Comment by christoph
3 days ago
Honestly, my opinion, our lives were fundamentally better before some tech came along - touchscren phones & “social” networks being the main two. We still haven’t caught up with the carnage this has caused. Kids social media bans are only now becoming a thing in some countries and we’re left with a deep sense of unease it’s really not to protect the kids at all.
It’s lead to plenty of good as well, a luddite I am not. I love my tech. I love conversing with people online, I became a happy mIRC user well over 20 years ago, I use telegram & discord daily. I just really, really despise tech’s current trajectory. I grew up wanting this stuff to supplement my life, not control & rule over it. The days where I want to toss it all in the trash and run off to the woods are increasing all the time. I didn’t want an internet where i’m constantly having to ask myself every image… is this real? I certainly don’t want one that’s constantly surveilling me and I definitely don’t want one that’s about to threaten to lock me out, or up(!), the moment I commit wrongspeak.
The analogy would be a 17 year old kid passing his driving test and getting straight in a 500bhp rear wheel drive sports car. We as a society have just collectively done that over the last two decades. And it feels like we’re just about to take it nuclear with AI.
So we can dwell on all of that past or set ourselves some basic goals and ambitions to aim for. Refocus. Change the conversation.
Somebody responded to me earlier that “at least we have reusable rockets”. Do you know what I really want? It’s really quite basic - clean air, clean water and clean energy. Let’s collectively work to tick those three off the list, for every.single.soul here on this planet first, then after that, we can focus on making them free for everybody. Then we can set our sights on the stars.
> a luddite I am not
I have to bring this up every time someone brings up luddites. I'm a Luddite.
The Luddite movement was not "people scared of new technology". That's propaganda that's stuck around for far too long. Luddites were skilled craftspeople that saw businesses gleefully eliminating their jobs without any sort of plan or thought for what it'd do to their lives. They were weavers seeing industrial looms doing the job of 1000 weavers being managed by one child with 2 fewer fingers.
It's pretty directly analogous to AI. We see all the major property owners licking their lips at the notion that they can simply fire a huge portion of the workforce with no thought of "what will these people do now"? Most of them are happy for us to just go away and work for uber/doordash.
If AI reaches it's promises, we do not have the infrastructure to handle an economy where only a few wealthy owners rake in everything and the rest fight for pennies (which are sapped away from the current rent seeking economy).
Yes, you are totally correct and I really appreciate this type of comment. I used luddite just because of ease/laziness, but it was not correct at all in hindsight.
I totally agree with all your remarks btw. I think society having lots of skilled tradespeople is a major win for everyone. Yet we as a society seem to be doing everything we can to stifle and destroy a lot of skilled tradework. Much has already died over the last few decades and either will never return, or will take herculean levels of effort to get restarted.