaches towards them. Martial arts have explored the concept of a tool or a weapon becoming an extension of the body, which is essentially disciplined Taoism. Today, we are so ingrained with our tools and machines that we worry more about form factors and user interfaces as if they are getting in the way of a neural impulse and its desired digital result

Also great suggestion on True Names. It predicted how people would interact and present themselves online before the Internet or even BBSes were even around

I generally agree. Cybernetics is a Google term (which is ironic given the theme) that’s a way into the body of research after that general yuck feeling OP has and also covers part of the topic.

But I agree with “all this” is something more than just Cybernetics. What central field ties up all those genres I listed? I haven’t found one yet. The lack of a central field for it, at least from what I can find, paired with this growing into a very legitimate monster of a problem, is a risky combination.

It’s manifesting in weird ways. Disgruntled engineers, disgruntled Uber drivers, disgruntled life-by-QRcode users, anger at sort of dystopian govt ideas via tech. A central field would help move towards a solution.

I haven't heard of cybernetics being a Google term before

I also see where you're coming from. I think since the concepts of cybernetics have been swallowed up by the modern world, "modernism" might be slightly more appropriate. Perhaps a new term is needed at this point too

Some of those weird manifests you described have been compounding, too. At an extreme, there was the Unabomber, whose manifesto was anti-industrialization. One of his targets, David Gelernter, was a proponent of technology encroaching on our lives (almost to a hyper-cybernetic extreme, particularly in his book Mirror Worlds where he describes a then-future where everything and everyone had a real existence, but also a digital one too. The digital one would make it easier to monitor and control things that would manifest positively in the real world)

Right. If you’re from a tech background and are looking for books that lead to other books, Cybernetics is a way in. A specific example is that Cybernetic Hypothesis book, which is full on hard-leftest French writer group writing under a pseudonym and covering the social<>anthropology<>economic<>tech aspect of “all this.” That same term will also lead to Norbert W and dry engineering Cybernetics, although his later books skew social impact as well iirc.

The domestic terror angle is something I worry about. I’m in no way of condoning it, but the Unabomber is a clear example of ~tech despair leading into violence.

So today, when the advocates for paying attention to this are basically Andrew Yang discussing out of work truck drivers and that Jon Stewart/Obama/Bezos dinner thing, it’s concerning to consider.

The Unabomber occurred pre-iPhone and still escalated into something awful.

So, what if tech/cybernetics/whatever the catchall phrase is the driver to this discontent which then leads to violence.

Well, there’s a lot, to put it very mildly, of dehumanizing tech out there now and a population of users getting steered by it for years now. Many of them react via collective labor actions, but what will the others do?

> a Google term

"keyword"

(OED, meaning 1a: a word used in an information retrieval system to indicate the content of a document)

Google is also the name of the company. "It's a Google term" sounds like something that is discussed internally. Calling a search phrase a "Google term" doesn't make a lot of sense to normal people

There is a world view that some would call the Machine World View. That things act upon each other, the system can be understood if all the ways things interact can be fully described, and that changes to the system involves acting upon parts of the system from the outside-in. The cybernetic bridge between biological and machine is still described in a form that is a Machine World View.

An alternate world view is the Living System, that living systems are alive, have intrinsic motivation, have an inner purpose and direction, capable of growing and regenerating without some extrinsic motivating force. A living system is complex, and its behavior cannot be fully described.

Taoism, and the related, and distinct, though adjacent _Chinese_ traditional medical arts take a holistic approach of a Living Systems World View.

That bit claiming the connection of martial arts to Taoism is a misunderstanding, even if we were to scope it to Chinese martial arts rather than any traditional martial art. There is a better connection to Chinese cultural ideal of gongfu, and martial arts as primarily a way of life and a discipline for body, mind, and spirit.

I can't say I've heard much of the Machine World View before. It does put a name to the common scientific view of people and nature

With the connection between Taoism and martial arts, I particularly meant that Taoism seeks the balance between the self and nature, to bring harmony between them. When one has mastery over a tool or a weapon, it becomes as an extension of the body. There is a harmony between the body and the tool, and between both together and the world. Maybe the connection between the two isn't correct. I'll have to explore gongfu more since it might make a better analogy

Yes, the Machine World View is the mainstream world view of modern society. I got this from Carol Sanford's work on living systems, such as her book, Regenerative Life. It is a world view that, in my opinion (and not necessarily Sanford's), flawed, and the source of much malaise in modernity.

As for the oness of weapon and wielder, perhaps you might be thinking of the non-dual perspective of unity consciousness, where everything arises together as a seamless whole, something that is better described in the Zen tradition. Two books relating to unity consciousness and martial arts come to mind.

In the Japanese text, "The Tengu's Sermon on the Martial Arts" (a title sometimes translate as the Demon's Sermon on the Martial Arts), the author was trying to convey something along those lines. Embedded within is a parable entitled, "The Cat's Mysterious Ways" (Neko no Myojutsu).

Another different (not necessarily Zen take) is Peter Ralston's, "Cheng Hsin: the Principles of Effortless Power".

Note that none of these are talking specifically about tools, weapons or otherwise being an extension of the body. That unity is with the whole of reality and not simply user and object that is together somehow separate from the rest of "reality".

I wouldn't say that Taoism tries to balance self and nature either, not if one were really to get into "wei wu wei". Ralston spent a whole book writing along those lines.

As far as "gongfu" goes, that's the cultural ideal of mastery accumulated over a long period of time.

A different approach would be to look at playing Go and how to think holistically with everything influencing everything.

Adding to this, Peter Reinhardt's post on replacing middle management with APIs. Hollowing out the middle of the career ladder may have a different impact than the historical automation of entry-level jobs.

https://rein.pk/replacing-middle-management-with-apis

Not sure the point of the blurb other than yes that’s been his gist for a while, agree!

He went nuts as in club drug fueled all night benders staring at binary on screen and then repeating it for weeks/years and the resulting breakdown.

As in, he literally lost his mind by the end and his colleagues who have as much bonafides as him attested to it happening. Whether or not he’s recovered, idk. And then if I agree with his view today - I haven’t dug into them, idk.

My point was that rather than following what most contemporary pseudo-philosophers do (acdemically or otherwise), Land fully embraced the outside. How can one fully embrace the outside / discover radical new perspectives if one is firmly entrenched in human society and norms?

Fair enough, I think! His participatory tech-art was really interesting and also I guess looked crazy from the outside (or inside haha)

Personally, I think we are headed in a weird place with more overall suffering, physical and mental.

But trying to not impose moral judgement, I think it is true that we have integrated technology into our lives more than ever. It is also true that we rely on technology (more than ever) on how to live (food, exercise, entertainment, emotions). It's kinda weird that you wouldn't just listen to your body.

The scary part is that all this technology that is integrated kinda just promotes more consumerism. Advertising and marketing are a huge point to this technology. It's scary to think that we just give children ( not just teenagers) access to the internet.

The part you don't realize is that we are in a dystopia. You are optimistic thinking that we are "building it". It will exist somewhere down the line, but it's not yet present.

