Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

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The idea of tech as a tool of oppression is something that increasingly bothers me. I got into tech because I just liked building stuff with computers, and at the time I naively thought it seemed democratizing. Looking back I think this was largely because of the general public’s cluelessness about computers and the internet, so technically minded people with a little bit of access had a huge amount of power in shaping those early online spaces. I thought the future of tech would reflect the ideas of the builders, but I learned that’s not how it works. If something has potential as an instrument of power, that potential will be developed by those with power. Tech, especially the global internet has proven to have incredible scaling characteristics that can be harnessed for massive profit and control. AI is now promising a similar return in kind for whoever controls it. I’m not sure how to counterbalance this consolidation of power, but I do think it should be our major political project of the next 20 years or things are going to get ugly.

You should click through some of the links I've included, like https://dyingforaniphone.com/ and see how much money Apple pushes to hide how each of its innovations leads to corruption and straight-up sweat shop behavior (among other companies like Samsung, LG, Microsoft, HP and the like).

Or read more about how the necessary components for our devices like cobalt maintains the slave labor in Africa backed by Western hegemonic forces: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/books/review/cobalt-red-s... or the case of oil being pushed for more energy production and the lobbying against green solutions from companies like Exxon and Shell via https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo185167...

It's not even really about you or how you feel but what this industry is doing. And with the recent Supreme Court rulings, we're going to be lucky if we know if _more_ things go down.

>The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological sutfering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.

Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

https://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/Anarchism/Unabom/manifest...

I think Kaczynski's take is overly pessimistic, but it does get the broad strokes right.

Kaczynski has a few good points about the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, but man is his extremely long screed about "leftists" tiresome. You could give that chunk to Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson and it wouldn't feel out of character.

I'm convinced things are going to get very ugly over the next decade or two. It won't be until things get tremendously bad before the government actually does something and tries to turn it around.

Better stop moralizing capitalism. AI is simply another tool, and like all the tools that came before, its #1 purpose is to generate profits for the owners.

There's no counterbalance or consolidation of power that wouldn't go in accordance with the rules of a capitalist society, which necessarily includes the social class divide. Between those owning everything and those who sell their labor to survive.

Ugly or not, that is exactly what capitalism is supposed to be doing.

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