Comment by bluegatty
8 hours ago
'The industry' is not hellbent on destroying society - this is just so unhinged it's hard to know how to make of it.
8 hours ago
'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.
Unfortunately there are plenty of highly legible metrics that make the world a worse place ("engagement" might be among the worst)
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.
yes and yes. a system can fulfill it’s function while simultaneously having massive impacts on society. we are only now experiencing the consequences of social media running rampant.
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Facebook literally heavily contributed or at minimum enabled and amplified at least one genocide (2017 Myanmar). That is the total opposite of "really not causing harm".
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.