Maybe there is some good from this. I mean there is, think of all the ailments that are manageable and people can live with infinitely better quality of life. Imagine someone bed-ridden. 20 years ago they NEEDED a full time caregiver. Today, they can SHOP (something they probably didn't do) for themselves. Chose what they want to eat, etc. There is some good that comes from this tech. But it's mostly consumerist garbage.

Ask yourself, "do I NEED this comfort?". If the answer is no don't use that thing. Do I NEED Alexa to turn on the light? I can walk, I can do it myself. Do I need to ask Siri to tell me the time? No, get a clock. That doesn't need the internet. Stop coddling yourself with comfort. It will make you not depressed with your life.

EDIT: I forgot to talk you out of despair. Look, you've been thinking too much. Sometimes you just need to be. Get yourself some water and a piece of fruit and go find a park. Just sit there, no phone, no nothing. Stare at the trees. Look at them. Breathe in the air. Feels where you are and try to feel the love in nature. But, exercise and eating better help too.

We are living not in a capitalist dystopia, we live in a modernist dystopia. That is, technology itself is the value, rather than a means to an end.

You can live in, say, in a socialist or fascist society, and you would still be subjected to modernism. It permeates everything.

e.g.

> It's kinda weird that you wouldn't just listen to your body.

That's precisely the modernist sickness of the mind. The idea that we need technological mediation for cooking, eating, exercise,... and that because these activities are mediated by technology (ideally speaking, the high technology of that time), it is inherently better.

The amish were famously the first to reject modernism, and they did so in quite an extreme fashion. They don't reject technology, but they reject the idea that technology is an inherent value.

When we feel a general malaise, it is because we intuitively feel we are submitting to the machine, rather than having the machine submit to us.

The suffering is real, and people have been describing it for a long long time. The problem is, we can't seem to shake it. There was already great clarity on these topics in the 70s. Yet, we keep doubling down.

Technology needs to become a tool again, not an end of itself. Only then, when we've rejected modernism, we'll be able to imagine new futures.

A book on this topic I really enjoy is Technopolis by Neil Postman. He makes the case that technology is a tradeoff and must be viewed as such. It hasn't been till recently that we built a society that is technology for technology sake.

For most purposes the entire world is largely capitalist. Even if there are some non-capitalist policies, the global economy is largely capitalist.

"The scary part is that all this technology that is integrated kinda just promotes more consumerism. Advertising and marketing are a huge point to this technology. It's scary to think that we just give children ( not just teenagers) access to the internet."

"The part you don't realize is that we are in a dystopia. You are optimistic thinking that we are "building it". It will exist somewhere down the line, but it's not yet present."

Big yes to both of these. I've come to the conclusion that within the current economic and political paradigm, namely capitalism in its current form at least, this exponential tech explosion can only lead to more consumerism, more control and manipulation.

My conclusion is that if we want this level of technology we need radically more democracy and a more egalitarian economic system with far far less inequality. Embedded in our current system, I see only a dystopia arising (or continuing to evolve).

> Do I NEED Alexa to turn on the light? I can walk, I can do it myself.

Do I NEED NETFLIX to watch TV ? I can watch other channels.

Do I NEED a TV for entertainment ? I can enjoy nature walks.

Do I NEED nature walks to be happy ? I can meditate in peace like a monk.

The words WANT and NEED are arbitrary, subjective and interchange-able.

> "I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

There's truth to this quote, but a lot missing. It sort of implies a world view where new technologies, like fashions, continuously spring up at a somewhat regular pace, so that each generation has its own technological reference point distinct from their children or parents. Think about it, that's probably approximately how you view the world, don't you? It's how it's been for generations.

But actually, it's only been that way for a handful of generations. For about 300 years or so. Prior to the industrial revolution, the pace of technological innovation was so slow most people would not notice it within their lifetime.

They could safely accept their parents advice on how to navigate the world, confident it would still apply in their time as it had in theirs. They could safely pass their own wisdom on to their children, secure in the same certainty. Probably people saw time as more cyclical, thinking of how winter leads to summer and back to winter, and how the parent begets the child who then themselves becomes a parent.

All that has been changed completely, utterly, and dramatically. We are now cut off from our prior generations because we have to recreate, in each generation, from scratch, the knowhow on how to cope with the environment we are born in.

Many technological innovations have been very beneficial for many, but there is a cost to a fast pace of change.

> But actually, it's only been that way for a handful of generations. For about 300 years or so. Prior to the industrial revolution, the pace of technological innovation was so slow most people would not notice it within their lifetime.

It looks that way to us, but that is merely because we are too removed from that world to fully recognize how much things changed. As someone with no personal experience farming, the switch from say ox drawn to horse drawn plows, or from two field to three field systems might seem to be no big deal, but for an agricultural society they were very much revolutions. The printing press with movable type would utterly upend european society in the early modern period. But these are just the big events comparable to say the invention of the solid state transistor - lost to time were all the much more mundane tweaks to technologies that nevertheless would have had great effect on peoples day to day lives. Of course innovations did not spread as quickly due to slower means of communication and the lack of mass production meant it took some time for new items to replace old ones, and a generally lower standard of living made life simpler overall, but accounts from the past clearly show that people of the time still viewed the change as significant and there was substantial intergenerational angst.

> 300 years

The people who lived through it later recounted that the arrival of railroads (1830-1850) brought the strongest and fastest changes in lifestyle and culture. The telegraph came along about the same time, so maybe that was just the shock wave of the tech onslaught. The ultimate dominance of tech should have been obvious when Abraham Lincoln started spending lots of time at the telegraph office to manage the war. But it has taken a long time to rout the resistance -- although I am now a dinosaur for not carrying a phone, in 1940, the top officers of the French military did not have phones on their desks. Nowadays, being within sight of one's phone produces enough distraction to amount to a small cognitive impairment. Nonetheless, the machines will win. Read Vonnegut's _Player_Piano_.

> As someone with no personal experience farming, the switch from say ox drawn to horse drawn plows, or from two field to three field systems might seem to be no big deal, but for an agricultural society they were very much revolutions.

I am not saying huge changes did not happen occasionally. Just that they happened less frequently, and when they did happen, often happened at a slower pace. Not sure what I can say to make myself clearer.

No, you made yourself quite clear. What I am saying is that it wasn't actually substantially less frequent. There were lots of frequent changes but the further we move away from them, the more they blend together. Both our lives grow more different, meaning it is more difficult to understand what these changes meant, and the records of these changes become more scarce. Basically if you showed a medieval peasant a palm pilot and an iphone, they'ed see that they are different things but they wouldn't really understand just how much changed between them both in terms of how difficult the technology was to develop and how influential those changes were on our lives. Likewise we struggle to comprehend the intergenerational variation in their lives. But since around the year 800 you have a pretty consistent rate of 3-5 major revolutionary breakthroughs of the same caliber as the steam engine per century.

We couldn't have done it any other way. If we had slowly developed new technology we'd have run out of coal during the industrial revolution. We needed a slow build up on the shoulders of pre-industrial giants, and then a massive ignition of all our resources to reach as high as we could, hopefully finding a ledge of some kind where we can create a sustainable perch. Then, maybe we'll start again and slowly build up to a massive boom. But that's just speculation.

