8 ms·

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technolog

by ost-ing 4mo ago

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

ahartmetz 4mo ago
It really depends on the technology. Different technologies redistribute power differently. LLMs are very "centralizing" indeed. It is hardly feasible to train your own LLM as a private person or even a small company - at best you can download a pre-trained one, which at least nobody can silently change or take away from you.
- matusp 4mo ago
  That's why we have state. There are many technologies that we, as a society, decided to control in various ways. You can't just build a nuclear weapon for example. There is no particular reason why we let tech bros control many aspects of our lives, apart from legal inertia. LLMs can be "trivially" decentralized by expanding the concept intellectual property to also cover algorithmic processing. It's just about how we setup our laws and rules.
  - krupan 4mo ago
    Nobody had to legislate Free software into existence in order to protect us. Wise people saw the need and did something of their own accord. We are still free to do this!
    - ahartmetz 4mo ago
      It seems like one needs a big machine farm and a vast corpus of training data with a lot of manual curation to get started creating a competitive LLM, plus whatever technical expertise that I don't even know about. The stuff that makes LLMs exist now and not earlier. It might be possible to organize all that with volunteers and some paid work, but how in practice? Stallman seems kind of out of the game at this point and there is no Linus Torvalds figure neither for this, as of now.
      - stevenhuang 4mo ago
        > there is no Linus Torvalds figure neither for this, as of now Well yes there is. It's Karpathy.
      - moring 4mo ago
        > It seems like one needs a big machine farm and a vast corpus of training data with a lot of manual curation to get started creating a competitive LLM, plus whatever technical expertise that I don't even know about. The stuff that makes LLMs exist now and not earlier. "big machine farm" reminds me of folding@home, which needed the same and got it. "manual curation" is what Wikipedia did, as well as the free software community. "technical expertise" is present in the free software world too. It is sparse since it is sparse in the world as a whole, but it exists. "no Linus Torvalds figure" might be the main problem ATM.
        ahartmetz 4mo ago
        I also thought of these after writing my comment. The main problems that I see with these solutions are: - Training seems to need a lot of data available at the same time, which is difficult to handle on commodity hardware. - Manual curation can be a mind-numbing task, it might need to be gamified somehow. There is a chance that the curation could be higher quality than the current corporate stuff. Pretty sure that it's not an intrinsic property of LLMs to write like TED talks.
  - apsurd 4mo ago
    The State are the people and the people want tech billionaires because they want the same chance at being that (tech) m/billionaire. Temporarily embarrassed millionaires; I cannot get around that issue toward collective action, toward myself contributing to an answer. I'm stuck. I can't unsee its truth =/. The individual will choose enrichment. We all will.
    - watwut 4mo ago
      It does not seem like people want tech billionaires. It is fairly common to hate them. It is just that peoples preference dont matter as billionaires have disproportionally more power.
      - apsurd 4mo ago
        My example is always Bezos; everyone "hates" greedy tech Billionaire Bezos but how did he get there? We all put him there every day, every hour, every purchase. If basically everyone transacts with Amazon, willingly, how is it possible that Bezos is the bad guy? I get that it's not black and white but the point stands: he didn't overthrow the government, the we put him there.
    - rixed 4mo ago
      No we won't, and that's why we had free software in the first place. Many people dream of a community not of being forever singled out.
- krupan 4mo ago
  Very well said. Free software was a revolt against technology that you have no control over and I feel like the people that are whole heartedly embracing "AI" have completely forgotten this. They now use an incredibly expensive proprietary piece of technology that they have no control over to write a bunch of code that they cannot (even if they tried) understand and they talk like it's the most amazing thing ever. This is pure short-sighted foolishness.
  - ahartmetz 4mo ago
    Yeah - I really like F/OSS for the freedom aspect and I intensely dislike SaaS LLMs for the same reason. I tolerate them more easily for ancillary tasks like vulnerability search or super-powered LSP-workalikes to learn about a code base. There will eventually be a lot of nuance, I hope and believe - reasonable compromises between going all in and abstaining completely. So far, I'm doing okay just occasionally dabbling in local models. I at least need to know what people are talking about.
- worik 4mo ago
  > It is hardly feasible to train your own LLM as a private person or even a small company Yet
krackers 4mo ago
>In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate must depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society must be highly organized and decisions have to be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision
- idle_zealot 4mo ago
  I don't know what you're quoting, but I wish it were the case that something affecting a million people granted each affected individual about a one-millionth share in the decision. I don't think that would always yield good outcomes, but at least it would be democratic. Structures that enable that are what we should be building.
  - rglover 4mo ago
    In some circles, he goes by Uncle Ted.
    - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4mo ago
      To quote a movie: In the 1960's there was a young man graduated from the University of Michigan. Did some brilliant work in mathematics. Specifically bounded harmonic functions. Then he went on to Berkeley, was assistant professor, showed amazing potential, then he moved to Montana and he blew the competition away.
      - ajdegol 4mo ago
        But you forgot about Vickers
  - tejohnso 4mo ago
    With our level of technology I don't see why we couldn't have that kind of decision directly put into the hands of individuals rather than leave it to "representatives" or worse yet corporations that aren't even required to ask. Maybe I'm not thinking through the difficulties well enough, be what we have with elected representatives campaigning on one set of ideals and then voting the complete opposite way is unacceptable. At least, that should be grounds for imprisonment. Maybe that would be sufficient to get the representative voting system working well enough.
toasty228 4mo ago
> As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. I have to very regularly remind myself many people genuinely believe this shit and are not straight up evil/maniacs, it's getting harder
- ismailmaj 4mo ago
  I'm thinking that personally, technology is not bad in a vacuum and not necessarily bad in society, but it just reveals that our system is ill-equipped to guarantee good usage of it. We could have fun defining what's good usage but we're so far from it, it would just make me sad.
- stevenhuang 4mo ago
  What, so you believe technology corrupts absolutely? Nonsense.
thih9 4mo ago
One attempt was open source. Or perhaps libre software? I guess it is not a success since only one of these looks mainstream.
- krupan 4mo ago
  Free/Open Source software is very mainstream now I'm not sure what you mean, but maybe we are taking too much of it for granted?
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - thih9 4mo ago
    I meant that “open source” achieved pop culture level recognition. Libre software never did, most people are still unaware of the difference or don’t care. A popular claim against open source is that it alone is insufficient to prevent abuse (here: accumulation of power). Recent decade has shown many cases of that, with corporations adopting open source projects without giving power to their users; e.g.: Android or cloud services. Perhaps if we understood open source less as a process and more as a movement (so: if libre software movement was more popular) things would be different.
    - krupan 4mo ago
