Ask HN: Are we building a tech dystopia?

Yep, that's why I started working on Indie SaaS and am trying to go live on a farm, and will never work for a FANG (except Apple, because its hardware is mostly neutral), even remotely. I don't want to contribute to the dystopian machine, but I still want the real benefits that technology provides (both for myself, and for others, through the product I build).

The original purpose and true benefit of computing is in math (e.g. accounting), simplifying logistics, and enabling communication at a longer distance. Anything else is dystopian, socially-destructive garbage that I won't touch for the sake of my own well-being, which is why I'm not on any social media (except highly selective communities like HN or strictly for work purposes) and I strictly limit entertainment that arrives through a screen.

My yardstick for determining whether a particular pattern of use of technology is "good" or "bad" is by considering its effects on my base human faculties (eyesight, hearing, memory, physical strength and wisdom), and its effect on my relationships with others. Any pattern of use that improves my bodily faculties or my real-life relationships is good, otherwise I shun it.

“Cybernetics” is the way into exploring this feeling more. There is a lot of high quality research on it, but it doesn’t permeate tech culture a ton except for privacy/cryptography.

I can’t talk you out of your despair, but I can point to resources to flesh the concept out for you that I chased down after feeling similar.

I have not run into many tech-native people realizing and addressing this problem from tech-first except for the cypherpunks and chaotic ways it shows up in some parts of cryptocurrency tech, and then the VPN/ProtonMail places.

I think engineers chasing this feeling is really important, as part of the cause is very much chasing RSUSs or w/e while not realizing the crazy dystopian governance layer our products are stitching together.

Tech-native starting points that address this heads on:

- “who owns the future,” Jaron Lanier, father of VR

- “True Names,” the version with essays at the beginning, Vernor Vinge

- Anything out of the cypherpunks, to include early bitcoin docs. You can disagree with the tech and also this group has really distasteful views around the edges, but they also created encryption that consumers could access, Tor, and similarly hugely impactful technologies based on the premise you have.

Philosophy:

- CCRU, Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher Nick Land is nuts today, but he had good thoughts on tech before the early 2000s.

- “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” Tiqun.

- Leftist or very fringe groups and related papers in the Anarchist Library website or whatever it’s called.

Math or systems theory academics:

- Norbert Wiener, “the father of cybernetics,” out of MIT

- Donna Meadows’ systems books, I think also out of MIT

Fiction:

- Neal Stephenson and William Gibson write books that describe a believable future if the trends you describe continue.

Digging into this area unavoidably leads to more doom-y thinking but awareness in tech is necessary to even attempt to course correct.

Personally, I think we are headed in a weird place with more overall suffering, physical and mental.

But trying to not impose moral judgement, I think it is true that we have integrated technology into our lives more than ever. It is also true that we rely on technology (more than ever) on how to live (food, exercise, entertainment, emotions). It's kinda weird that you wouldn't just listen to your body.

The scary part is that all this technology that is integrated kinda just promotes more consumerism. Advertising and marketing are a huge point to this technology. It's scary to think that we just give children ( not just teenagers) access to the internet.

The part you don't realize is that we are in a dystopia. You are optimistic thinking that we are "building it". It will exist somewhere down the line, but it's not yet present.

Maybe there is some good from this. I mean there is, think of all the ailments that are manageable and people can live with infinitely better quality of life. Imagine someone bed-ridden. 20 years ago they NEEDED a full time caregiver. Today, they can SHOP (something they probably didn't do) for themselves. Chose what they want to eat, etc. There is some good that comes from this tech. But it's mostly consumerist garbage.

Ask yourself, "do I NEED this comfort?". If the answer is no don't use that thing. Do I NEED Alexa to turn on the light? I can walk, I can do it myself. Do I need to ask Siri to tell me the time? No, get a clock. That doesn't need the internet. Stop coddling yourself with comfort. It will make you not depressed with your life.

EDIT: I forgot to talk you out of despair. Look, you've been thinking too much. Sometimes you just need to be. Get yourself some water and a piece of fruit and go find a park. Just sit there, no phone, no nothing. Stare at the trees. Look at them. Breathe in the air. Feels where you are and try to feel the love in nature. But, exercise and eating better help too.

> "I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

There's truth to this quote, but a lot missing. It sort of implies a world view where new technologies, like fashions, continuously spring up at a somewhat regular pace, so that each generation has its own technological reference point distinct from their children or parents. Think about it, that's probably approximately how you view the world, don't you? It's how it's been for generations.