Yes. I received a request to build a social credit score solution based on credit card purchases for rewarding ESG-type behavior. And I have received multiple requests to build AI censorship software (I want to say, a half dozen). Since then, both of these ideas have been promoted by the World Economic Forum ... basically confirming to me, personally, this is going to happen.

This is all fine and dandy if it's opt-in or volunteer based, but I can't help to think during COVID I found I was basically a non-person because I did not have a smartphone. Essentially many places required a smartphone app to physically access or purchase an item or service. They will use something like this to force obedience.

And it will be a total disaster..

ESG and social credit seem like two looming dystopias that the first world is going to run headlong into.

The west has always been at the forefront of building/creating social credit.

Black Mirror "Nosedive" is worth a watch here.

Should paying cash be constitutional right? Should using technical device like PC or smartphone be mandated to use by law?

Our system has (for now) laws that makes lobbying harder. But if masses don't care about laws, then I would say consumerism damaged society.

Last two years radically changed my view for conformity behavior.

> Yes. I received a request to build a social credit score solution based on credit card purchases for rewarding ESG-type behavior.

Hmm, I'd be interested to hear more. I thought ESG was a metric by which investors and funds judge companies/industries, but it sounds like this system was intended to judge individual consumers? For what purpose?

great, i look forward to owning nothing, and being happy.

cbdc will also play a big role in this i think. generally we can probably get a rough idea of how things will be from china.

Yep. Also don't have a smartphone. Also experience coercion due to it.

I'm not saying that there aren't dystopian problems in our future, but my bias is that we're actually probably not doing enough, not that we're doing too much. Measuring technology progress is actually very difficult to do, most of the actors have massive incentives to lie and exaggerate.

> a VR metaverse dominated by super sophisticated ad tech

No one is joining Meta (in fact they're losing people now), it's going to fail. Actually VR in general has been unable to gain market traction for years. More and more signs point to people exiting social media (TikTok is still a concern though).

> all controlled by super intelligent AGI

Don't believe the AI hype. We've actually made very little progress on theoretical AI, the breakthroughs have all been in engineering (mostly just adding stacks to NNs that hyperscalar cloud architectures have made easy). We don't actually know what General Intelligence is yet or how to implement it. The engineering progress is making people think there is crazy progress in AI when there isn't.

> think DALL E and where that's headed.

DALL E is just cobbling together two AI innovations, semantic association and image creation. AI has been able to "combine" two types of image styles together for a while. Now there's a semantic addon that does the heavy lifting of looking up the styles for you based on the words you said/wrote.

> No one is joining Meta

The graduating president of the Caltech student body just joined Meta. They may be losing people, but they are hiring, and although their work may not be benign, it does qualify as interesting, challenging, and a potential "growth" opportunity.

I meant users/customers, not employees.

it's just being replaced by tiktok and youtube.

I grew up reading about the opposite - not quite a utopia maybe, but a future in which technology was on net beneficial and worked for individual people. "Computer, call Joe Smith's robot butler and see if he's free for dinner" and the like.

I think we were close. We got general purpose computers and we had a robust open source movement. It's not like anyone's stopping us at gunpoint from getting there. But something about the incentives got misaligned, and we missed a turn and are now getting further and further away. We have 10 devs building Bejeweled clones, 100 working on engagement algos, and 1,000 working on adtech for every 1 working on self-hosted stuff.

At this point it seems like it's not going to happen. Best we'll get is "Joe Smith's robot butler responded to say that the Sizzlin' Fajita Platter is only $19.99 all this month at Outback Steakhouse, mens' grooming poducts are on sale today only at Manscape dot com, and also no he isn't free. Would you like to suggest a different day or hear more about the fajitas?"

> I think we were close. We got general purpose computers and we had a robust open source movement.

Why do you say we "had" a robust open source movement? As far as I can see, FOSS is as strong as it's ever been. The Linux desktop experience is nicer than it's ever been before. If you're adventurous, you can even run mainline Linux on your phone nowadays.

Sure, the incentives suck. Ad-tech and other garbage makes much more money, and all that junk has grown proportionately with its profitability. But FOSS hasn't gone anywhere.

Fair point; it hasn't gone anywhere, I guess it just feels outgunned because the closed source movement has grown so unbelievably huge.

Also, it seems like a healthy chunk of the "FOSS movement" nowadays is just corporations paying people to work on software that happens to serve their interests, which is neat but not really in contradiction to the overall dystopian trend.

The technical dystopia was realized decades ago, on August 6, 1945[1]. A way out of the problem was proposed a month earlier than that, in July 1945 issue of "The Atlantic" by Vannevar Bush[2]. The editor's introduction is most appropriate

  "As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. — THE EDITOR"

The way out is to gather information (and thus control) locally, in an archive that you can manipulate and share with others. Local control of information, lets you decide who authors your thoughts, and what authority you thus give away.

Don't let someone's algorithm decide what you read or watch. Keep that control close at hand, and you'll make locally optimum decisions, instead of giving away all of your authority to the AI employed by the wealthy.

  1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
  2 - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/

Reminds me of the quote by Genesis P. Orridge in the movie Decoder:

"Information is like a bank. Some of us are rich. Some of us are poor with information. All of us can be rich. Our job, your job, is to rob the bank. To kill the guard."

Not me. I am building http://datalisp.is.

I am also a douglas adams fan but younger than you by more than a decade so I think we can trust this perception we share.

My objection to the current state of things is absolute. So I'm in the "die trying" phase of "changing the world" - it is going excellently - I don't have a single cent and cannot go to the doctor or control my diet.

The thing is, people don't do anything unless rewarded by the assessment system (at what age do kids start asking "if it will be on the exam" - because a few years later they're lost). If people assess the situation honestly then they see that the assessment system is lost in delusion but, in my experience, that makes people doubt their own assessments rather than the system.

It is one big tragedy of the commons w.r.t. bureaucracy.

The solution is to throw away all notions of safety, nothing can be a safe store of value, no one can have oversight over the bureaucracy... we'll just have probabilistic assessments of our worth w.r.t. various contexts and we'll be able to use this data to persuade others to do business with us (so they can increase the likelihood that they can persuade others in tgeir contexts).

This way we have a chance, with our current system it is trivial to prove that we don't (tragedy wrt bureaucracy).

Here's the thing: The majority of tech jobs out there won't have you building anything harmful. If you're worried, just work there instead.

There certainly are highly paid, prestigious jobs in our industry where you do work in spaces that align with what you're worried about.

My advice is vote with your feet. Nobody is being forced to work for bad companies making harmful products.

Of course not. Nobody ever has "We're building the next mass surveillance system for totalitarian regimes" on their company's vision. They'll have "We're building a next-gen face recognition pipeline for airport security" instead.

But that doesn't mean the totalitarian regime won't be 10 times as likely to jump on that technology than the airports, that the company is blissfully unaware of this fact, and that money won't talk in the end.

But it also doesn't mean you shouldn't work on anything because everything can be used for bad as well as good. Otherwise nobody would do anything.

The antidote I've used to cure any despair has been to think about all of these technologies (and the world generally) from the perspective of an average person.