      I can agree that the original aims of the movement haven't fully caught on, especially the subtle difference between Open Source and Free/Libre software. The pragmatic side of better security, low-bureaucracy standardization, and low price won out over Freedom for freedom's sake. To me that's most apparent today with LLMs. Those are completely proprietary and privately controlled, yet the software world now LOVES them.
- bamboozled 4mo ago
  Open source is still around ? It would be vastly improving your life even though you can’t see it.
- 4mo ago
Forgeties79 4mo ago
> until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all Tons of us called for common sense guard rails and a little bit of actual intention as we rolled out LLM’s, but we were all shouted down as “luddites” who were “obstructing progress.” We all knew this was coming. It’s been incredibly frustrating knowing how preventable so much of it has been and will continue to be. Edit: these responses are absurd. Banning GPU’s…? What are you on about? Who said anything about stopping or banning LLM’s? Did none of you see “guardrails”? “A little bit of actual intention”? Where are you getting these extreme interpretations? I’m talking basic regulatory framework stuff. Regulations around disclosure, usage, access, etc. you know, all the stuff we neglected and are now paying for with social media in droves? We have done this song and dance so many times. No one is going to take away your precious robot helper, we’re just saying “maybe we should think about this for more than two seconds and not be completely blinded by dollar signs.” I mean people have literally died in my state because Zuckerberg wants to save a few bucks building his data center. It feels like AI evangelists come out the woodwork seething if anybody even implies you shouldn’t be allowed to do literally whatever you want at all times.
- zzzeek 4mo ago
  It wasn't "preventable" though. How would you prevent what's been happening ? Pass a law making GPUs illegal ? Just ..."convince" everyone that the machine that can write working software, business letters and render good enough banner and print advertising for nearly free is evil and just don't use it (ask Emily Bender how that's going)? There is no realistic way from stopping any of this from happening. Need a different approach.
  - Forgeties79 4mo ago
    I proposed literally none of those solutions or even suggested them.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - 4mo ago
bananaflag 4mo ago
Well, I love to take showers, which involve a lot of tech like running water and water heaters and soap which I can buy from the supermarket. I lived in places without any of those and I wouldn't want to do it again.
- WillPostForFood 4mo ago
  Tyranny of antibiotics and vaccines and MRI machines...
- hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
  While I believe the comment you are replying to may be too broad considering "all tech", I also strongly agree with the overall sentiment (and in particular I commend ost-ing for putting a general feeling I think a lot of people have so clearly and succinctly into words). As a Gen Xer, I grew up with a strong belief in the "goodness" of technology, of its power to make people's lives better and to ameliorate suffering. So after 25 years of seeing so much invested into technology that actively makes people's lives worse (e.g. ad-tech, social media algorithms), and even conservatively just results in the huge accumulation of wealth and power to the very few, I can't help but feel extremely disillusioned. Yes, I like showers and soap and running water, but I rarely see the type of economic investment into tech these days that will have as broad of a beneficial impact as running water did.
jmyeet 4mo ago
Thing is, technology (particularly automation) could make life better but it not doing that is a choice. Think about it. We could live in a world where people only had to work 20 hours a week or even at some point not at all. We don't do that because we have a system that simply makes a handful of people even wealthier. We will likely see the first trillionaire minted in our lifetimes. That is an unimaginable and unjustifiable amount of money for one person to have. So you're not really complaining about technology making things worse. You're complaining about wealth inequality, which is a direct result of the mode of production and the organization of the economy. Internet access should, at this point, be basically free. The best Internet in the country is municipal broadband. It's better and it's cheaper. It's owned by the town, city or county that it's in, which means it's owned by citizens of that municpality. Instead what we have in most of the country are national ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum and AT&T and the prices are sky high. They are only sky high so somebody far away can continue to extract profit from something that's already built and not that expensive to build. You will get lied to by people saying national ISPs have an economy of scale. Well, if that were true, why is municipal broadband so (relatively) better and cheaper? Why would there be state laws that make municipal broadband illegal? Why would national ISPs lobby for such laws?
- alehlopeh 4mo ago
  If it’s a choice, then who gets to make that choice? Certainly not the individual. I don’t remember getting to choose anything of the sort. If you say it’s society that makes the choice, how does that work exactly? Through democracy and governance? Well then society did make the choice. Are you then complaining that the choice society made is not the one you prefer? From the perspective of the individual, it’s not a choice at all.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago
  >We could live in a world where people only had to work 20 hours a week or even at some point not at all. How would your country function, if all medical staff, construction, rail, sewage, police and firefighters suddenly worked half as long or not at all, starting tomorrow? Because my home country tried this whole "if we seize the means of production from the wealthy elites, we won't have to work as hard anymore" ~80 years ago, and guess what happened to the workers? Were they working less hours for more money, OR, were they working just as much while also starving and being plagued by shortages? The problem with your logic, is that it only applies to bullshit Western office corporate jobs who are anyway not actually doing much useful work for 40h. All those office jobs that don't need to be working 40h, were just subsidized by endless money printing, that's why you see so many layoffs happening, once the ZIRP era ended when they were hiring people just to raise headcounts to boost stock valuations to gullible investors they could rug-pull, but now the bubble popped and the jig is up. And it only works in a world where you own the world reserve currency, and globalisation, free trade and international competition does not exist, because the countries who will work harder than you, will outcompete you and subjugate you in the long run so you can make their sneakers and phones for 60h/week, while they kick it back and live from printing money.
fidotron 4mo ago
Let's go there: this is what the Unabomber was on about, and there has long been an effort to stop people noticing this. Ultimately you end up with either going for totalitarianism (either to arrest development in the status quo, maintain a state of anarcho primitivism or technocratic tedium) or we resist that and break out by trying to forge forward into some unknown unchartered territory. In practice we have no choice but to aim for the unknown and hope. Can't lie and say I can see what the way through all this is though.
- iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago
  Not so long ago, I have come to a rather unpleasant realization that whether a lot of that will happen, will depend heavily on whether the ones currently trying to make technology control every facet of our lives decide to allow society get dumber first ( think Idiocracy, which AI very much could allow ) or not in which case it is anyone's guess, because people will still have some basic skills and memories of what could be. I am hoping for the best, but life has taught me hard not to bet against humanity's worst instincts. edit: add whether
  - fidotron 4mo ago
    100%. Same applies to any hypothetical sentient AI that may or may not arise. The incentives to keep everyone weak and dumb are too strong. I have a friend in a position of some influence, and am currently trying to persuade them to stop being so comfortable trusting in humanity to come to the right decisions for exactly that reason.