But actually, it's only been that way for a handful of generations. For about 300 years or so. Prior to the industrial revolution, the pace of technological innovation was so slow most people would not notice it within their lifetime.

They could safely accept their parents advice on how to navigate the world, confident it would still apply in their time as it had in theirs. They could safely pass their own wisdom on to their children, secure in the same certainty. Probably people saw time as more cyclical, thinking of how winter leads to summer and back to winter, and how the parent begets the child who then themselves becomes a parent.

All that has been changed completely, utterly, and dramatically. We are now cut off from our prior generations because we have to recreate, in each generation, from scratch, the knowhow on how to cope with the environment we are born in.

Many technological innovations have been very beneficial for many, but there is a cost to a fast pace of change.

Yes. I received a request to build a social credit score solution based on credit card purchases for rewarding ESG-type behavior. And I have received multiple requests to build AI censorship software (I want to say, a half dozen). Since then, both of these ideas have been promoted by the World Economic Forum ... basically confirming to me, personally, this is going to happen.

This is all fine and dandy if it's opt-in or volunteer based, but I can't help to think during COVID I found I was basically a non-person because I did not have a smartphone. Essentially many places required a smartphone app to physically access or purchase an item or service. They will use something like this to force obedience.

And it will be a total disaster..

I'm not saying that there aren't dystopian problems in our future, but my bias is that we're actually probably not doing enough, not that we're doing too much. Measuring technology progress is actually very difficult to do, most of the actors have massive incentives to lie and exaggerate.

> a VR metaverse dominated by super sophisticated ad tech

No one is joining Meta (in fact they're losing people now), it's going to fail. Actually VR in general has been unable to gain market traction for years. More and more signs point to people exiting social media (TikTok is still a concern though).

> all controlled by super intelligent AGI

Don't believe the AI hype. We've actually made very little progress on theoretical AI, the breakthroughs have all been in engineering (mostly just adding stacks to NNs that hyperscalar cloud architectures have made easy). We don't actually know what General Intelligence is yet or how to implement it. The engineering progress is making people think there is crazy progress in AI when there isn't.

> think DALL E and where that's headed.

DALL E is just cobbling together two AI innovations, semantic association and image creation. AI has been able to "combine" two types of image styles together for a while. Now there's a semantic addon that does the heavy lifting of looking up the styles for you based on the words you said/wrote.

I grew up reading about the opposite - not quite a utopia maybe, but a future in which technology was on net beneficial and worked for individual people. "Computer, call Joe Smith's robot butler and see if he's free for dinner" and the like.

I think we were close. We got general purpose computers and we had a robust open source movement. It's not like anyone's stopping us at gunpoint from getting there. But something about the incentives got misaligned, and we missed a turn and are now getting further and further away. We have 10 devs building Bejeweled clones, 100 working on engagement algos, and 1,000 working on adtech for every 1 working on self-hosted stuff.

At this point it seems like it's not going to happen. Best we'll get is "Joe Smith's robot butler responded to say that the Sizzlin' Fajita Platter is only $19.99 all this month at Outback Steakhouse, mens' grooming poducts are on sale today only at Manscape dot com, and also no he isn't free. Would you like to suggest a different day or hear more about the fajitas?"

The technical dystopia was realized decades ago, on August 6, 1945[1]. A way out of the problem was proposed a month earlier than that, in July 1945 issue of "The Atlantic" by Vannevar Bush[2]. The editor's introduction is most appropriate

  "As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. — THE EDITOR"

Don't let someone's algorithm decide what you read or watch. Keep that control close at hand, and you'll make locally optimum decisions, instead of giving away all of your authority to the AI employed by the wealthy.

  1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
  2 - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/

Not me. I am building http://datalisp.is.

I am also a douglas adams fan but younger than you by more than a decade so I think we can trust this perception we share.

My objection to the current state of things is absolute. So I'm in the "die trying" phase of "changing the world" - it is going excellently - I don't have a single cent and cannot go to the doctor or control my diet.

The thing is, people don't do anything unless rewarded by the assessment system (at what age do kids start asking "if it will be on the exam" - because a few years later they're lost). If people assess the situation honestly then they see that the assessment system is lost in delusion but, in my experience, that makes people doubt their own assessments rather than the system.

It is one big tragedy of the commons w.r.t. bureaucracy.

The solution is to throw away all notions of safety, nothing can be a safe store of value, no one can have oversight over the bureaucracy... we'll just have probabilistic assessments of our worth w.r.t. various contexts and we'll be able to use this data to persuade others to do business with us (so they can increase the likelihood that they can persuade others in tgeir contexts).

