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.
This is nothing new or unique to software.
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?
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.
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.