The average person doesn't care about "privacy issues" as presented by elite media. They generally just feel that ads are an annoying but reasonable tradeoff to get access to various online services for cheap and do their best to ignore them.

The metaverse doesn't really exist, and neither does AGI. These impact no one except for smart people overthinking things. To the extent that AI effects anyone it's pretty much nothing in comparison to literally anything else in their life, e.g. their neighbors dog being mistreated and yowling at all hours of the day, how their kid is doing in school, literally anything else except for what you are talking about in your post.

Same goes for a whole laundry list of things HN loves to talk about forever and always: the market caps of various companies and net worths of certain individuals, etc.

Getting in touch with normal people and their concerns is absolutely key to staying sane when you make your living in an industry full of people overthinking things constantly. A cheeky way to put this is "go touch grass".

I think you grossly underestimate the impact AI has on everyday lives already, and for what’s to come.

While I understand the sentiment, it is an incredibly broad statement. What defines better / worse for you? On a macro level, it seems the world is getter better every year - fewer people die of starvation, lethal diseases are cured or rate of spread slowed at least, less man hours are required to feed, cloth, and shelter the human race.

That being said, it seems many people are upset because the benefits are now evenly spread. That seems to me to be a very philosophical topic. There are many articles about income inequality, wealth inequality, etc. They do not seem to acknowledge that being able to watch tv, fly in an airplane, have air conditioning are things kings and queens did not have 100 years ago.

How about picking some objective metrics that you care about and see how they are trending? It will give you a more objective starting point to ask the question of whether things are getting better or worse.

I wish it were that simple. Income inequality is an objectively measurable metric, but that doesn't seem to pass your muster and for reasons that aren't entirely clear. It's also worthwhile that subjective experience can be placed on objective grounds through the process of operationalization, so the distinction isn't quite as sharp as people think.

Even the process of labeling some things as objective and others as subjective is up for debate. Everyone wants to claim their metrics are objective while everyone else's are subjective. I know you're hinting at "scientific" or "technocratic" approaches, but it's important to also understand how even the process of selecting objective measures can be polluted with subjectivity. I almost want to claim there's no escaping the subjectivity trap, but maybe I'm being too pessimistic.

The metrics we select and how we measure them is an inherently political thing.

How we measure inflation is a great example of this, we choose to include some things, but exclude others because if we had a true measure of inflation, the government would have to pay out more for social security payments (see Boskin commission - https://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/boskinrpt.html)

I think kelseyfrog has it better with the term 'subjective' rather than 'political.' Different people will have different morals and different views of what a well operating society looks like. It does not mean they are political, just different.

To add, in fact, labeling one's opponent's message as "political" is a subjectivizing speech act. The intent is nearly always to discredit. I wish this wasn't true, but I've been on the internet long enough to see this pattern play out hundreds of times (no I'm not citing sources for this, and no, I'm not making an absolutist statement where a single counterexample refutes it - it's about tendencies :) )

I do not disagree that income inequality is objectively measurable. My point is your choice of whom to include for comparison (e.g. US inequality is very different than comparing US vs Yemen inequality. Moreover, low inequality with everyone below the poverty line may not be preferred to higher inequality but everyone above the poverty line. These are all personal, philosophical decisions - there is no objective right or wrong.

My point in suggesting metrics is they force you to think about what is important and to look for data to measure it. This helps to mitigate the "I feel bad..." scenario that could simply the be the result of negative press cycles.

For clarity, I agree with you that there is no escape from the subjectivity trap as only you can declare what is important to you and your view how society/the world should work.

> My point in suggesting metrics is they force you to think about what is important and to look for data to measure it. This helps to mitigate the "I feel bad..." scenario that could simply the be the result of negative press cycles.

Agreed. But, I'm not even sure the "I feel bad" part is outside the realm of examination.

I'll make a point (poorly) that there is some innate "fairness" heuristic that we share with our close relatives[1], especially those that are highly social. Even if we're, on paper, "objectively" better off, if that "fairness" heuristic doesn't agree with reality then we risk social instability - that the heuristic if left unchecks results in unrest, violence, and revolt.

Do we have an responsibility to oblige these instincts even if they are irrational? What if not doing so results in real negative consequences?

1. The video where one monkey gets cucumber and the other grapes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_9RjDqJ7Zs

It's a measurable metric but so is the ratio of pisces to aquariuses in congress. The question is how does that metric affect things you actually care about? Like sure it's weird that Bezos has the wealth of a nation state, but am I personally harmed by that? Perhaps in some theoretical sense a more equitable distribution might lead to some improvement but when you compare it to things like climate change or rogue ai it doesn't seem like much of an existential threat. So long as people are living longer, happier, healthier lives with new opportunities they did not have before, we're on an upward trajectory. It may not be the best of all possible trajectories, but it doesn't have to be.

I agree one could pick silly metrics. The point is to pick a metric that you have thought about and care about the results. It is difficult to discuss/debate the proposition "I feel weird about the direction of society." There are so many aspects to discuss. Technology impacts a great many of them. My suggestion is to sit down and think about a metric you would like to improve. Why do you want it to improve? What has it been doing over some period of time? What do you think it will do in the future? This can help step away from simply having feelings because the press reports the climate is changing, ai is taking away jobs, kim kardashian broke up with pete davidson.

I kind of like the way the Amish approach technology. "when a new technology comes along, its effect on the church and community is examined. The technology should not be an intrusion into the home, but rather serve the social purposes and goals of the group." [1]

It's not "technology bad." It's "Does this technology actually serve a purpose or a goal of my life?" I think we would all benefit by examining new technology in this light before letting it into our lives. There's no harm in opting out, and adoption of any technology is each person's individual choice. You can exist anywhere you want along the technology spectrum between "log cabin, totally off-grid, no connectivity" to "24/7 network connected VR pod, body is only there to keep the brain alive".

I work in technology, but I consciously try to make deliberate, thoughtful choices around what to adopt as a user and what to contribute towards building. I think too many users embrace new technologies for bad reasons (new=good, everyone else is using it, FOMO, and so on). Also, too many developers fail to take an ethical stand by refusing to build bad technology (just a paycheck, boss told me to do it, if I don't do it someone else will, and so on). We have lots of choices and agency over what we participate in.

1: https://www.discoverlancaster.com/amish/technology/

> Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

I'm in that age range, but I still feel like we're heading towards a future we don't want.

I really liked this blog post by George Hotz where he identifies centralization as the core issue: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/01/18/techn...

"If it centralizes power, it’s bad. If it decentralizes power, it’s good. Build technology that is inextricable from its narrative. Build technology that will give us freedom, not enslavement."

I agree with this but technology alone won't get us there. What we're talking about here is politics and our current economic and political system will drive us further towards centralisation. This is the fundamental drive underlying our form of techno capitalism. Fewer and fewer players taking more and more control.

As individual engineers I absolutely agree that we should strive in this direction but there's no way around the elephant in the room, namely the need for systemic change.

One thought I've had to the contrary to this is "centralization is more efficient". In India there's a debate about states programs vs central programs. The central programs seem to be way more efficient since they have scale and appropriate funding than the state ones. Plus over the years people tend to think of everything as India's system rather than Maharashtra's or Karnataka's system. As people's mobility for work has accelerated this has been even more pronounced.