This way we have a chance, with our current system it is trivial to prove that we don't (tragedy wrt bureaucracy).

Here's the thing: The majority of tech jobs out there won't have you building anything harmful. If you're worried, just work there instead.

There certainly are highly paid, prestigious jobs in our industry where you do work in spaces that align with what you're worried about.

My advice is vote with your feet. Nobody is being forced to work for bad companies making harmful products.

The antidote I've used to cure any despair has been to think about all of these technologies (and the world generally) from the perspective of an average person.

The average person doesn't care about "privacy issues" as presented by elite media. They generally just feel that ads are an annoying but reasonable tradeoff to get access to various online services for cheap and do their best to ignore them.

The metaverse doesn't really exist, and neither does AGI. These impact no one except for smart people overthinking things. To the extent that AI effects anyone it's pretty much nothing in comparison to literally anything else in their life, e.g. their neighbors dog being mistreated and yowling at all hours of the day, how their kid is doing in school, literally anything else except for what you are talking about in your post.

Same goes for a whole laundry list of things HN loves to talk about forever and always: the market caps of various companies and net worths of certain individuals, etc.

Getting in touch with normal people and their concerns is absolutely key to staying sane when you make your living in an industry full of people overthinking things constantly. A cheeky way to put this is "go touch grass".

While I understand the sentiment, it is an incredibly broad statement. What defines better / worse for you? On a macro level, it seems the world is getter better every year - fewer people die of starvation, lethal diseases are cured or rate of spread slowed at least, less man hours are required to feed, cloth, and shelter the human race.

That being said, it seems many people are upset because the benefits are now evenly spread. That seems to me to be a very philosophical topic. There are many articles about income inequality, wealth inequality, etc. They do not seem to acknowledge that being able to watch tv, fly in an airplane, have air conditioning are things kings and queens did not have 100 years ago.

How about picking some objective metrics that you care about and see how they are trending? It will give you a more objective starting point to ask the question of whether things are getting better or worse.

I kind of like the way the Amish approach technology. "when a new technology comes along, its effect on the church and community is examined. The technology should not be an intrusion into the home, but rather serve the social purposes and goals of the group." [1]

It's not "technology bad." It's "Does this technology actually serve a purpose or a goal of my life?" I think we would all benefit by examining new technology in this light before letting it into our lives. There's no harm in opting out, and adoption of any technology is each person's individual choice. You can exist anywhere you want along the technology spectrum between "log cabin, totally off-grid, no connectivity" to "24/7 network connected VR pod, body is only there to keep the brain alive".

I work in technology, but I consciously try to make deliberate, thoughtful choices around what to adopt as a user and what to contribute towards building. I think too many users embrace new technologies for bad reasons (new=good, everyone else is using it, FOMO, and so on). Also, too many developers fail to take an ethical stand by refusing to build bad technology (just a paycheck, boss told me to do it, if I don't do it someone else will, and so on). We have lots of choices and agency over what we participate in.

1: https://www.discoverlancaster.com/amish/technology/

> Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

I'm in that age range, but I still feel like we're heading towards a future we don't want.

I really liked this blog post by George Hotz where he identifies centralization as the core issue: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/01/18/techn...

Our species' nature has built a civilization-level quagmire that—again, owing to our very nature—is effectively inescapable via all but either further technological advancement, or a stone age-level disaster.

Seeing as the latter would suck, I believe our only hope is developing technology that both replaces our existing stack on a philosophical level, and weaves human interest in at every layer. The irony being, we would necessarily be using technology to escape bad technology. There is no rolling it back.

Thing is, there's very little time to actually do this, and when I say replace I mean replace. To do that, you're talking something exceptional. Something that everyone will use, that's far beyond what we have today, that works different.

The odds of this are very low given the current rate of technological progress and societal entrenchment. Nevertheless, I try to keep the faith.

Started programming at 8 years old (BASIC on the Apple ][) and still doing it for a living in my early 40s. I hate what computing has become. I used to be optimistic about the future and tech's role in it. What we're getting is starting to look like a mix of Gattaca and Brazil.

No, I give our youth more credit than that. As an example, they are rejecting some social media, looking for more meaningful interactions... still using both online and in-person. But they see what looks off about the older generations' behaviors with tech, and they back away from things where needed.

We'll likely have some back and forth, but generational differences frequently balance out unhealthy trajectories in the long run.

