Technology facilitated the atomized society, and then technology was applied as a salve, and then taken away. The amount of wreckage left in the wake of "moving fast and breaking things" seems to be approaching a breaking point.
Of our sanity maybe, or a breaking point of traditional liberal enlightenment values, but short of a global catastrophe I don't see anything halting the inexorable march of technological development and the social chaos that inevitably causes. Any attempt to stop this through political means would require Pol Pot tactics applied globally; aegrescit medendo.
With LLMs and voice generators particularly, I think the general public has been given access to military-grade information weapons. The chaos this causes will be used to justify crackdowns and regulation on the flow of information, to curb the automation of weaponized misinformation. New technology always spurns new regulations, so new information technology will beget new information regulations. The inexorable march of technology cannot be stopped, and so our freedoms will inevitably be curtailed until there is nothing left.
Or as another man put it:
> 114. As explained in paragraphs 65–67, 70–73, modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulations, and his fate depends on the actions of persons remote from him whose decisions he cannot influence. This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in order to function. At work, people have to do what they are told to do, when they are told to do it and in the way they are told to do it, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies HAVE TO be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead to charges of unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercised their discretion. It is true that some restrictions on our freedom could be eliminated. but GENERALLY SPEAKING the regulation of our lives by large organizations is necessary for the functioning of industrial-technological society.
I think he does a good job of explaining that technology necessitates the loss of freedom, and that conservative politicans who oppose regulation are taking people for suckers to promote big business. Footnote 13:
> [13] Conservatives’ efforts to decrease the amount of government regulation are of little benefit to the average man. For one thing, only a fraction of the regulations can be eliminated because most regulations are necessary. For another thing, most of the deregulation affects business rather than the average individual, so that its main effect is to take power from the government and give it to private corporations. What this means for the average man is that government interference in his life is replaced by interference from big corporations, which may be permitted, for example, to dump more chemicals that get into his water supply and give him cancer. The conservatives are just taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business.
>The inexorable march of technology cannot be stopped
More good news: global catastrophes can stop it! On a more pedantic note, This general platitude has always bothered me because for all our technological advancements, it's not, at its core, true. Thanos snap your fingers and get rid of every human, and what happens to technology? ChatGPT isn't going to upload itself into the best Boston Robotics model on the market and ensure continuity of electronics manufacturing. The march might be inevitable because 8 billion humans can't agree on anything, but it is still a choice. Small pockets of people have in fact opted out of that march; maybe more will in the future, or maybe "we" collectively decide that such a path is for the best.
Vindication is a dish best served cold, I suppose. It honestly would not surprise me if more people are looking at that document with fascination as of late.
And of course, there could be nuclear war, societal breakdown as mentioned, another global plague (H5N1? Marburg? Cordyceps? Prions? The possibilities are endless), or, my favorite, Butlerian Jihad. :)