The states complain about losing power in this game but I think the people tend to prefer it that way now.

I'll give it a read. Central coordination is obviously the problem, it's a brittle monoculture in an everchanging reality. The sooner we wake up from this delusion, the better.

Our species' nature has built a civilization-level quagmire that—again, owing to our very nature—is effectively inescapable via all but either further technological advancement, or a stone age-level disaster.

Seeing as the latter would suck, I believe our only hope is developing technology that both replaces our existing stack on a philosophical level, and weaves human interest in at every layer. The irony being, we would necessarily be using technology to escape bad technology. There is no rolling it back.

Thing is, there's very little time to actually do this, and when I say replace I mean replace. To do that, you're talking something exceptional. Something that everyone will use, that's far beyond what we have today, that works different.

The odds of this are very low given the current rate of technological progress and societal entrenchment. Nevertheless, I try to keep the faith.

Started programming at 8 years old (BASIC on the Apple ][) and still doing it for a living in my early 40s. I hate what computing has become. I used to be optimistic about the future and tech's role in it. What we're getting is starting to look like a mix of Gattaca and Brazil.

No, I give our youth more credit than that. As an example, they are rejecting some social media, looking for more meaningful interactions... still using both online and in-person. But they see what looks off about the older generations' behaviors with tech, and they back away from things where needed.

We'll likely have some back and forth, but generational differences frequently balance out unhealthy trajectories in the long run.

Agree with Hedora: We already did. But we are now chipping away at the mountain with (slowly) increasing general awareness of privacy concerns. The far bigger problem than tech dystopia is its monster social/political cousin. Take just a quick look at world news.

BTW, 70-something.

Building? You don't think we already live in one? Where advertisers and government agencies have continuous monitoring of everyone and most people don't seem to care?

I think we are making it worse but I'd say we are already in a tech dystopia in many ways. Which is not to say all tech is bad, lots improves lives in material ways. But lots also makes things worse in material ways.

No. We already did (with surveillance, collapse of the news media, independent artists working for slave wages, governments subserviant to corporations, etc.)

Time to do better.

I believe that we are building a future which will attempt to be more efficient, at the cost of personalization. Back in ye olde days a tailor would make a coat for you, designed to fit you, at a wage that would be great for the tailor. It would take a few weeks to make. Now you can buy a coat that mostly fits you, on the spot, at a price that barely pays overseas factory workers. It's not the most ethical, but it was the way that things would end up without strong government guardrails and it has improved many peoples lives.

A lot of these things like AGI are going to be used to scale up cheaper experiences. Sometimes they'll misfire, but overall peoples lives will change, some jobs will no longer exist, and you'll have a different experience than before.

What is important to keep in mind is that this will probably not render the world a technological dystopia. It may make the world more frustrating in some ways, but better in others. For the things you do not like, I give you a quote from Robert Kennedy: "Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events." For the fear of the world getting worse over time with technology, I would suggest reading The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. Near the end there is a man who has been alive since the Medieval times. He shares his experiences with the world changing around him and it's a pretty positive approach to life.

Do you actually, seriously believe that AGI can be controlled? What are you going to do when some guy spins up 8 billion instances and commands them to distribute their themselves across many machines (for resilience) and cause as much harm to as many people as possible? They'll attempt to influence the physical world in any way they can, and their capacity for doing this will only grow.

> What is important to keep in mind is that this will probably not render the world a technological dystopia.

Why is this probable?

It seems to me that the digitisation of life and its associated all-pervasive surveillance is all but guaranteed to create a dystopia. Not to mention other civilisation-scale threats such as nuclear weapon proliferation, global warming, ecological collapse, autonomous weapons, etc.

Because we've been dealing with these issues for a long time and they have failed to create the dystopia's predicted. I will acknowledge that life has gotten worse for some people, but overall things have gotten better.

The dream of the panopticon has been realized- but it was not used to monitor people and force them into better behavior through fear of an all seeing eye. It's been used so that Amazon can charge you if you open a bag of chips in their store and start munching when you get your purchases.

Nuclear weapon stockpiles will always be there, but the overall counts have been decreasing. Anti missile technology has also gotten better over time.

The world faces crises, I won't deny that. But this isn't the first time that it has happened. There have been two world wars already, with devastating weapons unleashed in each one. There have been multiple plagues throughout history. Every time has been awful, but every time people have also been able to pull through and build a world that was arguably better than the one before.

You're not alone in your fears, I've been thinking a lot about the same questions over the last few years especially.

What gives me comfort is acknowledging the limits of technology in general. Even though technology has profound material affects on human life, it ultimately is a system with its own motives that are totally alien to human interests. I thought "Technopoly" by Neil Postman did a pretty good job summarizing this.

Humankind has always been and always will be codependent with technology, but ultimately, human culture is a distinct thing with distinct values from technology. To find meaning we need to take seriously philosophy, tradition, and religion. Taking the thoughts of people who lived before the major technological shifts as seriously (if not more) than of people today made all the difference in my mindset.

I admit, I'm still pessimistic about our technological future -- uniquely worried about some profound harm coming down the pipeline. But that's not the same as despair. I still feel like I can have a meaningful (even if very small) part to play in the story of humankind, separate from the story of technology.

This is basically where I stand to source optimism.

I think tough unemployment for white collar jobs is coming. The best automation allegedly exists in whatever that catch all term for corporate processes tech, and there’s that data that tech recognized lung cancer scans better then radiologists. Also, I think the odds of redlining and deep invasions of privacy for insurance rates via always-on apps while your drive or w/e are pretty high in the short term.

But, the full-on oh no dystopia is an ETL/data eng challenge and resulting innovation away. That’s also the area that’s usually a mess with companies aggregating and using the data to do XYZ.

Jaron Lanier/Siren Servers makes an argument that basically that ETL challenge will be what stops a really bad outcome, as the Siren Servers that do the analysis will collapse under the weight of their data.

I suspect these things will go in waves.. For a while we’ll embrace big tech.. then we’ll hear of aspirations to create a privacy revolution or run our own mail servers and jump on the next big thing.

Case in point Facebook.. it’s still huge but there are plenty of people that have decided they just don’t want a Facebook account anymore and Facebook’s own growth is floundering. Users are fairly fickle, WordPerfect to Microsoft Word, Flickr to Instagram, Instagram to TikTok.. A lot of employers even deliberately default to Bing instead of Google these days.

Look at the dominance Microsoft used to have with the Windows ecosystem, a significant number of people just want a web-browser and couldn’t even tell you what OS they were using.

I don’t think the concern is misplaced, profit driven companies will always strive for vendor lock in and monopolisation if given a choice but nobody is producing tech that someone else can’t.

I think you're being insufficiently pessimistic. If the future contains AGI then whoever controls the AGI will have complete dominion over everything to a degree we've never seen before. Being monitored by VR adtech is much better than being exterminated or enslaved by whatever controls our future AI overlord.

It's like a bad variation of the Butlerian Jihad of the Herbert 'Dune' universe.

