Hacker News Reader

Comment by drgo | Hacker News Reader

I am not optimistic. What we learned from history is that despite all warnings and good intentions, governments, corps and citizens will make every possible mistake before we finally arrive at another precariously stable situation. Experts are famously bad at predicting the outcomes of new technologies/policies even in times of relatively low upheaval. And plans have a way of producing many significant unintended consequences. This is not going to prevent people with strong opinions from asserting that they know exactly what needs to be done. And in the rush to do something many things will certainly be done. We are screwed at least for a while.

View on HN

WFH was a great example of this. Everyone seemed to be on board, this was the way of the future, etc. Yet it seems nobody in charge thought about downtown economies or commercial real estate, and it turns out having a bunch of empty office buildings is really bad for banks and pension plans that invest in them. Somehow the experts or economists didn't see this coming, and since the system in question is too big to fail, and they tried nothing and were all out of ideas, the only remaining solution was a whiplash back to the status quo, employee happiness and productivity be damned.

Or maybe.. the people lies in you expecting too much of such people like economists? Who have a hammered in fixed model of the world.

It's kind of like what us Canadians say about the U.S. sometimes — that they'll always do the right thing, after they've tried everything else.

Supposedly Winston Churchill said this, though now that I’ve been looking up a source I see that attribution is murky

I though it was Winston Churchill? Anyways, from experience, I think it's true.

I don’t know, early Internet was the good old days. Probably because it wasn’t mainstream and governments, corps and citizens mostly didn’t care.

LLMs were fun and interesting to use and explore before they started to be pushed absolutely everywhere with the most aggressive tech rollout we ever experienced, all the financial engineering, all the moral judgement and prospects of a dull, hyper capitalistic society where a few trillionaires control our lives

Reply on news.ycombinator.com