    - ihsw 4mo ago
      [dead]
  - JuniperMesos 4mo ago
    The thesis of Idiocracy is that society gets dumber in the future because intelligence is mostly genetically-determined and smarter people systematically have fewer children than dumber people, i.e. literal evolutionary selection against human intelligence over many human generations. This is clear in the first several minutes of the movie. People who recognize that this is what that movie is saying often then condemn it for being Nazi-adjacent pro-eugenics propaganda. In the logic of Idiocracy, the way that an AI would "allow" the future society portrayed in the movie is by letting dumb people systematically have more kids than smart people, and "not allowing" this would entail some kind of coercive eugenics policy aimed at getting smart people to have more kids than they would otherwise be inclined to.
themafia 4mo ago
Technology is simply a technique to leverage and extend human desire. It's a tool. It's in the hands of those who control and use it. You shouldn't blame technology. You should blame the maniacs that have latched on to it as a way of extending their power. You should blame the government for their failures of regulation. You should blame the media for failing to cover this obvious problem. The people who want to subjugate you are the problem.
- apsurd 4mo ago
  "The problem is them" no no, we're not doing that.
  - themafia 4mo ago
    I named three specific groups. You can easily find the bad actors within these groups. There is no "them." There is a highly identifiable set of individuals that take actions which cause major problems in our society. On this there is absolutely no question. In fact there is even good social consensus as to who these people are. I get that hacker news would rather avoid inconvenient issues or simply satirize them but I take absolutely no care of this.
jgalt212 4mo ago
> Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation. True during the mainframe. Not true during the PC age. Perhaps true again during frontier model / data center ago. Maybe not true again when hostable open weights models become efficient and good enough.
shevy-java 4mo ago
> As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology is not a good-only or evil-only thing. You have use cases that are beneficial and you have use cases that is not benefical. The technology in by itself isn't what makes things worse. Even many thousand years ago, humans used weapons to bash in other humans. Remember the Ötzi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Body https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Body he was killed by arrows, most logically from someone else shooting at him (at around 3230 BC). Nuclear energy is used as weapon or source for generation of energy (or rather, transformation of energy). And so on and so forth. IMO the biggest question has less to do about technology, but distribution of wealth and possibilities. I think oligarchs need to be impossible; right now they are causing a ton of problems. Technology also creates problems, I agree on that, but I would not subscribe to a "technology makes everything worse". That does not seem to be a realistic assessment.
- iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago
  This. But suggest that maybe someone should stop being able to 'create wealth' past 7th island in French Polynesia and people go nuts.
thomaswoodson 4mo ago
New around here, but… For those interested in a deep dive, I highly recommend reading the Technological Society, by French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul.
wotsdat 4mo ago
go steal someone else's money, damn socialists
bicepjai 4mo ago
I agree, I want technology in the hands of people (I want to control my data) and I don’t believe in cloud anymore since corporate greed and ad tech just destroyed the trust in cloud use case.
vjvjvjvjghv 4mo ago
"Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation" My theory is that AI and robotics have the potential to break capitalism as we know it. We will probably reach a point where machines will be better than humans at pretty much anything and there will be almost no need for workers who just do a job (like most of us). But if nobody has money to buy things then there is no point in producing anything. Not sure where this will be going but I am pretty sure the capitalists will not voluntarily share the gains. In theory all this progress should be great and exciting for humanity but without changing the system there may be dark times coming for most of us. I always have to think of Marshall Brain's "Manna" story. It may be a spot on prediction of things to come.
- dag100 4mo ago
  > But if nobody has money to buy things then there is no point in producing anything. The top 1% can still buy things. They can buy a lot of things, in fact. In 2024 in the US, the top 20% by income account consumed roughly the same amount as the bottom 60% (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm). This gap has widened over time (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1W5px https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1W5px) and will probably continue to widen even further.
mlinsey 4mo ago
That's definitely too broad a statement. I'd argue encryption, oral contraceptives, and the printing press were all strongly decentralizing.
- mystraline 4mo ago
  The Public won the encryption battle against the USG and ITAR idiocy. Well, until climate destroying shitcoin. Thats a big Lose. The printing press had sooo much state violence over that everywhere. Oral contraceptives are a fight the USA is losing to the extremist christian republicans. Right now the line is right on Misoprostol. And shithole states like Texas even criminalize day-after pills and 'suspect' miscarriages. And horrible tech like "weatherproof camera + AI + battery + solar + cell" (FLOCK) are easy to implement and already have been used in tracking women with miscarriages in Texas and across the country. It seems for every new tech, theres 1 really cool good thing for the public, a few neutral things, and 1-3 absolutely terrible things. And those terrible things make money. Lots of money.
  - mlinsey 4mo ago
    You're describing efforts by powerful institutions to squash the technology, which they definitely try to do, but that's just a strong signal that the technology itself is inherently opposed to centralized power, not an enabler of it. Other technologies like surveillance (and, perhaps, AI) are more clearly centralizing and enabling of power. The difference matters a lot if you're having mixed feelings about working in technology.
    - mystraline 4mo ago
      You are anthromorphizing technology. He doesnt like that.
      - blast 4mo ago
        mlinsey wasn't anthropomorphizing technology, and your GP comment seems extreme to me.
timoth3y 4mo ago
I think that is the core truth of the matter. Technology itself does not make life better. I recently published an article about the Luddites. If you look at their actual demands, they were not anti-tech. They were labor activists. Life got much, much worse for most people in the industrial revolution until the laws they advocated were finally implemented. https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-real-luddites-would-have-loved-ai/ https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-real-luddites-would-have...
- willhslade 4mo ago
  I mean, dentristy and vaccines but ok.
- pitched 4mo ago
  The Luddites were against the systems that were shifting work away from skilled workers (them) to unskilled workers (commonly children). I have no doubt serious injury and death happened at those machines but find it hard to believe that was the cause of the Luddites. All signs point to them being more worried about themselves. There’s no way they would have been pro-AI. It would take a very skilled VC to warp the world enough to make that sound true.
  - timoth3y 4mo ago
    If you look at what their actual demands, the pattern is clear. They lobbied for support for unemployed, the right to vote, improved safely and labor conditions across all industries, and enforcing the labor laws that were already on the books. Banning machines was not part of their demands. The Luddites were part of a larger labor movement that spanned multiple industries.
    - pitched 4mo ago