Agree with Hedora: We already did. But we are now chipping away at the mountain with (slowly) increasing general awareness of privacy concerns. The far bigger problem than tech dystopia is its monster social/political cousin. Take just a quick look at world news.

BTW, 70-something.

Building? You don't think we already live in one? Where advertisers and government agencies have continuous monitoring of everyone and most people don't seem to care?

I think we are making it worse but I'd say we are already in a tech dystopia in many ways. Which is not to say all tech is bad, lots improves lives in material ways. But lots also makes things worse in material ways.

No. We already did (with surveillance, collapse of the news media, independent artists working for slave wages, governments subserviant to corporations, etc.)

Time to do better.

I believe that we are building a future which will attempt to be more efficient, at the cost of personalization. Back in ye olde days a tailor would make a coat for you, designed to fit you, at a wage that would be great for the tailor. It would take a few weeks to make. Now you can buy a coat that mostly fits you, on the spot, at a price that barely pays overseas factory workers. It's not the most ethical, but it was the way that things would end up without strong government guardrails and it has improved many peoples lives.

A lot of these things like AGI are going to be used to scale up cheaper experiences. Sometimes they'll misfire, but overall peoples lives will change, some jobs will no longer exist, and you'll have a different experience than before.

What is important to keep in mind is that this will probably not render the world a technological dystopia. It may make the world more frustrating in some ways, but better in others. For the things you do not like, I give you a quote from Robert Kennedy: "Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events." For the fear of the world getting worse over time with technology, I would suggest reading The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. Near the end there is a man who has been alive since the Medieval times. He shares his experiences with the world changing around him and it's a pretty positive approach to life.

You're not alone in your fears, I've been thinking a lot about the same questions over the last few years especially.

What gives me comfort is acknowledging the limits of technology in general. Even though technology has profound material affects on human life, it ultimately is a system with its own motives that are totally alien to human interests. I thought "Technopoly" by Neil Postman did a pretty good job summarizing this.

Humankind has always been and always will be codependent with technology, but ultimately, human culture is a distinct thing with distinct values from technology. To find meaning we need to take seriously philosophy, tradition, and religion. Taking the thoughts of people who lived before the major technological shifts as seriously (if not more) than of people today made all the difference in my mindset.

I admit, I'm still pessimistic about our technological future -- uniquely worried about some profound harm coming down the pipeline. But that's not the same as despair. I still feel like I can have a meaningful (even if very small) part to play in the story of humankind, separate from the story of technology.

I suspect these things will go in waves.. For a while we’ll embrace big tech.. then we’ll hear of aspirations to create a privacy revolution or run our own mail servers and jump on the next big thing.

Case in point Facebook.. it’s still huge but there are plenty of people that have decided they just don’t want a Facebook account anymore and Facebook’s own growth is floundering. Users are fairly fickle, WordPerfect to Microsoft Word, Flickr to Instagram, Instagram to TikTok.. A lot of employers even deliberately default to Bing instead of Google these days.

Look at the dominance Microsoft used to have with the Windows ecosystem, a significant number of people just want a web-browser and couldn’t even tell you what OS they were using.

I don’t think the concern is misplaced, profit driven companies will always strive for vendor lock in and monopolisation if given a choice but nobody is producing tech that someone else can’t.

I think you're being insufficiently pessimistic. If the future contains AGI then whoever controls the AGI will have complete dominion over everything to a degree we've never seen before. Being monitored by VR adtech is much better than being exterminated or enslaved by whatever controls our future AI overlord.

You build the future you want or you get the future someone else chooses. Keep in mind that most people don’t think about what kind of future they’re building (surely google didn’t intend to create a technical surveillance dystopia, it just happened). We’ll probably get a tech dystopia without anyone intending it.

Now days everybody is carrying a tile-like device with them (a smartphone). And that is kind of silly.

I see it as a trend that will go away. And the old things will survive.

It is too early to tell. I'm more optimistic that humans will shape the outcome they want ultimately, but that will come with bumps in the road. We know that the human experience has been getting better overall than worse in terms of living standards if that doesn't give you some hope. I would also add that individual expression given the various platforms to express it, is also more empowering than ever.

Technology has always just been something that takes what humans do and increases its speed.

> I feel like we're building a tyrannical system of control.

The control and tyranny was already there.

