alt Hacker NewsThe author is still grieving by watching a civilisation changing technology just passing by. Every single one of the problems they note applies to any technology that existed.
The internet produced 4chan. Produced scammers. Produced fraud. Instrumental in spreading child porn. Caused suicides. Many people lost their lives due to bullying on the internet. Many develop have addictions to gaming.
To anyone who has given it some thought, any sufficiently advanced technology usually affects both in good and bad ways. Its obvious that something that increases degrees of freedom in one direction will do so in others. Humans come in and align it.
There's some social credit to gain by being cynical and by signalling this cynicism. In the current social dynamics - being cynical gives you an edge and makes you look savvy. The optimistic appear naive but the pessimists appear as if they truly understand the situation. But the optimists are usually correct in hindsight.
We know how the internet turned out despite pessimists flagging potential problems with it. I know how AI will turn out. These kind of articles will be a dime a dozen and we will look at it the same way as we look at now at bygone internet-pessimists.
This is response not just to this article, but a few others.
Replies
> We know how the internet turned out despite pessimists flagging potential problems with it.
A sludge of spyware and addiction machines which employ negative emotion and outrage to drive shareholder value?
"The internet" is a pretty big tent. Everything from text messages to streaming video to online gaming to social media to encyclopedias. I think 15 years ago you could make a strong case that the internet was mostly a net positive, I think now that is much more difficult. If governments are able to fully realise their plans for surveillance and control, it will almost certainly become a net negative. Of course with many positive aspects.
So likewise with AI, we should be careful to not make the same mistakes as we did with the internet so we can realise something that is mostly positive. We could absolutely have a world where AI is as beneficial as you believe it will be, but we don't get there through inaction, we get there by being deeply critical of the negative aspects of AI and ensuring that we don't let a small number of hyper scalers control our access to it.
I think you underestimate people's grievance with technology. If you make a poll my guess is more than 50% of people will say the world was a better place pre-social media.
If the AI tech keeps going at the direction it's going now, more and more people will start believing the world would be better if the internet and computer had never been invented.
You talk like the internet being a net positive is a given. It really isn't, especially after it's proven that it doesn't democratize power (see Arab Spring, and China, and the US, and everywhere.)