Comment by AlexandrB
4 hours ago
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 is how my parents felt about the internet back in the 90s.
Interestingly, both technologies also supercharge scams - one by providing a way to cash out with minimal risk, the other by making convincing human interaction easier to fake.
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?
> 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."
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.
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> 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.
> 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. Some states have already ratified the changes, others are in progress.
U.S. federal stablecoin legislation was passed earlier this year.
Low interest rates favor parasite middlemen, not those who actually do stuff
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
It’s how I feel about internet and social media now.
They are both force multipliers. The issue of course is that technology almost always disproportionately benefits the more intelligent / ruthless.
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”
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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.
> Imagine the DVR being invented today. A commercial device that helps you skip ads. It would never be allowed to happen.
That's arguably what AI is - it compressed the internet so that you can extract StackOverflow answers without clicking through all the fucking ads that await you on the journey from search bar to the answer you were looking for.
You can of course expect it, over the next decade or so, to interpose ads between you and your goal in the same way that Google and StackOverflow did from 2010-now.
But for the moment I think it's the exact opposite of your thesis. The AI companies are in cut-throat capture-market-share mode so they're purposely skipping opportunities to cram ads down your throat.
Of course LLMs today are the most consumer-friendly they're ever going to be. It's irresponsible not to look ahead to the inevitable 180.
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Yes, at some point mainstream technology turned on the users. So much modern tech seems to be about exerting control or "monetizing" instead of empowering.
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.
Capitalism has many harms, but what's the alternative? Communism is worse - much worse.
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