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Comment by PeterStuer | Hacker News Reader

The Internet grew faster than companies could 'secure' it, and I would say that was not just a good thing, but key to its success.

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I have the opposite impression looking around at the current situation. The tech giants moved fast and broke things and they broke humanity.

You're probably not wrong. But I think we should recognize that what is humanity is rather fluid. If you were to talk to the 15th century clergymen, I think they would tell the horrors of printing press and how it has/will break humanity. And they wouldn't be wrong either. Humanity evolves, and, well, that's it. And overall, hopefully, and this is where we hopefully can effect positive change, we can steer the change to more humane, and moral direction.

It matters what you think of democracy. "The people" don't want transformative AI. The polls bear it out.

the people want to have their cake and eat it.

What do you mean? The options on the table are crazy gamer fantasies that presumably aren't widely supported, dystopia, or worse.

People want some improved automation, but not too much.

> People want some improved automation, but not too much.

that's right, they want automation to reduce their costs, but not replace their jobs/business. the people employing them also want the same thing.

The people want their horseless carriage and their horses too.-

I think they simply shone a light on human nature. Those aspects were there and still affected people, but we had the illusion that we were rational humanist actors - and even then that was only in the west. the internet simply shattered the illusion.

This isn’t a good analogy. The internet provably works. AI doesn’t provably work. It works some of the time, and there’s no indication we are anywhere close to a version of AI which provably works all of the time, or even up to human standard.

There were and are many unknowns and fear about the internet at the time, too.

I was just fixing some php from 2001 and it allows visitors to execute php, inject js, read/write the database, send emails, extract md5 passwords, extract email addresses.

I'm surprised things worked out so well.

Tell that to everyone who is already using AI productively

While somewhat true, doesn't mean the same mistake has to be repeated to get progress on AI.

What "mistake" are you talking about?

Defaults like these user:password

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