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lifeisstillgood 2 hours ago

This is a personal opinion, so please be careful, but technology enables new forms of behaviour and opportunity that we can’t always predict.

And so ….

We will live in a almost totally transparent world - our daily interactions, voice, text and visual are likely recorded by someone at some point - how bosses interact with their employees, how nurses talk to patients and cashiers to customers, how parents talk to children - all of this will be recorded

And that can be a Good Thing. Imagine your boss getting real time feedback on coaching style, or you getting pointers on how not to argue with your wife.

The challenge is fairly simple - if we lose all secrets, the privacy is just the politeness of our neighbours. And while we can and should have strong laws on this, we need a social chnage to make serving someone ads based on their observable behaviour about the same level of social acceptability as crapping on their doorstep and then pouring petrol on and lighting it.

But we could see a world where privacy is protected but epidemiologists can pick apart the most thorny problems, human beings will be raised to be the very best they can be, and society become more communal and robust.

It’s possible - tech is neutral

And those societies and countries that embrace it will probably have that boost everyone thinks is coming from AI

loteck 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s possible - tech is neutral

The people creating, funding, controlling, developing, deploying and using the tech are not neutral, and the technology is indistinguishable from those people. In light of that, I would argue your assertion, that the "tech is neutral", is nothing more than rhetoric and that in every meaningful way the tech lacks neutrality.

probably_wrong 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Imagine your boss getting real time feedback on coaching style, or you getting pointers on how not to argue with your wife.

This sounds like a dystopia: either I'm receiving some machine-generated feedback that no one checked and may as well not apply at all or someone did check and my entire life is being judged by strangers. In either case, I imagine myself yelling at my SO because they cheated on me and getting a notification that my behavior was out of line.

To me this sounds eerily similar to that quote "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" in that it's not coming as positive a statement as intended.

brainisnuetral 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> tech is neutral

This statement has the same level of wisdom as telling a judge "Hey man, it's just a plant" at your hearing for dealing cannabis in the US in the 90s. You may be right, but that's independent of the reason we're all here right now.

"Tech" requires an entire grotesque machine of money and monsters, and they are rarely neutral.

If you believed "tech is neutral" you'd advocate for all of this machinery to be heavily regulated, publicly run, publicly owned, and universally accessible, rather than advocating to hide it behind one of the most secretive institutions in the US being led on the leash by oligarchs.

So, you're either one of these oligarchs or brainwashed by one.

lifeisstillgood 5 minutes ago | parent [-]

I wish I was an oligarch… could do with the cash.

Ok. Yes tech requires a huge amount of infrastructure- yes. Just as car driving does, and how that infrastructure is laid out has a huge impact on the usability / direction of/ benefits of cars. But if I may, regulating tech so we all remain anonymous and untracked is just as bad as a corporate run world

ajross 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> we need a social chnage to make serving someone ads based on their observable behaviour about the same level of social acceptability as crapping on their doorstep

Every time. Every ?!%@# time on HN. "Here's a story about police state overreach and unconstitutional privacy violation. And that's obviously very bad. Now let me tell you how the really important thing here is how much Google sucks."

autoexec an hour ago | parent [-]

Feeling guilty? Everyone will happily stop shitting on Google the moment they stop being evil.

ajross 11 minutes ago | parent [-]

Shitting on Google in a threat about the tech industry is fine. Hijacking a thread about literal state surveillance dystopian policies to talk about advertising (!!) is certifiable.

What it tells me is that the commenter is unserious about actual civil liberties, because "the government's bayonets will always be pointed at the Other People", where Google is the enemy they can see today. Historically that always ends up with the bayonets winning.