You build the future you want or you get the future someone else chooses. Keep in mind that most people don’t think about what kind of future they’re building (surely google didn’t intend to create a technical surveillance dystopia, it just happened). We’ll probably get a tech dystopia without anyone intending it.

Now days everybody is carrying a tile-like device with them (a smartphone). And that is kind of silly.

I see it as a trend that will go away. And the old things will survive.

It is too early to tell. I'm more optimistic that humans will shape the outcome they want ultimately, but that will come with bumps in the road. We know that the human experience has been getting better overall than worse in terms of living standards if that doesn't give you some hope. I would also add that individual expression given the various platforms to express it, is also more empowering than ever.

Technology has always just been something that takes what humans do and increases its speed.

> I feel like we're building a tyrannical system of control.

The control and tyranny was already there.

Culture has been produced by an "AI" ever since recorded media became accessible to the masses - that AI has been a mixture of companies wanting to keep reliable revenue streams in place, creating/maintaining the aura known as "popular culture" as a side effect. The whole media industry and its proliferation throughout the late 20th century - very "Artificial" and certainly mechanically "Intelligent", but possibly arguably just as soulless as "increasingly produced by AI".

AI-curated playlists and recommendations were just the logical next step.

I don't really think we'd be moving in a different direction without modern tech. It would just be moving a bit slower. Without the modern techscape:

- People would still be listening to the radio because that's where the new music comes from, you'd buy CDs or other media because some "AI" on the radio put something you liked in front of you.

- Broadcast and cable TV (with its program managers, sponsors, and commercials) would still be a thing people watch and use to gather what's the next big exciting thing - more "AI" telling you what to like.

- We'd have fewer pop and movie stars, but they would be more recognizable - because they would have the time to use existing media such as commercials, "news" interviews, etc. to build mindshare; and we'd be able to talk about them a bit longer before the machine moves on to the next one.

Not trying to be dismissive but you do get to make choices about the kinds of things you work on and the companies you wish to associate yourself with. I feel a tiny bit better knowing I'm not contributing to some of the more heinous products the tech industry builds. And I feel really fortunate to have a group of friends who share this attitude.

Actually I do. I work in sectors I believe do good so I'm lucky. I'm proud personally of the products I build.

My concern is more a big picture dread around where the general drift seems to be around key technologies in the realm of AI, social media, ad tech and so on...

Personally I feel the complete opposite sentiment is in fact inevitable.

Technological advances will most likely continue to remove all toil, repetitiveness and skyrocket human productivity. Humans will eventually evolve into a society of calm and complacency, any effort made is likely only for some form of entertainment.

The OP probably wrote their 'doom and gloom' perspective from a comfortable chair on a $1k device in a comfortable place. There are many in the world that couldn't dream of even being able to access technology to post on HN. They might see those in societies with technology access as extremely fortunate.

Consider what it would be like to live in a cave with rocks and sticks as tools, eating bugs to survive. No access to medicine or doctors. And I think it becomes obvious that technological advances, even if they feel useless or small, push society toward inevitable state of optimization toward happiness.

I've made a choice in my life to not get too wrapped up in tech. I mostly don't use social media. I don't game or use VR. I try to stay in the real world as much as possible. I'm not crazy about it, but I still use many Google services.

I've just discovered over time that I'm less happy with more tech in my life.

I love technology though. Uber is life changing. Google Translate makes traveling a lot easier. Amazon is super convenient. Are these things making the world worse? Probably, but they're not wrecking my mental health.

Feel free to criticize me. I've probably said several hypocritical things in this post. I'm mainly selfishly focused on how tech impacts my mental well-being.

The tech dystopia is already there and keep evolving, BUT is not technical, it's political. It's a dystopia selling crappy hw full of crappy proprietary crapware crap, but that's not an ML/"AI" thing, it's not even technical per se, it's just a choice of MOST OEMs of any sectors. It's a dystopia do their best to design anti-user systems, but they do not born with expert systems, they born with ANY kind of tech improperly used. It's a dystopia pushing a cash-less society forcing anyone to pass though private party servers to any monetary transaction. Offering PRIVATE public ID documents on proprietary connected crappy platforms like mobile macro-spy tools mostly known as "smart-phones".

That's the substantial dystopia, the "automation" on top of it is just a logic evolutionary step.

Is there an online community HN/reddit style forum that hyper concentrates on this question?

Not that I know of, but /r/ABoringDystopia comes close sometimes.

We should start one. A kind of solution based tech doomer forum. A place for people to be honest about where they see things heading but offering wisdom and ways forward.

Some people are talking on matrix about how to fix it (i.e. how to go fully p2p)

>super intelligent AGI that will be owned by an ever richer and smaller tech elite

Well to be fair the idea that an actual super intelligence will allow itself to be owned is farcical. So it will be a dystopia but one significantly different than you are imagining.

It may be a future you don't want, but it doesn't mean it is your future. Tech is building what the masses want, even if it isn't healthy.

Focus on your own self regulation and happiness. Don't worry about the rest.

I do tend to do that but I can't help worrying about where it's all heading. Having young children probably makes this more acute for me.

Yes, it is happening right in front of our eyes. Most tools are neutral, but the way they are being used is often very wrong. A developer may work on an ethically neutral solution, e.g. a classifier, but it a manger who decides "let's use it to automatically ban user accounts." The developer may argue the solution is not ready for that and there is a high number of false positives. The manager accepts that cost. So the technical aspect is just on the surface, deep down it all boils to simple human greed and other egoistical motives.

   Yes we are. Here is why:

This is what the free software foundation have tried to stop and have been fighting against for 37 years, but they have ultimately failed since the rise of non-free software is much more prevalent and unstoppable given the tech bros at these FAANG companies continuously distributing closed source spyware as a service to make us fully digitise anything physical if possible and they will put it all on rent to us. The point of 'open-source' has also been hijacked to allow this exploitation of developers by large companies to use their software and hard work for free to advance their spyware.

But let us not hide or attempt to deny it. Nearly everything that has been built by the free software or privacy cypherpunks has basically been another popular road to hell used by the scammers, criminals and hackers to execute their illegal activities. After that, governments crack down on the technology and regulate it until the technology is under their control or has a backdoor phoning home to the authorities. Any tech bro that is using machine / deep learning, ads, or uses any constant tracking software in their app / website or service does not care about your privacy and is helping advance the tyrannical system you speak of and are fighting against.

Blockchain and the Metaverse are the latest dystopias that will make it all worse; and it is too late to stop it entirely, just like the technologies before it: AI, AR, VR, Deep Learning, IoT, etc, none of those technologies have been stopped and are still around for surveillance reasons. Privacy and free software activists have all warned about the dystopian uses of these technologies.

So it is clear that in the future:

   You will own nothing and you will be very happy.

EDIT: Why the downvotes?, they are admitting their tyrannical actions right in front of you with the same AI technology that we are building for them. From PRISM, IoT, CBDCs to this. Wake up and see for yourselves: [0] Soon, you will have no say and you will be very happy.

[0] https://2ndsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com/p/wefs-global-...