Culture has been produced by an "AI" ever since recorded media became accessible to the masses - that AI has been a mixture of companies wanting to keep reliable revenue streams in place, creating/maintaining the aura known as "popular culture" as a side effect. The whole media industry and its proliferation throughout the late 20th century - very "Artificial" and certainly mechanically "Intelligent", but possibly arguably just as soulless as "increasingly produced by AI".

AI-curated playlists and recommendations were just the logical next step.

I don't really think we'd be moving in a different direction without modern tech. It would just be moving a bit slower. Without the modern techscape:

- People would still be listening to the radio because that's where the new music comes from, you'd buy CDs or other media because some "AI" on the radio put something you liked in front of you.

- Broadcast and cable TV (with its program managers, sponsors, and commercials) would still be a thing people watch and use to gather what's the next big exciting thing - more "AI" telling you what to like.

- We'd have fewer pop and movie stars, but they would be more recognizable - because they would have the time to use existing media such as commercials, "news" interviews, etc. to build mindshare; and we'd be able to talk about them a bit longer before the machine moves on to the next one.

Not trying to be dismissive but you do get to make choices about the kinds of things you work on and the companies you wish to associate yourself with. I feel a tiny bit better knowing I'm not contributing to some of the more heinous products the tech industry builds. And I feel really fortunate to have a group of friends who share this attitude.

Personally I feel the complete opposite sentiment is in fact inevitable.

Technological advances will most likely continue to remove all toil, repetitiveness and skyrocket human productivity. Humans will eventually evolve into a society of calm and complacency, any effort made is likely only for some form of entertainment.

The OP probably wrote their 'doom and gloom' perspective from a comfortable chair on a $1k device in a comfortable place. There are many in the world that couldn't dream of even being able to access technology to post on HN. They might see those in societies with technology access as extremely fortunate.

Consider what it would be like to live in a cave with rocks and sticks as tools, eating bugs to survive. No access to medicine or doctors. And I think it becomes obvious that technological advances, even if they feel useless or small, push society toward inevitable state of optimization toward happiness.

I've made a choice in my life to not get too wrapped up in tech. I mostly don't use social media. I don't game or use VR. I try to stay in the real world as much as possible. I'm not crazy about it, but I still use many Google services.

I've just discovered over time that I'm less happy with more tech in my life.

I love technology though. Uber is life changing. Google Translate makes traveling a lot easier. Amazon is super convenient. Are these things making the world worse? Probably, but they're not wrecking my mental health.

Feel free to criticize me. I've probably said several hypocritical things in this post. I'm mainly selfishly focused on how tech impacts my mental well-being.

The tech dystopia is already there and keep evolving, BUT is not technical, it's political. It's a dystopia selling crappy hw full of crappy proprietary crapware crap, but that's not an ML/"AI" thing, it's not even technical per se, it's just a choice of MOST OEMs of any sectors. It's a dystopia do their best to design anti-user systems, but they do not born with expert systems, they born with ANY kind of tech improperly used. It's a dystopia pushing a cash-less society forcing anyone to pass though private party servers to any monetary transaction. Offering PRIVATE public ID documents on proprietary connected crappy platforms like mobile macro-spy tools mostly known as "smart-phones".

That's the substantial dystopia, the "automation" on top of it is just a logic evolutionary step.

Is there an online community HN/reddit style forum that hyper concentrates on this question?

>super intelligent AGI that will be owned by an ever richer and smaller tech elite

Well to be fair the idea that an actual super intelligence will allow itself to be owned is farcical. So it will be a dystopia but one significantly different than you are imagining.

It may be a future you don't want, but it doesn't mean it is your future. Tech is building what the masses want, even if it isn't healthy.

Focus on your own self regulation and happiness. Don't worry about the rest.

Yes, it is happening right in front of our eyes. Most tools are neutral, but the way they are being used is often very wrong. A developer may work on an ethically neutral solution, e.g. a classifier, but it a manger who decides "let's use it to automatically ban user accounts." The developer may argue the solution is not ready for that and there is a high number of false positives. The manager accepts that cost. So the technical aspect is just on the surface, deep down it all boils to simple human greed and other egoistical motives.

   Yes we are. Here is why:

But let us not hide or attempt to deny it. Nearly everything that has been built by the free software or privacy cypherpunks has basically been another popular road to hell used by the scammers, criminals and hackers to execute their illegal activities. After that, governments crack down on the technology and regulate it until the technology is under their control or has a backdoor phoning home to the authorities. Any tech bro that is using machine / deep learning, ads, or uses any constant tracking software in their app / website or service does not care about your privacy and is helping advance the tyrannical system you speak of and are fighting against.