      I can’t find any primary documents online that back up your claim directly but this gets pretty close: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/why-did-the-luddites-protest/ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/why-... That is still a lot closer to collective bargaining than “save the children”. What you’re saying is plausible enough to be easy to get an LLM to hallucinate, is the larger concern here. If this opinion does come from one, try asking it to verify using external sources. The Luddites would have been violently opposed to AI slop, if they had an opinion on it.
runarberg 4mo ago
GMO was the first technology I figured that out. It was heavily pushed in around 2007 as a solution to world hunger, but at the same time it was very easy to see that hunger was a problem of distribution, not technology. Even back in 2007 we made much more food then was required to feed the world population. Furthering the obviousness of the lie was that in reality GMO was (and still is) mostly used for growing feed or cosmetic products. And on top of that we had large monopolies with patents to protect, and herbicides to sell, pushing this technology the hardest. Now its been 20 years later. The technology is mature and many of the patents have expired, but GMO has done absolutely nothing to solve world hunger.
- worik 4mo ago
  Yes. We do not need GMO for food, I agree. But where is the genetically engineered heart muscle that sits in the engine bay of my car running on nutrient solution, excreting C02 and urine while driving my car with a hydraulic motor?
lyu07282 4mo ago
This is exactly right, it gets examplified by Chinese people's attitude to new innovative technology. It's all doom and gloom in the west. But the thing is that both are correct stances on this technology for exactly the reason you mentioned. It's fundamentally different systems of governance of the same technology. One only ever saw new technology result in consolidation of power and collective decline and genuine grievances ignored, the other has demonstrated the ability to make new technology increase the collective well being of everybody. It's the low vs. high trust society, see the inverse of Francis Fukuyama's 1996 book Trust.
pdonis 4mo ago
> until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all Here's the problem: you can't. First, people have disagreements, often very fundamental ones, over what "benefits us all". There's no way to resolve many such disagreements short of brute force. Second, "enforce"--note the last five letters of that word--means some people are given the power to do things to other people that, if anyone else did them, would be crimes. Throw you in jail, fine you, restrict the things you can do. Indeed, that's how David Friedman, whose "The Machinery of Freedom" is worth reading, defines a government. And the problem is that government still has to be done by humans, and humans can't be trusted with the power to do such things. Ultimately the only defense we have is to not give other people such power. Not governments, not tech giants, nobody. But that requires a degree of foresight that most people don't have, or don't want to take the time to exercise, particularly not if something juicy is in front of them. How many people back when Facebook first started would have been willing to simply not use it--because they foresaw that in a couple of decades, Facebook would become a huge monster that nobody knows how to rein in? If my own personal circle is any guide, the answer is "not enough to matter"--of all the people I know, I am the only one who does not use Facebook and never has. And even I didn't refuse to use it back when it first started because I saw what things would be like today--I just had an instinctive reaction against it and listened to that reaction, and then watched the trainwreck slowly develop over the years since. So we're stuck. Even if we end up deciding that, for example, the government will break up the tech giants, slap huge fines on Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc., maybe confiscate a bunch of their property, maybe even make them do a bunch of community service, possibly even some of them serve some jail time--it will still be just other humans doing things to them that no humans can be trusted to do. It won't fix the root problem. It will just kick the can down the road a little longer.
- worik 4mo ago
  > Here's the problem: you can't. It is not possible to "enforce" a "value system". True. But we can have a value system we share that benefits us all. We can work together to improve our welfare as a whole. > Ultimately the only defense we have is to not give other people such power. That is untrue. We must have webs of trust, and within those webs there are power hierarchies. The trick is that those hierarchies must not be arbitrary nor permanent. This is a problem that has been wrestled with, and solved, several times in human history. Any human structure is vulnerable to outside attack, and most (all?) vulnerable to internal decay, but they can be established and are worth establishing. An example I can think of are the Republican Militias as described by George Orwell in Road to Catalonia, and activist groups I have been involved with here in Aotearoa. Nothing lasts for ever - that does not mean we cannot work together for good things. -- In one group I was involved on we used to have monthly meetings, by phone, of the organising committee. We had thirty members (all activists running hot with their own opinions), made decisions by consensus. I was on that committee for five years and we went over our allotted two ours twice: Once by ninety minutes (that was a day!) and the other time by five minutes. Nobody ever felt unheard - that mattered to us. It is possible, people have been doing it forever, the good things we make are vulnerable but we should still aspire to and achieve them
wnc3141 4mo ago
Read "why nations fail". It essentially covers this. Markets and technologies are great but ultimately bound by the systems of power they inhabit.
vatsachak 4mo ago
Technology can also divide power. Think about the amount of open source intelligence that exists.
keeda 4mo ago
Technology is primarily an accelerator. It just accelerates things, both good and bad, that were already in motion or at least already possible. Which is why things like healthcare got better but things like wealth inequality got worse. What needs to change is the system in which that technology exists inside, because otherwise removing technology will still keep us on the same trajectory to the same destination, only much slower and possibly with much more pain. What we're seeing right now with layoffs and everything else is simply an acceleration of our current trajectory. We were always going to get here, AI just got us here a few decades ahead of schedule. For once, however, we have a technology that could let us change this trajectory. I've said this before, but the capital class held so much power because it took a lot of people, and hence a lot of capital, to take on large endeavors that created new wealth. But things were rigged such that those who provided the capital also captured most of that new wealth. Now, just as AI lets companies (i.e. capital) do the same things with fewer people, it also lets people do the work of entire companies by themselves... i.e. without capital. That is a big enough shift in power dynamics to alter the trajectory in previously inconceivable ways.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
dzhiurgis 4mo ago
[flagged]
throwyawayyyy 4mo ago
The Stasi had one informant per 6.5 people. We're moving to a world in which everyone can have their own personal informant. I really don't think I am being hyperbolic here.
zmmmmm 4mo ago
> Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all The fallacy is believing that some kind of invisible hand will guide it to automatically produce an equal outcome and therefore any and all regulation is inherently bad. This seems to be a prevailing belief in the US in the current climate. We have institutions that are designed to redistribute power and they are called governments. People have to believe in their role in doing that enough to actually empower them to implement it though.
marcosdumay 4mo ago
> Technology amplifies power Some technologies concentrate power, some technologies distribute it. "The WWW" is still too coarse of a category to have just one of those effects up there. Some people just don't show the capacity to handle nuance or complexity.

