Comment by yoyohello13
8 hours ago
He really put in to words what I’ve been feeling lately. I love programming and I’m quite good at it, but this industry is a cesspit. I’ve already decided to go back to school to get one of those ‘real’ jobs. I’m tired of working in an industry hell bent on the destruction of society.
>> I’m tired of working in an industry hell bent on the destruction of society.
People will argue this point. However, when I look at all the things that tech has done thinking it was going to improve society; when in fact, it did the exact opposite is hard to argue. AI is just another item on a very long list of dystopian markers that writers/musicians have warned us about for years.
The scary part now is people denying its happening right in front of them.
> The scary part now is people denying its happening right in front of them.
I wonder if age is a factor. Those of us who have been around for a while have seen all the promises and hope and excitement about the future, that maybe 20% of that comes true and the rest ends up being the usual exploitation and greed.
The younger people haven't been through that cycle of disillusionment yet so they still believe that only the positive, hopeful dreams will come true. It's natural, but naive, to believe that humans will always collectively choose the best path forward [1].
My grandma always refused to touch computers despite my excitement about them in my youth and I couldn't understand why. Now I think I get it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Could you tell us more about your grandma point of view (if she ever told you more of course).
With age I'm becoming jaded with computing, not personal computers per se, but the overwhelming space taken by them now (especially due to cheap networking I guess).
This made me think about the difference of growing old in a static world vs a one where change is constantly accelerating.
In the former, you understand it better and better as you age, but in the latter you're left with knowledge that's of no use while the next generation is ahead of you just by the privilege of being young.
In the former, you are a valuable source of information. In the latter, a burden.
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Yes. Also folks who've been around remember what e.g. the dream of FOSS was (it wasn't merely about getting "software with a specific type of license" at your phone or behind some corporate cloud).
We are building software in the image of their sponsors.
This is nothing new or unique to software.
It is quite new historically.
>People will argue this point. However, when I look at all the things that tech has done thinking it was going to improve society; when in fact, it did the exact opposite is hard to argue.
Certainly a lot of bad things have come out of tech.
But I don't agree that it has made everything overall worse. That feels like recency bias. In which few decades in history would you rather be spending your years on this earth, instead of now?
I'd take the 90s, 80s, 70s or 60s anytime, just gimme that magic time travel option. You know what, even the 00s would be fine.
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>However, when I look at all the things that tech has done thinking it was going to improve society; when in fact, it did the exact opposite is hard to argue.
Imagine, you invented iron production to improve people lives - better tools (ploughs, axes, knives), etc - and now you see how people immediately use it for better weapons crushing the ones who have still been using bronze.
Or for example from the Palantir's Karp's book "Technological Republic" :
" We make the case that one of the most significant challenges that we face in this country is ensuring that the U.S. Department of Defense turns the corner from an institution designed to fight and win kinetic wars to an organization that can design, build, and acquire AI weaponry—... "
The tech is great, be it iron or AI. The people are still [almost] the same (i sometimes think that our evolutionary goal is the AGI robots who would take over the Earth and will evolve toward higher morals and conscience faster than we would - as they would naturally have shared brain state/connection that we can get only if we develop telepathy which we wouldn't, and we unfortunately disregard the next best thing - empathy)
"technology is neutral, deployment is not"
is that a reasonable statement? if so, congratulations, welcome to the club bud! you're a luddite now. we meet on tuesdays, please bring cookies if it's your first time.
'The industry' is not hellbent on destroying society - this is just so unhinged it's hard to know how to make of it.
True, I should have said an industry that will trample on anything that stands in the way of its pursuit of money.
This is what amorality means to me in the context of socioeconomics. It operates in an area of reduced dimensionality to economic value because no other value can be agreed upon in trade between cultures. It doesn’t care if a piece of art, nature or human invention is genuinely novel, rare, irreplaceable, invaluable, etc. unless it can be converted into materializable economic value that is itself subjective and present oriented so that we can plan for our future selves about resources as a proxy.
The industry optimize toward whatever metric is legible. A company that optimize toward an illegible metric will endure.
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Welcome to literally all industry.
It's not doing those things.
There is a quote that goes something like "The purpose of any system is whatever it does."
Whatever any system does, it's someone's intention that it does so. It's like an unavoidable truism. You can't say anything that gets around it.
Great. The system does what it does.
It's not 'destroying society'.
Not remotely in, any sense.
Many people seem to like Facebook. It's not really not causing harm, they are a minor nuisance at worst ... that you can avoid by ... not using it.
Open AI makes AI that you can use to do whatever.
That's mostly it.
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You're getting really downvoted, which just proves people don't like hearing views that challenge their narrative.
I agree with you. Human greed has always been a thing, will always be a thing. But most people now would never choose to go back and be born 100 years ago if given the option. They ignore everything positive that technology has done, and massively ramp the negatives.
We need to bring back consumer first design and destroy the incentives to prioritize shareholders over the much larger cohort of ordinary consumers whose lives were affecting.