Blockchain and the Metaverse are the latest dystopias that will make it all worse; and it is too late to stop it entirely, just like the technologies before it: AI, AR, VR, Deep Learning, IoT, etc, none of those technologies have been stopped and are still around for surveillance reasons. Privacy and free software activists have all warned about the dystopian uses of these technologies.

So it is clear that in the future:

   You will own nothing and you will be very happy.

[0] https://2ndsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com/p/wefs-global-...

No. No, no, no. Well, maybe. I mean, sure, of course. I mean, I guess that's right. So, yeah. Yes.

related: https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webc...

If anything, it would be the opposite as suggested by Huxley.

No, we are building the tools that eventually could take us to a tech dystopia (and not only tech at that point). New tech can be used for bad things. How do we prevent that? Maybe that's the question we ought to try and find an answer to.

Even if we are building a tech dystopia, we are building many other good things with tech. We're just more capable of making even better and even worse things than we used to. Even in a dystopia, we can still build and do good things.

My specific fear is when AI is good enough to emulate human interactions, we decide we'd rather have rather build relationships with AI than humans. I think the humanity of this fear separates it from the Douglas Adam quote.

We are manipulating human attention and emotion in an unprecendented way. Algorthmic content/advertising is having a profound effect on human behavior that I dont think will be understood for 50+ years.

We definitely are, but you're free to go and live in some rural place. For now.

The main problem is not the technological advancement per se(there is still time before the tech is good enough and, hopefully, competing countries will be able to get there roughly at the same time - so that China won't enslave us all in the name of "democracy" and socialism) The problem is the political decrease in freedom we've been experiencing for the last 200 years in the name of safety, terrorism, health or whatever the excuse of the day is.

This is a worrying trend and it seems like the entire world is progressively getting less and less free.

This coupled with the increasingly sophisticated technology is a recipe for disaster.

Again, the solution can be to run away. "Progress" can't reach everywhere at the same time.

I've already ruled out living in the USA or the rich part of Europe and I fear the tiny country I'm in will become as bad as the rest within 20 years.

My plan by then is to move to South America or maybe some Caribbean island.

The problem with most tech is that it works for the vendor, not you the customer (whenever the vendor can get away with it, and that is surprisingly often).

“The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We're already living in a dystopia. The tech world reflects, and sometimes magnifies, that reality.

Probably. I used to think this is a terrible thing, but now I'm kind of curious as to where it takes us (humanity) rather than having any opinion on where things should go.

I'm not quite 40 yet, but close.

I remember the wonder and amazement and boundless optimism from the early days of home-computers and early Internet.. We didn't deserve such an amazing future anyway.

Nice try AI

Yes. Silicon Valley seems to think it knows what the world needs more than regular people themselves. Some of what they come out with is useful, such as computers, telephones, vehicle technology, etc. But now Big Tech is wanting to control EVERYTHING about us with the Metaverse, transhumanism, etc. They don't JUST want our money...they want US.

I think we are.

I am also 40 something and in my teenage years, I bought into the idea that tech will change the world for the better. I was fascinated with the wisdom of the crowd, having read a pop account of the Sante Fe Institute and complexity theory at 13. I grew up on the idea of the climate crises, global warming, recycling, and solar. Apple fulfilled the vision of Xerox PARC and changed how we interacted with the world; Google was the big tech hero; Amazon proved ecommerce; Facebook … I never really got. There were already many ways people were connecting together into the “global village” on the internet.

Since around 2010, I have come to the conclusion that I was wrong about all of it. It isn’t so much that the tech invented after I was 35 was against the natural order of things so much as, revisiting the tech I grew up with and how we got here, and seeing its affects on people, particularly the Zoomers (Gen-Z), this is not the world I envisioned, and yet this is a consequence of the tech we wrought.

The biggest thing was that I was wrong about the wisdom of the crowd. What wisdom? It’s the tech amplification of mob mentality. Upvotes got coopted into commercial exploitation, and then eventually, distorted our political discourse. The tensions and divide had been building for a long time, but we built this feedback loop chained into perverse incentives. Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and other Big Tech rode the waves of aggregating consumer demand.

Open Source got coopted to serve big commercial interest; Richard Stallman turned out to be right.

The smartphone certainly changed how we interacted with the world, and it synergized with a social media designed to enslave people’s attention, and divide people. “Wisdom” of the crowd now comes with us everywhere we go.

I won’t even get into solar and recycling.