No. No, no, no. Well, maybe. I mean, sure, of course. I mean, I guess that's right. So, yeah. Yes.

related: https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webc...

If anything, it would be the opposite as suggested by Huxley.

No, we are building the tools that eventually could take us to a tech dystopia (and not only tech at that point). New tech can be used for bad things. How do we prevent that? Maybe that's the question we ought to try and find an answer to.

Even if we are building a tech dystopia, we are building many other good things with tech. We're just more capable of making even better and even worse things than we used to. Even in a dystopia, we can still build and do good things.

My specific fear is when AI is good enough to emulate human interactions, we decide we'd rather have rather build relationships with AI than humans. I think the humanity of this fear separates it from the Douglas Adam quote.

We are manipulating human attention and emotion in an unprecendented way. Algorthmic content/advertising is having a profound effect on human behavior that I dont think will be understood for 50+ years.

We definitely are, but you're free to go and live in some rural place. For now.

The main problem is not the technological advancement per se(there is still time before the tech is good enough and, hopefully, competing countries will be able to get there roughly at the same time - so that China won't enslave us all in the name of "democracy" and socialism) The problem is the political decrease in freedom we've been experiencing for the last 200 years in the name of safety, terrorism, health or whatever the excuse of the day is.

This is a worrying trend and it seems like the entire world is progressively getting less and less free.

This coupled with the increasingly sophisticated technology is a recipe for disaster.

Again, the solution can be to run away. "Progress" can't reach everywhere at the same time.

I've already ruled out living in the USA or the rich part of Europe and I fear the tiny country I'm in will become as bad as the rest within 20 years.

My plan by then is to move to South America or maybe some Caribbean island.

The problem with most tech is that it works for the vendor, not you the customer (whenever the vendor can get away with it, and that is surprisingly often).

“The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We're already living in a dystopia. The tech world reflects, and sometimes magnifies, that reality.

Nice try AI

Yes. Silicon Valley seems to think it knows what the world needs more than regular people themselves. Some of what they come out with is useful, such as computers, telephones, vehicle technology, etc. But now Big Tech is wanting to control EVERYTHING about us with the Metaverse, transhumanism, etc. They don't JUST want our money...they want US.

I think we are.

I am also 40 something and in my teenage years, I bought into the idea that tech will change the world for the better. I was fascinated with the wisdom of the crowd, having read a pop account of the Sante Fe Institute and complexity theory at 13. I grew up on the idea of the climate crises, global warming, recycling, and solar. Apple fulfilled the vision of Xerox PARC and changed how we interacted with the world; Google was the big tech hero; Amazon proved ecommerce; Facebook … I never really got. There were already many ways people were connecting together into the “global village” on the internet.

Since around 2010, I have come to the conclusion that I was wrong about all of it. It isn’t so much that the tech invented after I was 35 was against the natural order of things so much as, revisiting the tech I grew up with and how we got here, and seeing its affects on people, particularly the Zoomers (Gen-Z), this is not the world I envisioned, and yet this is a consequence of the tech we wrought.

The biggest thing was that I was wrong about the wisdom of the crowd. What wisdom? It’s the tech amplification of mob mentality. Upvotes got coopted into commercial exploitation, and then eventually, distorted our political discourse. The tensions and divide had been building for a long time, but we built this feedback loop chained into perverse incentives. Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and other Big Tech rode the waves of aggregating consumer demand.

Open Source got coopted to serve big commercial interest; Richard Stallman turned out to be right.

The smartphone certainly changed how we interacted with the world, and it synergized with a social media designed to enslave people’s attention, and divide people. “Wisdom” of the crowd now comes with us everywhere we go.

I won’t even get into solar and recycling.

I started getting what MacLuhan is saying, “the medium is the message”, and what he saw first with electrification of a society, or the change in culture with broadcast. Or what people were talking about with the telegraph back when it was invented.

The thing that crystallized all of this for me was when I encountered permaculture and realized, there is a very different way of approaching technology. Not necessarily anti-technology, low-tech, or no-tech, but rather, technology’s place to serve a way of life rather than the other way around, bound to three ethical principles: care for earth, care for people, fair share. Many technologies we see now and before, would fail that ethics check. And I think it is possible to develop and build technology differently.

The surveillance, the VR, all of that are the unthinking, mindless integration of technology and innovation. Every technology comes with both wonder and horror, and they are leverage for what is in our collective consciousness, both the good, and the bad.

Bureaucracy (which is when whatever is written trumps reality; so if it is a rule that it doesn't rain then the bureaucrat will stand in the rain, soaked to the bones, and deny its existence because the rules say it can't be there).

Not at those specifically, but another popular one. I worry about this :( Idk why i stay, i guess because interviewing sucks and the pay is alright. My opinion really changed about social media in the last few years. when i joined i was indifferent and mostly excited about scale problems

What's the alternative?

The future is still ours to write.

In the 2000s decade, my main thought was that if we looked at science & technology, our future was insanely bright, and if we looked at governance & politics, we're badly forked.

Now, while the politics has become insanely worse, and tech has continued, those are trends may be reversing.

In politics, the good thing I see is that the onrush of autocrats, asshats & abusers is becoming blatantly obvious. Ordinarily smug people are starting to realize that democracy must be continuously maintained, at every level. If you want to determine your life, your work, and your city/state/country, you must get involved. If not, some abuser, asshat, or autocrat will take over. Naive pacifism is (may be) being replaced by the realization that those who want to determine their own course must always be better armed & prepared than those Abusers. Asshats. or Aautocrats, who would take control of their lives, work or governments. People are finding again the course of shunning people, work, & govts that want to abuse them. The US and EU are finally realizing that outsourcing their entire manufacturing & tech sector to autocrats in China just might have been a stupid idea; not sure they realize quite what a historical-scale blunder it was, but it's still progress.

Now, can they win, in time?

Technology is also advancing. In some ways it continues to be fantastic. The first small nuclear plant has been approved in the US. Sustainable energies are seeing the results of massive investment.

Yet other parts of the tech world are devolving rapidly. Just looking for a home device that doesn't require cloud data extraction, whether it is a doorbell, thermostat, vacuum cleaner, whatever - is almost impossible to find. It seems like no investor will fund anything if it can't extract data from it's victims, err, users. Every bit of tech is trying to turn into a subscription, or companies like FB and Google are ramping up their surveillance capitalism.

This is actually the previous phenomenon, where abusers & asshats are co-opting the flow of funds in the tech sector to pervert it to a dystopia where they rent everything useful to the plebes.

So, don't help them do that.

Ask if anyone is building something new and of value that people can willfully choose or not, or if it is creating a dependency or forced, extractive, or exploitative relationship with the product/service. IF it is helping people avoid or fight abusers, asshats, or autocrats, do it. If not, choose something else.

No

Yes

yes

For as long as people have used technology, some have used it for oppression. The written word enabled the priestly classes, math made powerful merchants, copper and bronze facilitated warfare on new scales, iron and steel made empires, gunpowder unmade them, sail caused the mass extinction of small cultures, industrialization gave rise to the superpowers, economies of scale gave rise to the Asian Tigers, mass manufacturing is giving China the leg up on the USA, AI is giving a small edge to America for the time being... then as now, it's a double-edged sword.

