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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

    Our technology can make our lives better, can give us
    more control, can give us more privacy – but only if 
    we force it to live up to its promise.

Not only can it. It has. Any talk to the contrary is completely ignoring how much higher our bar has risen for quality of life.

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For privacy and control? Definitely not. A huge chunk of my family uses Facebook as the means of communication which means private correspondence is being mediated and read by Facebook's platform. At any whim they can ban a user, delete a message, etc. The same applies to Gmail but at least there is an escape hatch to a different email provider if you are using a custom domain.

The centralization of stuff into Amazon, Google, and Facebook's offerings has been extremely destructive to the status quo for control and privacy.

This is only true with our modern bar. And yes, we should continue to get better. I am not calling for a halt of progress.

However, women, children, and minorities have far more freedom and privacy than they ever have historically. There are some ways you can look at this so that it seems that corporations have more ability to see into your life. In large, it is really just a rise in their accuracy. Their attempts and actions are actually lessened.

>However, women, children, and minorities have far more freedom and privacy than they ever have historically.

Why should technology get the credit?

Why shouldn't it?

Different technologies, sure. But the liberating effects of labor saving devices is pretty tough to dispute.

Because a lot of it is pretty simply rooted in economics.

If you want your kids to go to school, there needs to be resources for that to happen (and you personally have to have enough resources that you aren't using them for labor).

> women, children, and minorities have far more freedom and privacy than they ever have historically

Zoe Quinn, black men getting shot at traffic stops and victims of cyberbullying might all have a different opinion about that.

This is a bit of goal post shifting. I am claiming we are getting better. Not that we have solved all problems.

None of those things are good. But you needn't dig hard to find our culture actively doing these things almost with glee not long ago. Our bar is rightfully higher than it was, and we have legitimate criticisms to overcome. But don't let that detract from the fact that the bar is higher.

At a whim, you and your family/friends can stop using Facebook and use any of literally hundreds of other excellent options for communication.

That's control. And privacy is much better now than it was in the "glorious early days of the internet" when your two choices were SMTP and IRC and both were subject to monitoring by local sysadmins and pretty much any node your packets passed through.

Just because the present is not perfect does not mean the past was better. I much prefer the privacy and control of today's internet over yesterday's internet.

Facebook tags photos with my face in it without my permission. How do I as a non-Facebook user stop that?

How do I prevent Google from reading my email conversations when a huge chunk of the destinations are on the Gmail platform?

I DON'T have control. And I DON'T like it.

You can't stop it because you don't control your friends. These are their pictures, their email conversations.

I fear the set of Orwellian rules that would be required to make you happy.

I don't mind that my friends have access. Controlling that would be Orwellian.

I mind that Google and Facebook have access. They are already Orwellian, and figuring out how to control that would be anti-Orwellian.

>At a whim, you and your family/friends can stop using Facebook

Said nobody who truly understands network effects or knows someone who depends on Facebook for day-to-day communication with 5-10 people.

Quitting Facebook by yourself is easy but it's pointless if your friends don't do the same. Forcing your social circle to switch at the same time (particularly if they aren't technologically inclined) is folly.

By what metric? American life expectancy is declining. Suicide rates are stable. And the cost of healthcare related to either of these issues is increasing.

Meanwhile, wages remain stagnant and automation threatens the jobs of everyone without an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering or a PhD in computer science. And literally every internet-connected device in our lives are surveillance tools being exploited for some corporate interest.

Yet there are piles of laundry in my home that aren't washing or folding themselves. Anything other than a TV dinner won't cook itself. Cars...might eventually drive themselves, I suppose, until enough bored teenagers poking around on Shodan decide they'd like a turn at the wheel.

Tech has risen to meet the needs of the average household by providing us...cellphone apps that put us in contact with some desperate human willing to perform tasks for those who can afford it, invisible money whose value fluctuates and gets stolen in more ways than is possible to spend, and gypsy cab/delivery services.

I can't think of a recent technological development that has made my life any better or easier. Instead, I spend more time troubleshooting half-assed, overcomplicated black-box shitware (with even less support!) than ever before. No thank you. It's been a race to the bottom since the late 2000s.

