[ddkper]

Pessimists are so wrapped up in their ideology that you get the feeling they actively desire for humans to fail to improve things in the world. All technology is is the application of scientific knowledge to make something easier than it was before. Thats it.

These pessimists like the writer are usually committed to an ideology that views humans as evil and wasteful (as if those values hold any value to an inert universe) and that we must fail in order to show us our evil ways. The writer is claiming that technology has failed to produce large productivity gains. He's not clear on the timeframe but yet he's typing on a laptop utilizing micro-processors and the internet to share his message. He's writing on a blog enabling him to reach audiences across the whole world and get paid to do so.

He's sitting in a post-covid world where our economies were saved by advanced telecommunications networks and video-conferencing technologies. Where millions of lives were saved from MRNA vaccines (technology), that were developed in record time. They were developed in record time by sharing the data realtime via the internet (technology), and Moderna even used AI (technology) to develop the vaccine in 2 days within computer space before physical production. Yep, an effective vaccine designed in 2 days certainly isn't a productivity boost /s

People that are pessimistic about human's abilities to solve problems with the application of science (technology) usually do so for moralistic or philosophical reasons, not for anything grounded in reality. If something isn't ruled out by the laws of physics it is possible to do given the right scientific knowledge.

[303uru]

It's not hard to see why. The majority in the US are wage slaves who will toil away sacrificing time with family and friends to enrich someone they will never meet.

There are a good number of anthropologists I've read and heard speak who through their research have come to believe on the whole pre-agrarian humans were the happiest to ever walk the earth. They "worked" about 15 hours a week.

I think we're flattering ourselves thinking the modern world is really any better for most people.

[giraffe_lady]

> technology is is the application of scientific knowledge to make something easier than it was before

Even taking this at face value, their point still holds that "improving things" is not a positive or even a neutral value in itself. If the something you make easier is stalking or genocide you've made the world worse. You need a viewpoint outside of mere technological improvement to decide which changes are valuable and which are not.

Valuing technology for its own sake absent this viewpoint will have you enabling atrocity. Which is, I think, exactly the "pessimist" position here. Andreesen & co are saying that mere advance is inherently good and they are saying no, it obviously is not.

[ddkper]

You cant predict beforehand how a technology will be used or even what technology will be invented but you can adopt a philosophy that says on the whole scientific advancement is a positive, or on the whole it is negative.

The pessimist position is that there are some technologies so destructive that by pure chance once we develop them we will extinct ourselves.

The optimist position is that problems inevitably arise in a complex universe but that humans are problem solvers (within the bounds of physics) and that it is possible to address them.

A classic example of pessimists is that you could develop a 3D printing machine allowing the regular person to create bioweapons easily. Yet they don't apply the same logic of if a technology is that powerful, it can be easily used to instantly create the antidote/vaccine to any bioweapon developed using it.

The optimists believe that technological advancement on the whole is good because the good cases take care of themselves and the bad cases can be solved with human ingenuity. The alternative of halting progress or centralizing control of technology is worse. Example: around 40k americans die per year in auto-accidents. Every year that self-driving cars are delayed, 40 thousand americans die. The alternative is the already bad status quo or problems we dont see coming like pandemics or asteroids or solar flares - which we will not have the technology to address without faster progress.

[giraffe_lady]

You can't know what all of its higher order consequences will be but you certainly can predict how a technology will be used. For example predictions that AI chatbots would be used for spam and phishing were exactly correct!

And just because development can't or shouldn't be completely stopped doesn't mean you can throw up your hands and do nothing either. The (so far) success of nuclear deterrance and nonproliferation for example is the result of a massive, coordinated, and preemptive attempt to constrain the technology.

[ddkper]

You can predict some use cases sure but not all. Thats what creativity is. To claim that anyone predicted TCP/IP would be used for half the things the internet powers today is laughable. In fact, for them to predict most of that would be in principle to invent these things.

For example, to predict in the 1970's TCP/IP would be used to enable bitcoin would be articulating the invention of bitcoin. Nobody predicted it, it was creatively developed using technologies that the founders invented with no idea it would be used for cryptocurrency.

You can always find a reason to be a doomer about the technology because it's easier to predict negative consequences than to predict the good that will come of it. To argue the negative side, one must only create a hypothetical. To argue the positive, one must practically invent the positive use-case which requires work and creativity.

You can say CRISPR is far too dangerous and allows for designer babies, a moral dilemma. This creates a strong hypothetical argument right off the bat, but for it to be proven a beneficial technology it actually needs the time to develop positive use cases like curing sickle cell disease.