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Comment by forthelove | Hacker News Reader

I'm too dumb to understand any of this stuff re AI, but one thing occurred to me recently on the philosophical side of tech: When your life is closely intertwined w/ tech, you begin to almost solely view the world through the lens of progress and innovation. Progress and innovation often comes at the total expense of momentary awareness and satisfaction. Innovating becomes an expectation. It's just what comes next, that's it. That's a problem, generally speaking, IMO.

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"Silicon Valley’s amorality problem arises from the blind faith many place in progress. The narrative of progress provides moral cover to the tech industry and lulls people into thinking they no longer need to exercise moral judgment."

Morality and the Idea of Progress in Silicon Valley http://berkeleyjournal.org/2015/01/morality-and-the-idea-of-...

Interesting article. Thanks for linking!

I think the statement could also be succinctly summarized from a simpleton's perspective as: "Have a problem? Science and tech will eventually find the answer." Science and tech keep answering questions, so it gives the false impression that every problem can be answered with science and tech, which in turn seems to justify - at least in part - every answer science and tech gives.

>"Have a problem? Science and tech will eventually find the answer."

I used to believe this myself when I was first getting into tech in school and reading Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near.

Then I got into the real world and realized the hardest problems to solve are not technical problems, but people problems.

Always a synchronicity of late. I've been thinking in the last few days about how often things that are "morally neutral" can often be confused as moral goods. Technological progress is a morally neutral thing, it must be evaluated whether the progress is a good one or not (e.g. chemical/biological weapons, etc). It hit me when someone wrote about diversity being a morally neutral thing. They gave a bizarre example of adding a deranged person or some other outlier to a crowd of folks an recognizing its more diverse, but certainly not for the better. Something to that effect.

That's a problem, generally speaking, IMO.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but I am curious why you think that is a problem.

If you're innovating for the sake of innovation, then you're stuck in a rat race without an attainable end goal.

Is there anything that isn't a rat race without an attainable end goal?

Even happiness/satisfaction/contentment/enlightenment etc... aren't ultimately attainable.

It's biologically determined that we will always search for the next thing.

Actually I do know people who are generally happy, and people who are generally unhappy. So there's a counterexample (since general happiness appears to be attainable). You may know people like that too.

Regarding the people who are generally happy, "rat race" would not apply to their experience of life.

The idea that life gets better over time is very new, as it coincides with the Industrial Revolution.

Before then, people thought in terms of food fuel and muscular mechanics. Same principle applied for slaves, livestock, and so on.

After industrialization, people began to think in terms of (typically) chemical fuels and technical mechanics. Problems that would be solved by the introduction of slaves or domesticated animals were instead solved by the use of machines.

Nowadays, in the Information Age, problems are not solved by throwing money or machines at it, but by utilizing the right information.

The tools we make, make us.

It is true that information is playing a greater role. However economic activity remains a good proxy for energy consumption, even whilst mainstream economics denies it.

aligned with that is heavy reliance (built out of educational exposure mostly) on objectivity/objectivism as a core organizing factor of knowledge - this comes with expectations of generalizability or shared assumptions/beliefs that doesn't always hold or holds in warped ways

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