I have a hard time reading this as other than paranoia.

There are concerns over expectancy going flat or down. My understanding is that a few points down does not indicate the swing down has started. Should be looked at, but evidence is equally indicative of standard variance in growth.

That is, the anomaly was the constant growth in expectancy. Certainly an outlier in our histories.

And you should try harder in looking for things that are easier in life. It may not have got your life, yet. We should do what we can to spread the rewards to everyone, including you.

...for some. It’s a bit less clear if you’re a kid mining cobalt in the DRC, right? The wonders of tech probably don’t matter to teen who is doxxed and bullied until they take their own life. Tech might not have improved the lives of people who lost their jobs to “gig” workers who are paid a fraction of minimum wage. Tech has downright hurt the environment, even if you only look at sheer waste. You probably don’t appreciate the future of drones if your experience with them is being bombed by them.

So yeah, if you can afford it, tech is wonderful. If you’re a Chinese Uigher, maybe not so much, and “any talk to the contrary” is disingenuous at best.

This sort of rhetoric is borderline insane, though. Yes, bad things happen even with tech. But they are typically far less dramatic than what happened before the tech. Homicides/lynchings were common before modern tech, as an easy example.

Similarly, suicides are not only not a new phenomenon, but they are actually not as high as they have ever been historically. This is precisely what i meant by us having a higher bar. And we should continue to raise the bar. But don't talk about how tech could possibly make our lives better. Instead, lets continue the progress we have made.

This sort of rhetoric is borderline insane, though. Yes, bad things happen even with tech. But they are typically far less dramatic than what happened before the tech.

Oh totally, war was much less dramatic before atomic bombs. /s

Edit for substance: Tech is a massively double-edged sword, and looking only at the benefits is dishonest. You have nuclear power, which is truly amazing, and nuclear weapons, which may yet end us all. You have vaccines, but also biological weapons, medicines and poisons, better plows, better swords. You can argue that tech is a net positive, but if it’s anything, it is dramatic.

Despite the incredible destructive weaponry we can deploy today, the last half-century has been the least bloody in history. Technology has drastically improved both our ability to create and destroy, but fortunately we're doing more of the former.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

Let me argue that the only reason for this is the atomic bomb and not 'technological progress' as a whole. Technology's 'ability to create' has virtually no bearing on any of this in my opinion.

To add to what Kitsune has said, the violence has simply changed into a series of proxy wars between nuclear powers, at the expense of non-nuclear powers. The other part is that for the first time in over a thousand years, Western Europe isn’t almost constantly killing itself in endless wars.

> the violence has simply changed into a series of proxy wars between nuclear powers, at the expense of non-nuclear powers

Still thanks to technology (e.g. radio, satellite, improved espionage capabilities).

> Western Europe isn’t almost constantly killing itself in endless wars

Once again, thanks to technology. We're now able to do more for less, and many of the motivations for war (resources, land) are no longer as much as a contributing factor.

For values or “us” which are nuclear powers and their close allies. Of course if “thanks to technology” we end up destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons, climate change, or something as yet unforeseen then really what has come of it? Fixing nitrogen for fertilizer also led to the democratization of high explosives. Nuclear power and weapons are linked.

Look away from your personal circumstances for a minute and consider the trajectory overall, for everyone, and not just you. This Panglossian “optimism” is downright destructive. It feels a lot like being in an airplane which has entered an unpowered, uncontrolled descent, and the guy next to tells you to be happy, it’s a miracle that we’re flying, humans never flew in all of history until recently.

Past performance does not guarantee future returns. One could say something similar about the 50 year period ending in 1910. WWI, WWII, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot really skew the average.

If you look at the death toll in proportion to the population at that time, even that 50 year period will be less bloody than some others in the past.

We need you to please up the insight/provocation ratio of your comments, no matter what you're replying to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Understood, I edited it to include more details about what I was trying to get across.

Thank you.

Not a problem, I was wrong and appreciate the feedback.

Some feedback: the way you present your arguments is not useful or productive to discussion.

This has nothing to do with whether I agree or disagree with your premise. It's the delivery of the message that you need to improve if you want it to come across in a way that is productive.