by ost-ing 4mo ago

ahartmetz 4mo ago

It really depends on the technology. Different technologies redistribute power differently. LLMs are very "centralizing" indeed. It is hardly feasible to train your own LLM as a private person or even a small company - at best you can download a pre-trained one, which at least nobody can silently change or take away from you.

matusp 4mo ago
That's why we have state. There are many technologies that we, as a society, decided to control in various ways. You can't just build a nuclear weapon for example. There is no particular reason why we let tech bros control many aspects of our lives, apart from legal inertia. LLMs can be "trivially" decentralized by expanding the concept intellectual property to also cover algorithmic processing. It's just about how we setup our laws and rules.
- krupan 4mo ago
  Nobody had to legislate Free software into existence in order to protect us. Wise people saw the need and did something of their own accord. We are still free to do this!
  - ahartmetz 4mo ago
    It seems like one needs a big machine farm and a vast corpus of training data with a lot of manual curation to get started creating a competitive LLM, plus whatever technical expertise that I don't even know about. The stuff that makes LLMs exist now and not earlier. It might be possible to organize all that with volunteers and some paid work, but how in practice? Stallman seems kind of out of the game at this point and there is no Linus Torvalds figure neither for this, as of now.
    - stevenhuang 4mo ago
      > there is no Linus Torvalds figure neither for this, as of now Well yes there is. It's Karpathy.
    - moring 4mo ago
      > It seems like one needs a big machine farm and a vast corpus of training data with a lot of manual curation to get started creating a competitive LLM, plus whatever technical expertise that I don't even know about. The stuff that makes LLMs exist now and not earlier. "big machine farm" reminds me of folding@home, which needed the same and got it. "manual curation" is what Wikipedia did, as well as the free software community. "technical expertise" is present in the free software world too. It is sparse since it is sparse in the world as a whole, but it exists. "no Linus Torvalds figure" might be the main problem ATM.
      - ahartmetz 4mo ago
        I also thought of these after writing my comment. The main problems that I see with these solutions are: - Training seems to need a lot of data available at the same time, which is difficult to handle on commodity hardware. - Manual curation can be a mind-numbing task, it might need to be gamified somehow. There is a chance that the curation could be higher quality than the current corporate stuff. Pretty sure that it's not an intrinsic property of LLMs to write like TED talks.
- apsurd 4mo ago
  The State are the people and the people want tech billionaires because they want the same chance at being that (tech) m/billionaire. Temporarily embarrassed millionaires; I cannot get around that issue toward collective action, toward myself contributing to an answer. I'm stuck. I can't unsee its truth =/. The individual will choose enrichment. We all will.
  - watwut 4mo ago
    It does not seem like people want tech billionaires. It is fairly common to hate them. It is just that peoples preference dont matter as billionaires have disproportionally more power.
    - apsurd 4mo ago
      My example is always Bezos; everyone "hates" greedy tech Billionaire Bezos but how did he get there? We all put him there every day, every hour, every purchase. If basically everyone transacts with Amazon, willingly, how is it possible that Bezos is the bad guy? I get that it's not black and white but the point stands: he didn't overthrow the government, the we put him there.
  - rixed 4mo ago
    No we won't, and that's why we had free software in the first place. Many people dream of a community not of being forever singled out.
krupan 4mo ago
Very well said. Free software was a revolt against technology that you have no control over and I feel like the people that are whole heartedly embracing "AI" have completely forgotten this. They now use an incredibly expensive proprietary piece of technology that they have no control over to write a bunch of code that they cannot (even if they tried) understand and they talk like it's the most amazing thing ever. This is pure short-sighted foolishness.
- ahartmetz 4mo ago
  Yeah - I really like F/OSS for the freedom aspect and I intensely dislike SaaS LLMs for the same reason. I tolerate them more easily for ancillary tasks like vulnerability search or super-powered LSP-workalikes to learn about a code base. There will eventually be a lot of nuance, I hope and believe - reasonable compromises between going all in and abstaining completely. So far, I'm doing okay just occasionally dabbling in local models. I at least need to know what people are talking about.
worik 4mo ago
> It is hardly feasible to train your own LLM as a private person or even a small company Yet

krackers 4mo ago

>In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate must depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society must be highly organized and decisions have to be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision

idle_zealot 4mo ago
I don't know what you're quoting, but I wish it were the case that something affecting a million people granted each affected individual about a one-millionth share in the decision. I don't think that would always yield good outcomes, but at least it would be democratic. Structures that enable that are what we should be building.
- rglover 4mo ago
  In some circles, he goes by Uncle Ted.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4mo ago
    To quote a movie: In the 1960's there was a young man graduated from the University of Michigan. Did some brilliant work in mathematics. Specifically bounded harmonic functions. Then he went on to Berkeley, was assistant professor, showed amazing potential, then he moved to Montana and he blew the competition away.
    - ajdegol 4mo ago
      But you forgot about Vickers
- tejohnso 4mo ago
  With our level of technology I don't see why we couldn't have that kind of decision directly put into the hands of individuals rather than leave it to "representatives" or worse yet corporations that aren't even required to ask. Maybe I'm not thinking through the difficulties well enough, be what we have with elected representatives campaigning on one set of ideals and then voting the complete opposite way is unacceptable. At least, that should be grounds for imprisonment. Maybe that would be sufficient to get the representative voting system working well enough.

toasty228 4mo ago

> As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. I have to very regularly remind myself many people genuinely believe this shit and are not straight up evil/maniacs, it's getting harder

ismailmaj 4mo ago
I'm thinking that personally, technology is not bad in a vacuum and not necessarily bad in society, but it just reveals that our system is ill-equipped to guarantee good usage of it. We could have fun defining what's good usage but we're so far from it, it would just make me sad.
stevenhuang 4mo ago
What, so you believe technology corrupts absolutely? Nonsense.

thih9 4mo ago

One attempt was open source. Or perhaps libre software? I guess it is not a success since only one of these looks mainstream.

