People will argue this point. However, when I look at all the things that tech has done thinking it was going to improve society; when in fact, it did the exact opposite is hard to argue. AI is just another item on a very long list of dystopian markers that writers/musicians have warned us about for years.
The scary part now is people denying its happening right in front of them.
I wonder if age is a factor. Those of us who have been around for a while have seen all the promises and hope and excitement about the future, that maybe 20% of that comes true and the rest ends up being the usual exploitation and greed.
The younger people haven't been through that cycle of disillusionment yet so they still believe that only the positive, hopeful dreams will come true. It's natural, but naive, to believe that humans will always collectively choose the best path forward [1].
My grandma always refused to touch computers despite my excitement about them in my youth and I couldn't understand why. Now I think I get it.
In the former, you understand it better and better as you age, but in the latter you're left with knowledge that's of no use while the next generation is ahead of you just by the privilege of being young.
In the former, you are a valuable source of information. In the latter, a burden.
I'd put it more like: you're left with knowledge that sees right through bullshit and the same-old promises and error modes, but nobody's buying. And the next generation is hired precisely because they're naive to all of that to repeat the same mistakes eagerly while sociopaths profit.
With age I'm becoming jaded with computing, not personal computers per se, but the overwhelming space taken by them now (especially due to cheap networking I guess).
I did manage to convince her to try a VR headset at one point and despite her protests she clearly enjoyed it. Afterwards she said "what a silly gadget" haha. I'm realising now that I have similar feelings about generative AI.
So now I rebalance things and put computers in a smaller niche, not the centre of gravity.
Hard to tell if it's just nostalgia, but all the smoothing, drop shadows, antialiasing (and now blurring with MacOS 26) feel so unnecessary and hardly even pretty anymore.
There's something nice about computer interfaces that just look like computer interfaces instead of pretending they're something else.
IMO part of it is that the older interfaces trusted the intelligence of the user to understand the abstractions below the interface, while newer software assumes the user is dumb in order to capture the largest possible market share. In the 90s it was "RTFM", now it's "your software sucks if it's not obvious". But what we lost in that is that interfaces now abstract away what's actually going on underneath.
Maybe this preference for the old way is part of the reason for the resurgence of TUIs.
[1] https://viznut.fi/unscii/
[2] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/I too feel that the computing aesthetic has vanished, somehow on purpose, a lot of efforts were aimed at making gpus and browser able to emulate anything (magazine, movies), so that's what apps do.
And I also agree about the balance between the tool and user. Limitations forced UIs to be organized, structured in some simple ways, they would do enough work to do some of the work, but the rest was on you to grasp the abstractions and ideas around. The software became something to immerse yourself in to gain more. That was part of the magic.
Imagine, you invented iron production to improve people lives - better tools (ploughs, axes, knives), etc - and now you see how people immediately use it for better weapons crushing the ones who have still been using bronze.
Or for example from the Palantir's Karp's book "Technological Republic" :
" We make the case that one of the most significant challenges that we face in this country is ensuring that the U.S. Department of Defense turns the corner from an institution designed to fight and win kinetic wars to an organization that can design, build, and acquire AI weaponry—... "
The tech is great, be it iron or AI. The people are still [almost] the same (i sometimes think that our evolutionary goal is the AGI robots who would take over the Earth and will evolve toward higher morals and conscience faster than we would - as they would naturally have shared brain state/connection that we can get only if we develop telepathy which we wouldn't, and we unfortunately disregard the next best thing - empathy)
is that a reasonable statement? if so, congratulations, welcome to the club bud! you're a luddite now. we meet on tuesdays, please bring cookies if it's your first time.
Certainly a lot of bad things have come out of tech.
But I don't agree that it has made everything overall worse. That feels like recency bias. In which few decades in history would you rather be spending your years on this earth, instead of now?
I could not give less fucks for having AI and smartphones and most other stuff, including all the fancy new medical procedures which are barely incremental.
Fridges, basic 90s-style internet and mini-skirts and welfare, and cheap housing, and jobs-a-plenty, more affordable healthcare, and the lifestyle, I can use just fine!
And I'd avoid the Plague or feudal times too. Including the techno-feudal times of today.
Pretend people can't have periods they'd be fine to live again and might prefer to today is bullshit.
Genuine question, have you ever investigated these options? If so, why did you dismiss them?
Disagree
Removing yourself from the computing environment does not remove the impact it has on the world and around you. That is the equivalent of sticking one's head in the sand.
Right now I am picturing the dog drinking coffee in the burning room meme.
Four things:
1. I am a parent. Ignoring like the world doesn't exist is not an option.
> wouldn't you be happier if you lived in an environment where you were not impacted by all the stuff you dislike?
2. That would not be possible.
3. If you have the capability to do something, some believe you have an obligation to. Actively working to not make a shit world requires a deep awareness and understanding that leads to consistent action.
4. Trying to isolate yourself like in the face of so much suffering, including those around you, seems like the most selfish thing I can imagine. Could never be me.
> Things are not that bad.
For YOU maybe, for fucks sake.
And many, many others.
Don't project your reality on everyone else.
Only through awareness and understanding of it can I work to reduce it.
What I want is a better society (as I see it), not convenience for me personally.
Obviously to the degree I can distance myself from stuff I don't care for, I do it. But I don't want to larp in some like-minded commune while the world turns to shit, I want the world to not turn to shit.
But a lot of people disagree with you and think it isn't turning to shit, and in fact for most people on the planet, life gets better every year.
I understand your issues are more local, but remember, actions always speak louder than words. People say they don't want certain things, but then they engage prolifically with those things.
