I Ask Seven Heretical Questions About Progress

> What does it tell us about progress if the most influential technological innovation of the century is clearly destroying lives on a massive scale? (The author is referring to smartphones.)

The author draws the wrong correlation. Smartphones enable communication. More communication is not the problem, but it is a catalyst that enables the problem to cause more damage.

The problem is that everything we see from government and corporations is a lie.

The fix would be to make it a felony to lie in the course of business. Criminally prosecute every stockholder of every corporation that makes claims that are proven false. Lock them up.

I can not say what the solution is to lying politicians.

> so why do companies that use AI hide it? Why do consumers hate it?

Anyone using AI correctly is doing great.

AI helps us learn. AI helps us be more productive.

The correct use of AI when authoring an article is to ask the AI: "Please rate this on a scale of 1 to 100 and give me 10 bullet points on what to improve. Do not reword any if it for me. Just give me bullet points on what to improve."

The issue is once again that people lack values. People screw other people by not spending the time to even proof read what AIs can generate. Those people need to be fired.

> How much is progress really worth if the people at the forefront of it anticipate global collapse in their private lives?

The two are unrelated. The value of progress has nothing to do with the hobbies of the rich.

It is fun to plan to be in a movie you liked. Disaster movies are popular and people with too much money like to spend money preparing for the end of the world.

Engineers do have more doubts about new technology, and C-level execs doubt society. We doubt what we know and trust the rest of society due to the Dunning Krueger Effect. Another example is that farmers usually have more doubts about food safety than do computer programmers.

Consider a graph in which one side shows how easy it is to achieve a goal, and the other side shows how useful it is,

At the beginning of industrialisation we were solving easy and useful problems. For example, sanitation, refrigeration, etc.

Now we're solving problems that are not only useless but potentially destructive, such as the attention economy, artificial intelligence and planned obsolescence. At the same time, these problems use up a lot of energy and cause pollution.

> Why did my mother abandon the most innovative food technologies of her generation and return to laborious and expensive organic foods—raised according to the farming standards of the Middle Ages?

Because high tech requires keeping up. At some point your mother was sick of the rat race and took the path of least resistance into something she knew. The work may have been physical, but the barriers to entry were low.

> investment in advancing medical and safety technology result in shorter lifespans?

Nobody made those investments in curing or preventing diseases. For-profit corporations made investments in medications that would be life-prolonging so their customers would give everything they had to get the meds so they could stay alive. This leads to huge spending that benefits the corporations.

Funding research into cheap cures is something we should do.

Funding meant to research prevention is diverted to angry anorexic people yelling at us to lose weight. Screw them, I'm going to get a burger.

> Is it really progress if technological innovation degrades the listening experience, erases all the supporting information about the music, and impoverishes the artists who create the songs in the first place?

The new technology could allow every artist to sell to a global market, with little friction.

The problem is The Copyright Mafiaa. (That's spelled with 2 As, like RIAA and MPAA.) Try to release something into the public domain, as I do regularly. An attorney will copyright it and pretty soon your boss will tell you that you are guilty of piracy.

Heretical answer - most of these have pretty easy answers and not much of anything to say about progress.

> Why did property values go up so much in a city that rejected progress and efficiency in almost every possible way?

> Why do so many people want to live and work there today? Why would they move from Silicon Valley to a boring farming community?

Since 1965, the US Government has protected the scum from the honest, hard working people. We The People are either fighting, fleeing, or surrendering. The author's parents chose to flee.