Treat the Internet Like Real Life

3.st

5 pointsqwm3 comments

I suppose in part it is 'The devil makes work for idle hands to do'. In freeing up time for the individual and not being presently aware of this, you end up just filling it with less than helpful stuff.

I am not advocating for a return to less efficient means but that people need to be aware of how technology can be used create and fill gaps in odd ways.

That's actually a very good way of putting it. One of the things I wanted to show in the article was that a lot of the promises of tech optimism were kept, but the other consequences were ignored. What you bring up is a very large consequence that was overlooked.

It's the enormous blind spot that Big Tech tends to have: it completely ignores the concept of a cost/benefit calculation and simply assumes that everything that it comes up with is all upside. In fact, a great deal of what it comes up with these days costs more than than the benefit can justify.

The one weird exception is with the genAI companies, who demonstrated their complete lack of ethics by being very clear that the cost they'll be imposing on society may be extreme (up to potentially extinction) but that they're willing to gamble all of our lives on it anyway.

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