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

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

>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

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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

"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.

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?

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.

> 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 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.

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.

> 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.

go steal someone else's money, damn socialists

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