I appreciate the feedback and agree, I did a poor job. Hopefully my edit has added some much-needed substance.

That's funny because I was just thinking how much I appreciated your comments.

Edit: but of course I didn't see it before the edit ;)

And likewise - I appreciate your edit and I think your point is stronger for it (regardless of whether I agree or disagree with it)

"Bad things happened before" isn't really a rebuttal. The point of the original article was that tech can improve the outcomes of those things, but it's not, because we're not demanding it.

Worse things happened before, is the rebuttal. We are getting better. To the point that we now hold ourselves to standards we didn't even imagine before.

yet our stories of their past don't include any history before colonial forces, slave capture, or the faintest possibility that anything other than improvement could have come with the civilizing forces.

What? Even without the conquests of societies in the past, most other societies were much less likely to survive nature. A simple walk through the forest before antibiotics was ridiculously risky.

Again, the claim is that the bar is rising. Not that it always rose fairly. Nor that it has equally reached everyone. Just that, by and large, technology has made our lives better.

I mistakenly thought your double-grand-parent was related... so my comment is without context.

yeah, "tech" is changing things and I couldn't imagine life without it... I imagine there are beings on the planet that can't imagine life with it, and they seem to live fine lives.

we're special animals... in that technology is part of "us". but I don't know that makes our lives better.

bill joy and some others disagreed, too

It’s a bit less clear if you’re a kid mining cobalt in the DRC

Worldwide incomes have risen more in the last 30 years, especially for the poor, than at any other time in history.

Tech might not have improved the lives of people who lost their jobs to “gig” workers who are paid a fraction of minimum wage.

This is mostly a myth. Gig workers tend to make a bit more than minimum wage. Which, sure, isn't great but these are unskilled jobs where you make your own hours. It's not surprising that the wages tend to be on the low side.

Tech has downright hurt the environment, even if you only look at sheer waste.

GDP per unit of energy consumed has risen dramatically due to better technology.

You probably don’t appreciate the future of drones I’d your experience with them is being bombed by them.

Deaths due to warfare are at all time historic lows. I can't say that this is due to new technology but it is worth noting.

Now let’s just apply some regional filters there, so that skyrocketing benefits for a minority don’t play statistical games with the majority.

Apply whatever regional filters you want. Most of what I said will still hold most of the time. I'm not playing any statistical games.

Ok, let’s look at the Middle East and Northern Africa.

Edit: Or better yet, stick with my original example of the DRC, which is not a happy tale.

It’s been pretty great for Bangladesh and India.

Time will tell. Bangladesh is grossly overpopulated, and struggling with hydrological and agricultural issues which may yet lead to systems collapse. India may thrive, or die in nuclear fire along with Pakistan. Until pretty recently tech was great for Syria too, but again, chicken, eggs, hatch.

There are the big twin baddies of climate change and mass migration to contend with, and nobody seems to be contending. We’re in a decent place, but I would argue, a profoundly negative trajectory. In the same way that the Late Bronze Age was both a time of wonders, and utterly doomed.

I'm not sure why you switched to worldwide when it specifically said DRC. Most economic indicators there have been flat or declining for the last 50 years. Vague platitudes about the world as a whole are unhelpful, and if anything only serve to reinforce the mythology of universal progress.

> Worldwide incomes

gotta buy that shit they're selling now that WORLD TRADE is here. thank goodness for foreign products instead of whatever came before that.

> GDP per unit of energy consumed

using this metric presumes that GDP is the goal. fortunately or not, there's no quantitative measure of well-being. certainly we could suggest that not dying during childbirth is an improvement... but if you're instead spending life under the thumb of an extraction economy established by colonialists with the explicit intent to remote-rule thru division[0], then... well, it's at least not so crystal clear that foreign tech comes from the hand of the savior.

> Deaths due to warfare are at all time historic lows.

I like this statistic, too, but I suspect it's inflated by medics around battlefields not letting people bleed, or rot from infection, to death.

anyway, I just wanted to make the point that it's not so clear cut. I think technology is largely good... and whatever it is, it's not going away.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonization

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