> There are more objective reasons to be pessimist about technology than optimist.

Strongly disagree, it's why I'm not dying in a ditch of famine at the ripe age of 30.

> to produce not a machine to cure cancer, but to produce fake slop as indistinguishable from human speech or real images as possible

Arguably a stepping stone to better technologies, and a prerequisite to machine intelligence

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andrepd 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Strongly disagree, it's why I'm not dying in a ditch of famine at the ripe age of 30.

I'm obviously talking about the future of technology and not about technology in general. I agree that vaccines and antibiotics and fertilisers and the three field system and writing and the automatic bread slicer are all good technologies that improved our lives. The """innovations""" peddled by big tech, AI among them, are nothing like this! Again: mass surveillance, predatory pricing, mass manipulation, fake videos, line-rate slop: this is what big tech proposes, not the cure for cancer or the 15-hour workweek.

Also a nit: infant mortality was dreadful and pushed avg life expectancy way down. But if you lived to 15 you had a good chance of living to 70 even in pre-modern times.

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solenoid0937 3 days ago | parent [-]

Many of the innovations we take for granted today followed a very similar pattern, including the backlash. https://pessimistsarchive.org/

	▲	crashabr 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		This is the ultimate cope out: taking technology as a singular entity that evolved outside of human control and is simply commented on by passive observers who are simply "pessimist" or "optimist" about it instead of people whose lives are meaningfully impacted by it. The trick to do so is to flatten human experience under the determinism of "efficiency" (which you euphemistically called "quality of life"). This way "optimists" can dismiss nuanced oppositions to a lack of regulations as "luddism" and fold together anti-vaxxers and AI skeptics, as if those are the same people, with the same motivations or arguments. This also conveniently distracts from the fact that technological pessimism exists as a contrast to periods of technological optimism, which helps evade the question of what changed: after all, pessimists aways existed, as your link shows. I would suggest unfolding the "pessimist" reductionism and questioning why AI skeptics are not stem-cell skeptics. This will probably help avoid arguments that sound very much like "the end justify the means".

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binary132 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

the existence of such an argument has no bearing on its merit