krupan 4mo ago
Free/Open Source software is very mainstream now I'm not sure what you mean, but maybe we are taking too much of it for granted?
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- thih9 4mo ago
  I meant that “open source” achieved pop culture level recognition. Libre software never did, most people are still unaware of the difference or don’t care. A popular claim against open source is that it alone is insufficient to prevent abuse (here: accumulation of power). Recent decade has shown many cases of that, with corporations adopting open source projects without giving power to their users; e.g.: Android or cloud services. Perhaps if we understood open source less as a process and more as a movement (so: if libre software movement was more popular) things would be different.
  - krupan 4mo ago
    I can agree that the original aims of the movement haven't fully caught on, especially the subtle difference between Open Source and Free/Libre software. The pragmatic side of better security, low-bureaucracy standardization, and low price won out over Freedom for freedom's sake. To me that's most apparent today with LLMs. Those are completely proprietary and privately controlled, yet the software world now LOVES them.
bamboozled 4mo ago
Open source is still around ? It would be vastly improving your life even though you can’t see it.
4mo ago

Forgeties79 4mo ago

> until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all Tons of us called for common sense guard rails and a little bit of actual intention as we rolled out LLM’s, but we were all shouted down as “luddites” who were “obstructing progress.” We all knew this was coming. It’s been incredibly frustrating knowing how preventable so much of it has been and will continue to be. Edit: these responses are absurd. Banning GPU’s…? What are you on about? Who said anything about stopping or banning LLM’s? Did none of you see “guardrails”? “A little bit of actual intention”? Where are you getting these extreme interpretations? I’m talking basic regulatory framework stuff. Regulations around disclosure, usage, access, etc. you know, all the stuff we neglected and are now paying for with social media in droves? We have done this song and dance so many times. No one is going to take away your precious robot helper, we’re just saying “maybe we should think about this for more than two seconds and not be completely blinded by dollar signs.” I mean people have literally died in my state because Zuckerberg wants to save a few bucks building his data center. It feels like AI evangelists come out the woodwork seething if anybody even implies you shouldn’t be allowed to do literally whatever you want at all times.

zzzeek 4mo ago
It wasn't "preventable" though. How would you prevent what's been happening ? Pass a law making GPUs illegal ? Just ..."convince" everyone that the machine that can write working software, business letters and render good enough banner and print advertising for nearly free is evil and just don't use it (ask Emily Bender how that's going)? There is no realistic way from stopping any of this from happening. Need a different approach.
- Forgeties79 4mo ago
  I proposed literally none of those solutions or even suggested them.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - 4mo ago

bananaflag 4mo ago

Well, I love to take showers, which involve a lot of tech like running water and water heaters and soap which I can buy from the supermarket. I lived in places without any of those and I wouldn't want to do it again.

WillPostForFood 4mo ago
Tyranny of antibiotics and vaccines and MRI machines...
hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
While I believe the comment you are replying to may be too broad considering "all tech", I also strongly agree with the overall sentiment (and in particular I commend ost-ing for putting a general feeling I think a lot of people have so clearly and succinctly into words). As a Gen Xer, I grew up with a strong belief in the "goodness" of technology, of its power to make people's lives better and to ameliorate suffering. So after 25 years of seeing so much invested into technology that actively makes people's lives worse (e.g. ad-tech, social media algorithms), and even conservatively just results in the huge accumulation of wealth and power to the very few, I can't help but feel extremely disillusioned. Yes, I like showers and soap and running water, but I rarely see the type of economic investment into tech these days that will have as broad of a beneficial impact as running water did.

jmyeet 4mo ago

Thing is, technology (particularly automation) could make life better but it not doing that is a choice. Think about it. We could live in a world where people only had to work 20 hours a week or even at some point not at all. We don't do that because we have a system that simply makes a handful of people even wealthier. We will likely see the first trillionaire minted in our lifetimes. That is an unimaginable and unjustifiable amount of money for one person to have. So you're not really complaining about technology making things worse. You're complaining about wealth inequality, which is a direct result of the mode of production and the organization of the economy. Internet access should, at this point, be basically free. The best Internet in the country is municipal broadband. It's better and it's cheaper. It's owned by the town, city or county that it's in, which means it's owned by citizens of that municpality. Instead what we have in most of the country are national ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum and AT&T and the prices are sky high. They are only sky high so somebody far away can continue to extract profit from something that's already built and not that expensive to build. You will get lied to by people saying national ISPs have an economy of scale. Well, if that were true, why is municipal broadband so (relatively) better and cheaper? Why would there be state laws that make municipal broadband illegal? Why would national ISPs lobby for such laws?

alehlopeh 4mo ago
If it’s a choice, then who gets to make that choice? Certainly not the individual. I don’t remember getting to choose anything of the sort. If you say it’s society that makes the choice, how does that work exactly? Through democracy and governance? Well then society did make the choice. Are you then complaining that the choice society made is not the one you prefer? From the perspective of the individual, it’s not a choice at all.
joe_mamba 4mo ago
>We could live in a world where people only had to work 20 hours a week or even at some point not at all. How would your country function, if all medical staff, construction, rail, sewage, police and firefighters suddenly worked half as long or not at all, starting tomorrow? Because my home country tried this whole "if we seize the means of production from the wealthy elites, we won't have to work as hard anymore" ~80 years ago, and guess what happened to the workers? Were they working less hours for more money, OR, were they working just as much while also starving and being plagued by shortages? The problem with your logic, is that it only applies to bullshit Western office corporate jobs who are anyway not actually doing much useful work for 40h. All those office jobs that don't need to be working 40h, were just subsidized by endless money printing, that's why you see so many layoffs happening, once the ZIRP era ended when they were hiring people just to raise headcounts to boost stock valuations to gullible investors they could rug-pull, but now the bubble popped and the jig is up. And it only works in a world where you own the world reserve currency, and globalisation, free trade and international competition does not exist, because the countries who will work harder than you, will outcompete you and subjugate you in the long run so you can make their sneakers and phones for 60h/week, while they kick it back and live from printing money.

fidotron 4mo ago

Let's go there: this is what the Unabomber was on about, and there has long been an effort to stop people noticing this. Ultimately you end up with either going for totalitarianism (either to arrest development in the status quo, maintain a state of anarcho primitivism or technocratic tedium) or we resist that and break out by trying to forge forward into some unknown unchartered territory. In practice we have no choice but to aim for the unknown and hope. Can't lie and say I can see what the way through all this is though.

iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago
Not so long ago, I have come to a rather unpleasant realization that whether a lot of that will happen, will depend heavily on whether the ones currently trying to make technology control every facet of our lives decide to allow society get dumber first ( think Idiocracy, which AI very much could allow ) or not in which case it is anyone's guess, because people will still have some basic skills and memories of what could be. I am hoping for the best, but life has taught me hard not to bet against humanity's worst instincts. edit: add whether
- fidotron 4mo ago
  100%. Same applies to any hypothetical sentient AI that may or may not arise. The incentives to keep everyone weak and dumb are too strong. I have a friend in a position of some influence, and am currently trying to persuade them to stop being so comfortable trusting in humanity to come to the right decisions for exactly that reason.
  - ihsw 4mo ago
    [dead]
- JuniperMesos 4mo ago
  The thesis of Idiocracy is that society gets dumber in the future because intelligence is mostly genetically-determined and smarter people systematically have fewer children than dumber people, i.e. literal evolutionary selection against human intelligence over many human generations. This is clear in the first several minutes of the movie. People who recognize that this is what that movie is saying often then condemn it for being Nazi-adjacent pro-eugenics propaganda. In the logic of Idiocracy, the way that an AI would "allow" the future society portrayed in the movie is by letting dumb people systematically have more kids than smart people, and "not allowing" this would entail some kind of coercive eugenics policy aimed at getting smart people to have more kids than they would otherwise be inclined to.

themafia 4mo ago

Technology is simply a technique to leverage and extend human desire. It's a tool. It's in the hands of those who control and use it. You shouldn't blame technology. You should blame the maniacs that have latched on to it as a way of extending their power. You should blame the government for their failures of regulation. You should blame the media for failing to cover this obvious problem. The people who want to subjugate you are the problem.

apsurd 4mo ago
"The problem is them" no no, we're not doing that.
- themafia 4mo ago
  I named three specific groups. You can easily find the bad actors within these groups. There is no "them." There is a highly identifiable set of individuals that take actions which cause major problems in our society. On this there is absolutely no question. In fact there is even good social consensus as to who these people are. I get that hacker news would rather avoid inconvenient issues or simply satirize them but I take absolutely no care of this.

jgalt212 4mo ago

> Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation. True during the mainframe. Not true during the PC age. Perhaps true again during frontier model / data center ago. Maybe not true again when hostable open weights models become efficient and good enough.

shevy-java 4mo ago

> As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology is not a good-only or evil-only thing. You have use cases that are beneficial and you have use cases that is not benefical. The technology in by itself isn't what makes things worse. Even many thousand years ago, humans used weapons to bash in other humans. Remember the Ötzi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Body https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Body he was killed by arrows, most logically from someone else shooting at him (at around 3230 BC). Nuclear energy is used as weapon or source for generation of energy (or rather, transformation of energy). And so on and so forth. IMO the biggest question has less to do about technology, but distribution of wealth and possibilities. I think oligarchs need to be impossible; right now they are causing a ton of problems. Technology also creates problems, I agree on that, but I would not subscribe to a "technology makes everything worse". That does not seem to be a realistic assessment.

iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago
This. But suggest that maybe someone should stop being able to 'create wealth' past 7th island in French Polynesia and people go nuts.

thomaswoodson 4mo ago

New around here, but… For those interested in a deep dive, I highly recommend reading the Technological Society, by French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul.

wotsdat 4mo ago

go steal someone else's money, damn socialists

bicepjai 4mo ago

I agree, I want technology in the hands of people (I want to control my data) and I don’t believe in cloud anymore since corporate greed and ad tech just destroyed the trust in cloud use case.

vjvjvjvjghv 4mo ago

"Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation" My theory is that AI and robotics have the potential to break capitalism as we know it. We will probably reach a point where machines will be better than humans at pretty much anything and there will be almost no need for workers who just do a job (like most of us). But if nobody has money to buy things then there is no point in producing anything. Not sure where this will be going but I am pretty sure the capitalists will not voluntarily share the gains. In theory all this progress should be great and exciting for humanity but without changing the system there may be dark times coming for most of us. I always have to think of Marshall Brain's "Manna" story. It may be a spot on prediction of things to come.

dag100 4mo ago
> But if nobody has money to buy things then there is no point in producing anything. The top 1% can still buy things. They can buy a lot of things, in fact. In 2024 in the US, the top 20% by income account consumed roughly the same amount as the bottom 60% (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm). This gap has widened over time (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1W5px https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1W5px) and will probably continue to widen even further.

mlinsey 4mo ago

That's definitely too broad a statement. I'd argue encryption, oral contraceptives, and the printing press were all strongly decentralizing.

mystraline 4mo ago
The Public won the encryption battle against the USG and ITAR idiocy. Well, until climate destroying shitcoin. Thats a big Lose. The printing press had sooo much state violence over that everywhere. Oral contraceptives are a fight the USA is losing to the extremist christian republicans. Right now the line is right on Misoprostol. And shithole states like Texas even criminalize day-after pills and 'suspect' miscarriages. And horrible tech like "weatherproof camera + AI + battery + solar + cell" (FLOCK) are easy to implement and already have been used in tracking women with miscarriages in Texas and across the country. It seems for every new tech, theres 1 really cool good thing for the public, a few neutral things, and 1-3 absolutely terrible things. And those terrible things make money. Lots of money.
- mlinsey 4mo ago
  You're describing efforts by powerful institutions to squash the technology, which they definitely try to do, but that's just a strong signal that the technology itself is inherently opposed to centralized power, not an enabler of it. Other technologies like surveillance (and, perhaps, AI) are more clearly centralizing and enabling of power. The difference matters a lot if you're having mixed feelings about working in technology.
  - mystraline 4mo ago
    You are anthromorphizing technology. He doesnt like that.
    - blast 4mo ago
      mlinsey wasn't anthropomorphizing technology, and your GP comment seems extreme to me.

timoth3y 4mo ago

I think that is the core truth of the matter. Technology itself does not make life better. I recently published an article about the Luddites. If you look at their actual demands, they were not anti-tech. They were labor activists. Life got much, much worse for most people in the industrial revolution until the laws they advocated were finally implemented. https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-real-luddites-would-have-loved-ai/ https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-real-luddites-would-have...

willhslade 4mo ago
I mean, dentristy and vaccines but ok.
pitched 4mo ago
The Luddites were against the systems that were shifting work away from skilled workers (them) to unskilled workers (commonly children). I have no doubt serious injury and death happened at those machines but find it hard to believe that was the cause of the Luddites. All signs point to them being more worried about themselves. There’s no way they would have been pro-AI. It would take a very skilled VC to warp the world enough to make that sound true.
- timoth3y 4mo ago
  If you look at what their actual demands, the pattern is clear. They lobbied for support for unemployed, the right to vote, improved safely and labor conditions across all industries, and enforcing the labor laws that were already on the books. Banning machines was not part of their demands. The Luddites were part of a larger labor movement that spanned multiple industries.
  - pitched 4mo ago
    I can’t find any primary documents online that back up your claim directly but this gets pretty close: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/why-did-the-luddites-protest/ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/why-... That is still a lot closer to collective bargaining than “save the children”. What you’re saying is plausible enough to be easy to get an LLM to hallucinate, is the larger concern here. If this opinion does come from one, try asking it to verify using external sources. The Luddites would have been violently opposed to AI slop, if they had an opinion on it.

