[indigochill]

It's pretty applicable. And I don't mean just from a techno-skeptical perspective. At the dawn of personal computing, you basically had to be an electrical engineer to get a PC working. So you knew almost everything about your machine. Now, even highly skilled and experienced developers don't know nearly as much about their machine.

This introduces dark corners where bad actors can operate on levels that people either don't know how to monitor or don't even know exist (rootkits, etc.).

And it's not just that. Machine learning is increasingly being trusted to make decisions for us despite being the blackest of all boxes. Decisions like predictive policing (https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...) that have serious impact on people's lives.

I'm personally less skeptical of technology itself and more skeptical of unqualified people misusing technology (whether that's using machine learning to arrive at bogus conclusions, leaving personal webcams open on the internet, downloading fishy attachments, or anything else).

IMO, including some minimal technical education (like the technological equivalent of home ec) would be a fine start.

[rdiddly]

I hear you, but every successful technology, even if used correctly and competently, makes the human using it more capable with it, and less capable without it. So in a way it's always a descent. And of course "more capable" includes "more capable of screwing up" as you're basically saying.