[lm28469]

The way I see it is that our systems became so complex that we lost sight of what's good for us, as individual and as a group.

Most people are too busy to even acknowledge these issues. When you're barely able to financially take care of your family or when you're too deep in the consumerism game you don't have time for these high level questions.

People are more outraged about the latest episode of Game of Thrones than they will ever be about the current state of humanity and its impact on Nature, the erosion of privacy and freedom, &c.

[jimktrains2]

> The way I see it is that our systems became so complex that we lost sight of what's good for us, as individual and as a group.

I feel ask though it's more that our systems became so complex that no one, let alone the lay in that specific tech, are even capable of understanding the consequences and what we're loosing.

It's not unreasonable for a lay person to be told about facial recognition and think "well, it's just doing a better job than what a cop would have done anyway" without realizing that it often does worse than a cop statistically and that unlike a cop, all the cameras can be coordinated so that your movements are stored indefinitely and viewable by anyone, something that couldn't happen when a person was looking at people on their beat.

Ditto with online tracking, it's the extent of the ramifications that people don't think/know about. Even then, there are no alternatives that provide the simplicity of communication that Facebook does, so even after something like Cambridge Analytica, most people don't really have options to move away from without completely changing how they socialize, and to be honest, most people don't understand just how much information they leak even still.

[Loughla]

>[. . .] no one, let alone the lay in that specific tech, are even capable of understanding the consequences and what we're loosing.

This 100%. Living deep in flyover country, I have heard the sentence in your second paragraph from several people.

And do you know who I blame?

Creators and marketers of AI/ML. People on this site are included in that list.

They are being lauded as the saviors of humanity. Think of all we can learn and do with AI/ML. Nevermind that they're just sufficiently large datasets with sufficiently complicated math problems. Also nevermind where that data is coming from or what it contains.

You won't have to worry about online shopping, because we'll be able to get you your stuff faster! Isn't that great?!

In flyover country, deep in flyover country, away from huge cities, away from tech, people do not understand what data is out there about them and what is being done with it. That is the biggest problem with all of this. They literally don't understand why it's a problem, let alone the nuance of the problems.