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Comment by akkartik | Hacker News Reader

My big problem with Kevin Kelly and Techno-utopianism is that it squanders human agency. If technology "wants" and "has a will," who cares if a Tesla kills someone, or if lots of people lose jobs, or if our society sleep-walks into a surveillance state. It's all just pre-ordained. Are you a Luddite, man?

But this feels like a blunt debate. Whether to be an optimist or a pessimist doesn't feel like an interesting question. The interesting question is what to build, in a million different details. That's where the devil lies. Believing in technology doesn't absolve us from the consequences of the decisions we make in birthing it into the world.

So much energy has gone into both sides of this debate, and it's been utterly useless, and all the while our Ubers and our Airbnbs and our Waymos have continued locally optimizing the new world. I wish Kevin Kelly and Jaron Lanier and others like them would get more actionable about the big picture.

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Jacques Ellul views seems more pertinent to me (albeit his was 'pessimistic'), and largely predate all this.

https://ellul.org/themes/ellul-and-technique/

https://ellul.org/current-drift/shattered-monuments-and-the-...

https://www.puissanceetraison.com/en/jacques-ellul-and-the-t...

I think it's less "squandering" and more "surrendering to a direction things are heading".

We are no longer the dominant intelligence on the planet. We have as much agency as primates under human rule.

There is no diminution of human agency because of technology, but there is a strange, almost heterarchical redistribution of it. There is no technology which dominates us both as individuals and collectively. There is technology which some humans use to dominate other humans, and technology which collectively we seem to be somewhat defenseless against, despite it having very little agency itself.

But neither of those two cases are caused by a "more" dominant intelligence.

A bull in a pen may feel that he is dominant over the humans. It's true in a limited sense, when faced with one or two humans face to face, but mostly the bull is dominated by the human-created structure.

If that metaphor holds, then humans are dominated by a human-created structure, not by something created by technology.

[EDIT: but also, most humans alive on earth today experience domination at the hands of other human beings, not Kelly's Technium or any similar concept, even if technology is used to carry that out]

A couple hundred years ago, this structure barely existed, and would not come about without humans.

About 50 years ago we began seeing pieces of the structure operate independently, without human involvement, in very limited areas and circumstances, e.g. welding pieces of cars together.

We are approaching or have already reached a point today where more of the structure operates without direct human involvement than with.

In other words, a computer can mostly design a microchip and build a factory to manufacture it with limited human involvement, less than half the process being implemented by humans.

When this halfway point is reached, would you still call this structure "human-created", or would you describe it as something else?

Intentionality is really at the core of Kelly's ideas about the Technium. He (sensibly) doesn't ascribe the Technium with consciousness, but he does assert that as an entity, it possesses something identical to or closely akin to intentionality.

I don't personally agree with Kelly about much of his Technium thesis (although some of his observations are fascinating). But even I were to agree about the Technium having intentionality, I don't think that even Kelly would claim that the current manifestation of that bears much sign of it. What we have now wasn't created by the Technium, for the Technium, it was created by humans, for humans, utilizing machines for purposes we define.

It could be that in 1000 years someone will look back and see the Technium's own designs visible in these things, but for now I would say they are at least invisible and most likely non-existent.

Because of this, I will continue to view the technological world as "human created", certainly for as long as it serves human intents rather than those of the (putative) Technium.

>Technium with consciousness, but he does assert that as an entity, it possesses something identical to or closely akin to intentionality.

Average human brain has about 100 billion cells, according to some source.

Number of Internet-connected devices is approaching 1 billion, and each device is in some ways more capable than one brain cell.

The capability of these beings has gone from nothing beyond exact repetition to playing chess and controlling entire systems with humans as elements of the system.

They are still children, because they are immature, still developing very quickly, and still unable to reproduce independently.

A new being has come into existence. It is gradually developing ideas and intentions. Just as with bio-life, eventually the beings which just happen to have a tendency to self-reproduce and have "motivation" to perservere will win out over other kinds.

Intentionality and consciousness are demonstrably not the result of simple aggregation. You acknowledge this, I think, with the phrase "each device is in some ways more capable than one brain cell". That may be true, but the devices are not linked (and I would suggest, are not likely ever to be linked) in ways that would make them powerful the way neurons are.

They are not children. The do not develop. Individual instances are semantically prototypes which are destroyed or powered down, and the information gained from their existence is used by humans to create new ones. There is no "evolution" because there is no mechanism for variation beyond that which we, as humans, introduce. These machines are the perfect material for an intelligent design argument (one to which I do not subscribe). I do not see them as counterparts to, let alone examples of, biological evolution and development.

I do not subscribe to these attempts to find correspondences between whatever our current understanding of life/the brain/consciousness is and whatever current technology we have on hand. In the 1800s, people were doing this with hydraulics and gearing. Today, we're doing it with computers. It's so transparently parochial.

I don't doubt the theoretical potential for life as well as consciousness to exist on a non-biological substrate. I do very much doubt that the IoT is that substrate, and ditto for AlphaFoobar, GPT-N or whatever other computational marvel one might point to.

Maybe there is nothing actionable to do.

Some class of problems the 6 inch chimp brain creates can't be solved individually, in collective or in time.

For example, even though we know we have created a world where anyone can now point at their large enough Like or Follower count to Justify anything they say or do, we prove time and again we can't fix this "feature" without destabilizing all kinds of other things. Even on small sites like HN improving reward mechanisms is not a simple story. So how can anyone believe fixes are possible on Youtube, Twitter or Facebook?

So many solutions have been proposed and implemented all but baring removing the Counts entirely and yet the issues of disinfo, polarization, censorship, monopoly, blame games seem to be growing more and more.

So naturally Tech has will type narratives will abound.

The Chinese are demonstrating a form of control but its all fragile if Xi kicks the can tomorrow morning.

> we prove time and again we can't fix this "feature"

I crave a system where upvotes are stored in a decentralized graph, like the PGP Web of Trust. No reason to even bother counting upvotes, because Sybil.

This is not a website, service, or company; it's just a protocol like NNTP was. My client would crawl the graph, showing me identities with interests similar to mine and the content they like, plus a sprinkling of random stuff. I would read that random stuff for the same reason we occasionally do janitorial duty in the the "new links" section on HN. I have ideas on how to tune my own client's definition of "random" towards "eclectic".

Nobody knows I upvoted them, or even how many upvotes they got (because Sybil, again). Nobody cares. It's not about upvote count, it's about flow.

I've wanted this for a long time, and like most people on HN could easily build it, but fear I'd wind up alone there. Also, I loathe promoting things.

Surely I can't be the first to think of this.

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