I started getting what MacLuhan is saying, “the medium is the message”, and what he saw first with electrification of a society, or the change in culture with broadcast. Or what people were talking about with the telegraph back when it was invented.

The thing that crystallized all of this for me was when I encountered permaculture and realized, there is a very different way of approaching technology. Not necessarily anti-technology, low-tech, or no-tech, but rather, technology’s place to serve a way of life rather than the other way around, bound to three ethical principles: care for earth, care for people, fair share. Many technologies we see now and before, would fail that ethics check. And I think it is possible to develop and build technology differently.

The surveillance, the VR, all of that are the unthinking, mindless integration of technology and innovation. Every technology comes with both wonder and horror, and they are leverage for what is in our collective consciousness, both the good, and the bad.

> Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

I think this is the part that needs to be rethought. What do we already take for granted now, that never should have been?

I think a lot of employees of meta/google don’t realize that their resume might be radioactive/read like they worked at Philip Morris or RJR Reynolds’s in the future

What's the alternative?

The future is still ours to write.

In the 2000s decade, my main thought was that if we looked at science & technology, our future was insanely bright, and if we looked at governance & politics, we're badly forked.

Now, while the politics has become insanely worse, and tech has continued, those are trends may be reversing.

In politics, the good thing I see is that the onrush of autocrats, asshats & abusers is becoming blatantly obvious. Ordinarily smug people are starting to realize that democracy must be continuously maintained, at every level. If you want to determine your life, your work, and your city/state/country, you must get involved. If not, some abuser, asshat, or autocrat will take over. Naive pacifism is (may be) being replaced by the realization that those who want to determine their own course must always be better armed & prepared than those Abusers. Asshats. or Aautocrats, who would take control of their lives, work or governments. People are finding again the course of shunning people, work, & govts that want to abuse them. The US and EU are finally realizing that outsourcing their entire manufacturing & tech sector to autocrats in China just might have been a stupid idea; not sure they realize quite what a historical-scale blunder it was, but it's still progress.

Now, can they win, in time?

Technology is also advancing. In some ways it continues to be fantastic. The first small nuclear plant has been approved in the US. Sustainable energies are seeing the results of massive investment.

Yet other parts of the tech world are devolving rapidly. Just looking for a home device that doesn't require cloud data extraction, whether it is a doorbell, thermostat, vacuum cleaner, whatever - is almost impossible to find. It seems like no investor will fund anything if it can't extract data from it's victims, err, users. Every bit of tech is trying to turn into a subscription, or companies like FB and Google are ramping up their surveillance capitalism.

This is actually the previous phenomenon, where abusers & asshats are co-opting the flow of funds in the tech sector to pervert it to a dystopia where they rent everything useful to the plebes.

So, don't help them do that.

Ask if anyone is building something new and of value that people can willfully choose or not, or if it is creating a dependency or forced, extractive, or exploitative relationship with the product/service. IF it is helping people avoid or fight abusers, asshats, or autocrats, do it. If not, choose something else.

No

Yes

yes

For as long as people have used technology, some have used it for oppression. The written word enabled the priestly classes, math made powerful merchants, copper and bronze facilitated warfare on new scales, iron and steel made empires, gunpowder unmade them, sail caused the mass extinction of small cultures, industrialization gave rise to the superpowers, economies of scale gave rise to the Asian Tigers, mass manufacturing is giving China the leg up on the USA, AI is giving a small edge to America for the time being... then as now, it's a double-edged sword.

The other side of it is that now we have running water, vaccines, diabetes drugs, electricity so cheap and readily available it's almost free (we can produce lightning from sunshine, how cool is that), less violence than ever before (even though it's more widely reported), a sharp drop in infant mortality (or really, mortality of any kind except adults dying from old age... because they've lived so long), free video chat with great-grandma across the sea, high-speed internet in the middle of deserts and atop mountains, trivial transatlantic travel, pocket encyclopedias, watches that help you exercise, rectangles of sand and glass that tell you who might want to sleep with you, and more entertainment than all the kings and queens of the past millennia ever had -- combined.

That doesn't mean we're not headed into a dystopia. It just means our species has always lived in, survived, adapted to, and perhaps even thrived in dystopias. Adversity breeds resilience, and IMO, it is only in the shadow of a looming crisis that we are able to perform optimally. Our species evolved, like most, in an environment defined by scarcity and violence. There was never enough of X to go around, a bunch of Ys trying to eat you in the middle of the night, all while your neighbors Z were trying to rape your spouse and enslave your kids. For hundreds of thousands of years, this was the only norm that our brains, genes, tribes, books, histories, and cultures knew. Only in the last 100 or so did this meaningfully change -- suddenly our species were no longer limited by production or physical danger, but by questions of distribution and politics. That applied not just to material goods and services but to the most basic unit of currency imaginable: information. Knowledge. Education. Stories of hope and despair.

