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Comment by ncr100 | Hacker News Reader

One point seems to be about trust. She's noting how society depends upon digital, not analog, trust.

She thinks of that as dystopian because of the foreignness and inconvenience.

We, as technologists, can improve upon this by talking empathetically more with our users about how they interact with our technology, to help steer the product towards incorporating more human-focused designs. This could help avoid this Stranger in a Strange Land phenomenon becoming more prevalent, and avoid the negative psychological behaviors which disconnected individuals typically exhibit.

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We, as technologists, can improve upon this by...

We can do some of it but most of the 'do no evil' goes away in favor of what the money wants to do. Even well intentioned designers, developers/engineers, entrepreneurs, etc get pushed/pulled in directions of the money and usually understandably. The money machine always gets what it wants.

A big problem with our society today is, the people with all the power (lever on the money) are the same ones selling us out to dystopian lack of control of privacy, rights etc. We are a system setup where the only good that can really come is if wealth, or someone wealthy, wants to see it happen. We are basing all our opportunities, hopes, rights on very few people that are actively getting paid to cut them down.

Inequality does us in more than we realize because it is easy to throw the people under the bus for the money, once you are in the money you aren't in the people by design. We live in a 'free' country, but combine that with the feudal/sharecropper setup at our dictator-like controlled companies we work for where corporate rights overpower individual rights on the regular, and well you end up with a recipe for dystopia.

Fully agreed.

The grandparent comment expresses a beautiful sentiment -- and one that I and many other colleagues share -- but I've almost never seen it implemented in practice; and on the 2-3 occasions over a 15 years of career when I seen it, it was on a smaller scale and with business owners who had a close relationship with all technologists in the "company" (I use quotes here because an organization with 10 programmers, 1 sysadmin, 1 HR, 3 sales people and 1 CEO can hardly be called a "company").

Truth is, many businessmen don't think of people like people; they remind me a lot of the young military boys controlling drones that do the remote killing -- they think of people like "assets", "targets" and such. This de-humanization helps them make decisions that many of us would find extremely hard to justify in front of our moral values system.

talking empathetically more with our users about how they interact with our technology

I've been hearing this a lot lately but I don't really know what it means.

I think most (all?) developers/designers try to imagine the experience of an average or "canonical" user while developing features. This is a natural way to try creating a product with decent usability. You can take this a step further with UX studies, focus groups, etc.

However, since "UX design" has existed in one form or another since before PC's were a thing, I take it that's not what's meant by "having more empathy for our users".

I suspect this means somehow tailoring/adapting our products to the wide variety of cultural, geographic, socio-economic backgrounds of users, or even their states-of-mind/existential experience. In that case, I think a UX designer would face a combinatorial explosion of constraints and/or features requests, which is not practical.

However, we do have a free'ish market, which seems well positioned to address this wide variety of needs. Moreover, the long tail of users is getting fatter as our population scales, so it is increasingly rewarding to target niche groups.

Do we really have a strong ability to modify affordances based on user constraints (whether implicit or self defined)? I'm a teacher at the high school level and would love to see tools that integrate with, and enhance, my planning>classroom performance>efficacy assessment workflow, but... really, we aren't even trying to do something like that. I had a paper grade book; I have an electronic one now. I had a blackboard; I have an electronic one now. These are fine tools, but they don't move the needle in a way that really matters.

But what if there isn't any big incentive to do that? It's profitable to take away people's privacy and there's not that much money in letting them keep it.

Their really isn't any big incentive to do that. Software is still eating the world. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512...

I'm kinda OK with software eating the world. That doesn't automatically mean concentrating power.

Then you work to change the incentives.

> ... and avoid the negative psychological behaviors which disconnected individuals typically exhibit.

Please explain what you mean by "disconnected individuals" and what are the behaviours. Genuinely interested.

It sounds like you just want to talk until they accept the data collection, as opposed to listen to them on why they might think it is a bad thing and be given an opportunity to opt-out of it.

Don't worry about, it's not a problem for technologists, but ultimately for legislatures. It will take a lot of time, but it will happen as with telephones. Europe will keep throwing up roadblocks, and eventually the US will hopefully follow suit in assigning ownership of things like privacy to the individual.

This limbo lets you make a mint, but it will end.

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