runarberg 4mo ago

GMO was the first technology I figured that out. It was heavily pushed in around 2007 as a solution to world hunger, but at the same time it was very easy to see that hunger was a problem of distribution, not technology. Even back in 2007 we made much more food then was required to feed the world population. Furthering the obviousness of the lie was that in reality GMO was (and still is) mostly used for growing feed or cosmetic products. And on top of that we had large monopolies with patents to protect, and herbicides to sell, pushing this technology the hardest. Now its been 20 years later. The technology is mature and many of the patents have expired, but GMO has done absolutely nothing to solve world hunger.

worik 4mo ago
Yes. We do not need GMO for food, I agree. But where is the genetically engineered heart muscle that sits in the engine bay of my car running on nutrient solution, excreting C02 and urine while driving my car with a hydraulic motor?

lyu07282 4mo ago

This is exactly right, it gets examplified by Chinese people's attitude to new innovative technology. It's all doom and gloom in the west. But the thing is that both are correct stances on this technology for exactly the reason you mentioned. It's fundamentally different systems of governance of the same technology. One only ever saw new technology result in consolidation of power and collective decline and genuine grievances ignored, the other has demonstrated the ability to make new technology increase the collective well being of everybody. It's the low vs. high trust society, see the inverse of Francis Fukuyama's 1996 book Trust.

pdonis 4mo ago

> until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all Here's the problem: you can't. First, people have disagreements, often very fundamental ones, over what "benefits us all". There's no way to resolve many such disagreements short of brute force. Second, "enforce"--note the last five letters of that word--means some people are given the power to do things to other people that, if anyone else did them, would be crimes. Throw you in jail, fine you, restrict the things you can do. Indeed, that's how David Friedman, whose "The Machinery of Freedom" is worth reading, defines a government. And the problem is that government still has to be done by humans, and humans can't be trusted with the power to do such things. Ultimately the only defense we have is to not give other people such power. Not governments, not tech giants, nobody. But that requires a degree of foresight that most people don't have, or don't want to take the time to exercise, particularly not if something juicy is in front of them. How many people back when Facebook first started would have been willing to simply not use it--because they foresaw that in a couple of decades, Facebook would become a huge monster that nobody knows how to rein in? If my own personal circle is any guide, the answer is "not enough to matter"--of all the people I know, I am the only one who does not use Facebook and never has. And even I didn't refuse to use it back when it first started because I saw what things would be like today--I just had an instinctive reaction against it and listened to that reaction, and then watched the trainwreck slowly develop over the years since. So we're stuck. Even if we end up deciding that, for example, the government will break up the tech giants, slap huge fines on Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc., maybe confiscate a bunch of their property, maybe even make them do a bunch of community service, possibly even some of them serve some jail time--it will still be just other humans doing things to them that no humans can be trusted to do. It won't fix the root problem. It will just kick the can down the road a little longer.

worik 4mo ago
> Here's the problem: you can't. It is not possible to "enforce" a "value system". True. But we can have a value system we share that benefits us all. We can work together to improve our welfare as a whole. > Ultimately the only defense we have is to not give other people such power. That is untrue. We must have webs of trust, and within those webs there are power hierarchies. The trick is that those hierarchies must not be arbitrary nor permanent. This is a problem that has been wrestled with, and solved, several times in human history. Any human structure is vulnerable to outside attack, and most (all?) vulnerable to internal decay, but they can be established and are worth establishing. An example I can think of are the Republican Militias as described by George Orwell in Road to Catalonia, and activist groups I have been involved with here in Aotearoa. Nothing lasts for ever - that does not mean we cannot work together for good things. -- In one group I was involved on we used to have monthly meetings, by phone, of the organising committee. We had thirty members (all activists running hot with their own opinions), made decisions by consensus. I was on that committee for five years and we went over our allotted two ours twice: Once by ninety minutes (that was a day!) and the other time by five minutes. Nobody ever felt unheard - that mattered to us. It is possible, people have been doing it forever, the good things we make are vulnerable but we should still aspire to and achieve them

wnc3141 4mo ago

Read "why nations fail". It essentially covers this. Markets and technologies are great but ultimately bound by the systems of power they inhabit.

vatsachak 4mo ago

Technology can also divide power. Think about the amount of open source intelligence that exists.

keeda 4mo ago

Technology is primarily an accelerator. It just accelerates things, both good and bad, that were already in motion or at least already possible. Which is why things like healthcare got better but things like wealth inequality got worse. What needs to change is the system in which that technology exists inside, because otherwise removing technology will still keep us on the same trajectory to the same destination, only much slower and possibly with much more pain. What we're seeing right now with layoffs and everything else is simply an acceleration of our current trajectory. We were always going to get here, AI just got us here a few decades ahead of schedule. For once, however, we have a technology that could let us change this trajectory. I've said this before, but the capital class held so much power because it took a lot of people, and hence a lot of capital, to take on large endeavors that created new wealth. But things were rigged such that those who provided the capital also captured most of that new wealth. Now, just as AI lets companies (i.e. capital) do the same things with fewer people, it also lets people do the work of entire companies by themselves... i.e. without capital. That is a big enough shift in power dynamics to alter the trajectory in previously inconceivable ways.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

dzhiurgis 4mo ago

[flagged]

throwyawayyyy 4mo ago

The Stasi had one informant per 6.5 people. We're moving to a world in which everyone can have their own personal informant. I really don't think I am being hyperbolic here.

zmmmmm 4mo ago

> Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all The fallacy is believing that some kind of invisible hand will guide it to automatically produce an equal outcome and therefore any and all regulation is inherently bad. This seems to be a prevailing belief in the US in the current climate. We have institutions that are designed to redistribute power and they are called governments. People have to believe in their role in doing that enough to actually empower them to implement it though.

marcosdumay 4mo ago

> Technology amplifies power Some technologies concentrate power, some technologies distribute it. "The WWW" is still too coarse of a category to have just one of those effects up there. Some people just don't show the capacity to handle nuance or complexity.