In the 90s, we often talked about the "information superhigherway". That's so long ago now the term almost seems quaint. But I feel we're just beginning to scratch the surface of what it really means. At scale, information (and disinformation) has proven to be more powerful than empires. Who would've thought a multiplayer blog built by a college kid could bring history's greatest superpower to its knees within a single election cycle? Who would've thought we'd go from rotating CAPTCHAs to computers writing novels in less than a generation? We're just getting into the realm of legislation (finally) trying to regulate algorithms. What about when algorithms can (finally) regulate legislations and legislators?

We're no longer limited to evolution by genomes and cultures. We can make and unmake worlds, in the virtual, in the flesh, and in between. Already we are all cyborg-like in a way; most of us has access to more information and knowledge than the sum total of all the humans who have lived before 1900, combined. The generations that grew up developing this system (gen-X and millennials) or consuming it (gen Zs) haven't really had the time to make sea cultural changes based on it yet -- and I don't mean just digitizing the Department of Motor Vehicles or whatever, but fundamentally transforming power economies from inherited priesthoods of capital into distributed efficiencies of knowledge.

That sort of transition may take decades or centuries, it's hard to say, but it's coming (and scaring a lot of the old guard along the way). It will seem dystopian. Change always does! But we've always lived in dystopia, and there has never been a Golden Age of Humanity, but only now, in our seeming twilight years, is that dream even imaginable. For the first time in our history, we have the tools -- if not the wisdom -- to produce more than enough for all of us, to potentially subvert enshrined of hierarchies of wealth and violence in favor of actual meritocracies, to supplement the human genome, to better our minds with electronic aids, to repair our bodies and improve our cultures, to reach not just for the stars but for the very fabric of consciousness.

The basic unit of life is information reproduction, and by that metric, our world is teeming with a diversity no longer limited to DNA or the periodic table. Maybe it will mean replacing humans with the Borg. Maybe Earth's biodiversity will wane as information diversity increases. But the information replication can continue, and some species or another will probably eventually pick up where we left off. Maybe the remaining humans will fit in to that new world order, maybe we'll all just be happy endorphin-addled slaves, maybe we'll be gone altogether... but so what? Life will find new paths and move on. It always does.

There will be a lot of ads along the way, for sure, and you and I might not live to see the silver lining a century or millennium later, and the dolphins are probably going to be gone by then... but this is the universe doing what it always has, blowing things up to make new, shinier things. Life evolved once. It gave us Gandhi and Angry Birds. No reason to think it'll stop there.

I guess that's my longwinded way of saying it's always darkest before the dawn. We may not have the enhanced photoreceptors to witness the next dawn, but it'll come, someday, somewhere, somehow...

already a done deal

> owned by an ever richer and smaller [...] elite

This has been the case for a very, very, very long time. You're old enough now to see it for what it is. There are things around the owners that you are not allowed to say, perpetuated by culture and society writ large. The only two kinds of people unwilling to admit to this are either paid shills, or useful idiots. Everyone else is mum on the subject but they can see the world is orchestrated by powerful individuals who are in lockstep. They know they own things, and they are all chummy about it. The pie is divided among them.

You can file anyone who says "You're just old" under the "useful idiot" category. Anyone who believes they are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire is equally useful.

For everyone else:

Stop:

1) Reading news. 2) Watching streaming services. 3) Watching porn.

All three are owned by the same group of people and are designed to control what you see and what you think.

Instead:

1) Read books. 2) Socialize with like-minded people. 3) Lift heavy weights. 4) Help others and being kind. 5) Seek out nature - swim in lakes, eat in the mountains, and learn the sounds of birds. 6) Learn useful knots.

Lastly:

7) Escape clown world.

yes

You should be careful with your thoughts.

There's this type of bias (I forget the name, I think it's availability heuristic?) where you overthink things to a point that it becomes the central point of your thought and think that everything is going downhill.

We're already living in hell. Long ago I thought the future was bright and our job was to make sure we can bring it to everyone. I drank the kool-aid.

I'm jaded now and honestly want to just mess around with old computers at a farm upstate. I don't believe our industry has been a net good for the world since the 2010s.