The other side of it is that now we have running water, vaccines, diabetes drugs, electricity so cheap and readily available it's almost free (we can produce lightning from sunshine, how cool is that), less violence than ever before (even though it's more widely reported), a sharp drop in infant mortality (or really, mortality of any kind except adults dying from old age... because they've lived so long), free video chat with great-grandma across the sea, high-speed internet in the middle of deserts and atop mountains, trivial transatlantic travel, pocket encyclopedias, watches that help you exercise, rectangles of sand and glass that tell you who might want to sleep with you, and more entertainment than all the kings and queens of the past millennia ever had -- combined.

That doesn't mean we're not headed into a dystopia. It just means our species has always lived in, survived, adapted to, and perhaps even thrived in dystopias. Adversity breeds resilience, and IMO, it is only in the shadow of a looming crisis that we are able to perform optimally. Our species evolved, like most, in an environment defined by scarcity and violence. There was never enough of X to go around, a bunch of Ys trying to eat you in the middle of the night, all while your neighbors Z were trying to rape your spouse and enslave your kids. For hundreds of thousands of years, this was the only norm that our brains, genes, tribes, books, histories, and cultures knew. Only in the last 100 or so did this meaningfully change -- suddenly our species were no longer limited by production or physical danger, but by questions of distribution and politics. That applied not just to material goods and services but to the most basic unit of currency imaginable: information. Knowledge. Education. Stories of hope and despair.

In the 90s, we often talked about the "information superhigherway". That's so long ago now the term almost seems quaint. But I feel we're just beginning to scratch the surface of what it really means. At scale, information (and disinformation) has proven to be more powerful than empires. Who would've thought a multiplayer blog built by a college kid could bring history's greatest superpower to its knees within a single election cycle? Who would've thought we'd go from rotating CAPTCHAs to computers writing novels in less than a generation? We're just getting into the realm of legislation (finally) trying to regulate algorithms. What about when algorithms can (finally) regulate legislations and legislators?

We're no longer limited to evolution by genomes and cultures. We can make and unmake worlds, in the virtual, in the flesh, and in between. Already we are all cyborg-like in a way; most of us has access to more information and knowledge than the sum total of all the humans who have lived before 1900, combined. The generations that grew up developing this system (gen-X and millennials) or consuming it (gen Zs) haven't really had the time to make sea cultural changes based on it yet -- and I don't mean just digitizing the Department of Motor Vehicles or whatever, but fundamentally transforming power economies from inherited priesthoods of capital into distributed efficiencies of knowledge.

That sort of transition may take decades or centuries, it's hard to say, but it's coming (and scaring a lot of the old guard along the way). It will seem dystopian. Change always does! But we've always lived in dystopia, and there has never been a Golden Age of Humanity, but only now, in our seeming twilight years, is that dream even imaginable. For the first time in our history, we have the tools -- if not the wisdom -- to produce more than enough for all of us, to potentially subvert enshrined of hierarchies of wealth and violence in favor of actual meritocracies, to supplement the human genome, to better our minds with electronic aids, to repair our bodies and improve our cultures, to reach not just for the stars but for the very fabric of consciousness.

The basic unit of life is information reproduction, and by that metric, our world is teeming with a diversity no longer limited to DNA or the periodic table. Maybe it will mean replacing humans with the Borg. Maybe Earth's biodiversity will wane as information diversity increases. But the information replication can continue, and some species or another will probably eventually pick up where we left off. Maybe the remaining humans will fit in to that new world order, maybe we'll all just be happy endorphin-addled slaves, maybe we'll be gone altogether... but so what? Life will find new paths and move on. It always does.

There will be a lot of ads along the way, for sure, and you and I might not live to see the silver lining a century or millennium later, and the dolphins are probably going to be gone by then... but this is the universe doing what it always has, blowing things up to make new, shinier things. Life evolved once. It gave us Gandhi and Angry Birds. No reason to think it'll stop there.

I guess that's my longwinded way of saying it's always darkest before the dawn. We may not have the enhanced photoreceptors to witness the next dawn, but it'll come, someday, somewhere, somehow...

> Who would've thought a multiplayer blog built by a college kid could bring history's greatest superpower to its knees within a single election cycle?

Is this in reference to 4chan?

Wild guess: Facebook.

While I think there are some solid points made here, overall this feels reductive and almost isolationist. In particular, strongly agree that many wings of mass media have become a core problem, both as a vector of control and fountain of propaganda not often subject to critical thought.

The reality is that we live in an ever more complex technological environment and the true failure is that we have resisted evolving our laws and moral structures to match. Privacy laws should have been implemented more than a decade ago in the US, and likely will not be for another decade. We've allowed tech organizations to create entirely new economies, fundamentally disrupt existing ones and twist the idea of the web being a series of connected nodes to a structural trap for our minds and the minds of our children.

Disconnecting fully and abandoning the systems we helped build will allow them to slide deeper and faster into the dystopia that many of us feel is already here. If we do not find a way alter the direction of this, no one will.

It's always been interesting to me that in most science fiction that I'd classify as anti-dystopian, the reasons societies become that way is not because of technology solely, but because those societies gradually (or suddenly) changed their fundamental outlook and perspective to be communal and inclusive instead of individualistic and exclusive. Star Trek is probably the standard bearer for this idea, but I think it's worth analyzing, because there's an argument that we'll collectively face the same challenge and it's not hard to imagine that we're staring at it now.

yes

You should be careful with your thoughts.

There's this type of bias (I forget the name, I think it's availability heuristic?) where you overthink things to a point that it becomes the central point of your thought and think that everything is going downhill.

I'm not sure I think everything is going downhill. More that the type of tech we are developing, extrapolating from our current standpoint points in some scary directions. Eg. Authoritarian control and loss of freedoms.

I was once worried because there is layer between my code and I/O in increasing number of technologies, so others may control what I can do with computer and its communication with the world. Solution is simple. Just stand up and walk away from locked technologies (it is not like real prison or anything like that). Some people try to jailbreak or find holes in sandbox , these are the same people that help to improve jails , sandboxes, locks, etc...

>Solution is simple. Just stand up and walk away from locked technologies

That's not at all a solution to any sort of systemic issue.

I think it is indeed an important part of the "solution".

Whenever people choose/buy a hardware device or the software they use, they collectively shape the landscape of products.

The people who want less locked digital life might choose GNU/Linux as operating system or MNT Reform as hardware device as an example. As social network they might choose Mastodon over twitter/fb/insta.

That's the only possible solution without a centralised entity deciding what you can and cannot use - which leads to even less freedom

> where you overthink things to a point that it becomes the central point of your thought and think that everything is going downhill.

That's just obsession.

There's also Negativity Bias, but that's not a process, just a particular reason for believing one particular thing (as are all biases). That said Negativity Bias, IMHO is built into human cognition. Loss Aversion is one type.

We're already living in hell. Long ago I thought the future was bright and our job was to make sure we can bring it to everyone. I drank the kool-aid.

I'm jaded now and honestly want to just mess around with old computers at a farm upstate. I don't believe our industry has been a net good for the world since the 2010s.