Comment by matkoniecz
3 days ago
If you judge on aggregate then "Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive" is nonsense.
You cannot judge aggregate positively and conclude that therefore each segment was positive.
3 days ago
If you judge on aggregate then "Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive" is nonsense.
You cannot judge aggregate positively and conclude that therefore each segment was positive.
> If you judge on aggregate then "Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive" is nonsense.
It's not nonsense. If you think so, provide one great technology that has been a net negative.
That's quite easy.
Fracking
Social media infinite scrolling and targeted ads
Short form videos (tik tok, YouTube shorts, instagram reels)
Coming soon: Deep sea mining
Some of these are not great technologies, you might say. Well if they're impactful enough to turn everyone I love into a phone zombie and make the political landscape violent and insane then that's enough.
Those are just specific applications of some technology, not comparable to AI in general.
> It's not nonsense.
Yes, it is. You cannot go "overall progress was positive" and conclude "every change was positive".
> provide one great technology that has been a net negative
nuclear weapons + nuclear energy (luckily we had no nuclear war, but benefits here are not worth risks)
AI in general and LLM specifically so far
smartphones in general and social media specifically
maybe internet overall, maybe computers overall
biological weapons
leaded gasoline
(I know that you already excluded "social media" as "specific applications of some technology", I disagree with it)
>nuclear weapons + nuclear energy (luckily we had no nuclear war, but benefits here are not worth risks)
>AI in general and LLM specifically so far
>smartphones in general and social media specifically
>maybe internet overall, maybe computers overall
I disagree that these are net negatives.