[anon-3988]

The other half of technology is the people using it. If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them. Neither is good.

And I am talking about myself here. My only excuse is that I simply don't use my money. Which is not necessarily a good thing either.

[salawat]

>If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them.

Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.

[anon-3988]

> Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.

I am saying the solution to make people smarter or empower the people. Buy now pay later, credit cards, and all these bespoke algorithms is just an illusion to make people feel better when they get ripped off.

[BobbyTables2]

Indeed!

When I was growing up, I didn’t understand check cashing places, payday loans, the layaway counter in the stores, home equity loans, reverse mortgages, auto leasing, and such.

And looking back, I’m amazed how much nonsense is out there. These are more traps than tools.

[salawat]

>If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them.

And what I am saying is that this sentiment, right here? Is exactly what leads to your later observation below, because the only ones willing to pay someone to implement a technical system, are inevitably the greedy ones looking to extract value from the suckers, and pay a techie to o make the little blinkenlights do their thing. You can't look at the technical side as the "hero" in this encounter, because the technical is what is propping up the fintech dystopia in the first place.

>I am saying the solution to make people smarter or empower the people. Buy now pay later, credit cards, and all these bespoke algorithms is just an illusion to make people feel better when they get ripped of.

You are dead on with this observation, but again, the answer to this is not something the technical world can solve. It's a people problem. We have to start talking about how whether these practices around are fundamentally exploitive or not, and whether they have a place in our society. Whether we should even be trying the money lenders offering them. That set of questions is firmly in the realm of people problems (problems that are fundamentally questions of human interaction, and whether something should or should not happen), rather than the technical, to which most systems in the fintech basically boil down to being a CRM, a set of ledgers/accounts, an invoicing/bill payment system, and some email/login/account viewing screen.

As someone with over a decade having been wasted trying to find a way to genuinely help people through the financial/insurtech sector (I know, what an idiot, right?), you cannot use technology on the service provider side, without it morphing into a more efficient value extractor, and often the other side of the transaction, the ones being fleeced, are in the worst place to say no in the face of a tech enabled lender.

Hence, I know it sounded sort of glib, but I'll say it again. No using tech to solve people problems.

[steve_adams_86]

This reminds me of something I read here the other day. There was an exchange about social implications of technology, and the idea of designing software based around our understanding of these matters more in the future.

Someone responded like "lol, sure, we can find some sociologists to start programming our apps", and I thought Damn. That's really missing the point. And it seems so arrogant. Like, not only do we laugh at the idea of people doing our jobs, we also need to laugh at the idea of the relevance of their fields.

Yet we really should depend on their insights to further our field, in my opinion. No profession truly stands alone, just like no person does.

I think we'll get better about this over time. Right now we've definitely got some growing pains.

[BobbyTables2]

Well put! Turns out “tech bros” aren’t that good at sociology either!

Even in computing, a profession dominated by scientists and engineers, has a lot of failing. Even the damn SPEC benchmarks don’t know to average numbers correctly.

[esseph]

That should be some kind of daily reminder for everyone here