All I'm saying really is, try to avoid making the mistake that your reality is *the* reality. You can control your reality, and in this world you (and others) seem to dislike so much, there are other ways of being.
That's so untrue in these here parts, it's laughable
They're wrong. Their little corner might not be, but the world as a whole is.
> and in fact for most people on the planet, life gets better every year.
Sure, if you're a subsistence farmer, five of whose nine kids would have died of starvation a few decades ago. Now it's only one out of six. And yes, that is even in part thanks to the agricultural apps on your smartphone.
But for the larger part of the world's population, who aren't subsistence farmers — they're beyond all that, and into the downside (and that's where the subsistence farmers are headed too, once they are no longer such): Materially safe and well-fed, but prisoners in a bunch of walled panopticon gardens.
> You can control your reality
What one can control is a little Potemkin village, which one will always know is not actually reality. Your avid proselytizing for that as a "solution" is you working, intentionally or (hopefully) unintentionally, on behalf of the techbroligarks who are busily acquiring the real world as their personal fiefdoms.
If you are (hopefully not!) doing this intentionally, one can only wonder: Are you a techbroligark? (If so, who are you — Zuck, Musk, Thiel...?) If not: Why on Earth would you want to lull people — why would you be propagandizing for people lulling themselves — into the bliss of ignorance; why would you want them to ignore the world actually going to shit by hiding in some little artificial enclave where they can pretend that it isn't?
And if you aren't doing it intentionally, you need to wake up to the fact that it is what you're doing... And stop doing it.
I want the era/society/world, not mere personal or communal play-acting it.
I gotta say it reminds me a bit of that old Louis C.K bit where black people can't be messing with time machines. I guess gay people can't either. I don't think if you were gay you'd want the 60s, 70s, 80s or even 90s - maybe late 90s.
I mean it does seem that there are many groups of people I could think of that might be like 10 years ago please, but not much further back than that. Then again social progress not being evenly distributed might mean that 20 years ago and in a different country might be equivalent to 10 years for some life scenarios.
This is nothing new or unique to software.
Even scarier are the UIs for whom it's not happening fast enough and who cheer it on. Most of them don't realize they are digging their own graves if the promises they believe in become true. And if they don't become true, there will be a rude awakening for a great many people and bankruptcy for many companies.
Whatever any system does, it's someone's intention that it does so. It's like an unavoidable truism. You can't say anything that gets around it.
It's not 'destroying society'.
Not remotely in, any sense.
Many people seem to like Facebook. It's not really not causing harm, they are a minor nuisance at worst ... that you can avoid by ... not using it.
Open AI makes AI that you can use to do whatever.
That's mostly it.
I highly encourage you to read: https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/
oh that's happened to me a couple of times, its fucking infuriating.
The statement was that the purpose of the system is what it does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Read at least the first couple lines and become microscopically less ignorant. Or don't. I'm not your mom.
The 'system is doing what it is doing' and it's not 'destroying the world' it's improving it for the most part, with some negative externalities.
People on this thread are in such a juvenile nihilist head fog that they can't recognize what is going on around them, nor can they seem to even to be able to apply these metaphors, and when it's spelled out for them, they still don't get it.
There's nothing hugely wrong with 'the industry' even as it 'does what it does'.
I agree with you. Human greed has always been a thing, will always be a thing. But most people now would never choose to go back and be born 100 years ago if given the option. They ignore everything positive that technology has done, and massively ramp the negatives.
Think you are missing the point.
It is not an actual back room with dudes twirling their mustaches with concrete plans to destroy the world.
It is the 'profit motive' that forces a thousand small decisions, that you go along with because you have a mortgage to pay.
And all added up they destroy the world.
That is total nonsense.
You people have lost your minds, this is worse than a bad reddit thread.
Neither 'industry' not 'software' is 'destroying the world'.
Also ""Think you are missing the point.
It is not an actual back room with dudes twirling their mustaches ""
Thanks for the 'deep insight'?!?
Do you think you're conversing with a 14 year old, struggling with abstractions?
FYI - I've lived around the world, 'studied industry' formally, worked in a handful of them.
We're more prosperous than we have ever been, by a long mile.
There are some externalizations that are not healthy, but almost all of it is simply due to the large footprint we have on the earth.
Thankfully the population will scale back a bit and we'll probably harmonize.
But the very notion that 'the industry is destroying the world' is so juvenile and nihilist, it's just ridiculous.
Sorry. It think there were several themes here.
"Capitalism", leads to a thousand little decisions, that destroy the world. I've seen plenty of middle managers, that when they have to make their quarterly numbers, will dump toxic waste into the river upstream of a kindergarten.
Then "Industry". Look up some of the philosophy around 'e/acc'. They are definitely wanting to destroy the 'humans'. So maybe not the 'world', just all the 'humans'. And since the 'e/acc' comprise a large component of AI companies, and AI is driving the industry. I think there is a fair argument that the "Industry" does want to do harm to 'humans'. But maybe humans doesn't equal the 'world'.
"Do you think you're conversing with a 14 year old, struggling with abstractions?"
Yes, a little bit. You posted a single sentence. How does that convey that you are some industry veteran. Though, I do see you have posted more since then. But not what I saw at that time.
To some of your other posts. Yes, Today is better, and Tech is a big part of that. I don't think that should imply that it is a never ending fountain of good, just ignore any problems. It isn't like Industries can't go downhill. What? We can't talk about it. Could be we are steadily pushing up the mountain until we go over a cliff. Look up Black Swan events.
Sure sounds like it.