[ost-ing]

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

[timoth3y]

I think that is the core truth of the matter. Technology itself does not make life better.

I recently published an article about the Luddites. If you look at their actual demands, they were not anti-tech. They were labor activists. Life got much, much worse for most people in the industrial revolution until the laws they advocated were finally implemented.

https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-real-luddites-would-have...

[pitched]

The Luddites were against the systems that were shifting work away from skilled workers (them) to unskilled workers (commonly children). I have no doubt serious injury and death happened at those machines but find it hard to believe that was the cause of the Luddites. All signs point to them being more worried about themselves.

There’s no way they would have been pro-AI. It would take a very skilled VC to warp the world enough to make that sound true.

[timoth3y]

If you look at what their actual demands, the pattern is clear. They lobbied for support for unemployed, the right to vote, improved safely and labor conditions across all industries, and enforcing the labor laws that were already on the books. Banning machines was not part of their demands.

The Luddites were part of a larger labor movement that spanned multiple industries.

[pitched]

I can’t find any primary documents online that back up your claim directly but this gets pretty close: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/why-...

That is still a lot closer to collective bargaining than “save the children”.

What you’re saying is plausible enough to be easy to get an LLM to hallucinate, is the larger concern here. If this opinion does come from one, try asking it to verify using external sources. The Luddites would have been violently opposed to AI slop, if they had an opinion on it.

[willhslade]

I mean, dentristy and vaccines but ok.

[ahartmetz]

It really depends on the technology. Different technologies redistribute power differently. LLMs are very "centralizing" indeed. It is hardly feasible to train your own LLM as a private person or even a small company - at best you can download a pre-trained one, which at least nobody can silently change or take away from you.

[krupan]

Very well said. Free software was a revolt against technology that you have no control over and I feel like the people that are whole heartedly embracing "AI" have completely forgotten this. They now use an incredibly expensive proprietary piece of technology that they have no control over to write a bunch of code that they cannot (even if they tried) understand and they talk like it's the most amazing thing ever. This is pure short-sighted foolishness.

[ahartmetz]

Yeah - I really like F/OSS for the freedom aspect and I intensely dislike SaaS LLMs for the same reason. I tolerate them more easily for ancillary tasks like vulnerability search or super-powered LSP-workalikes to learn about a code base. There will eventually be a lot of nuance, I hope and believe - reasonable compromises between going all in and abstaining completely. So far, I'm doing okay just occasionally dabbling in local models. I at least need to know what people are talking about.

[matusp]

That's why we have state. There are many technologies that we, as a society, decided to control in various ways. You can't just build a nuclear weapon for example. There is no particular reason why we let tech bros control many aspects of our lives, apart from legal inertia.

LLMs can be "trivially" decentralized by expanding the concept intellectual property to also cover algorithmic processing. It's just about how we setup our laws and rules.

[krupan]

Nobody had to legislate Free software into existence in order to protect us. Wise people saw the need and did something of their own accord. We are still free to do this!

[ahartmetz]

It seems like one needs a big machine farm and a vast corpus of training data with a lot of manual curation to get started creating a competitive LLM, plus whatever technical expertise that I don't even know about. The stuff that makes LLMs exist now and not earlier.

It might be possible to organize all that with volunteers and some paid work, but how in practice? Stallman seems kind of out of the game at this point and there is no Linus Torvalds figure neither for this, as of now.

[moring]

> It seems like one needs a big machine farm and a vast corpus of training data with a lot of manual curation to get started creating a competitive LLM, plus whatever technical expertise that I don't even know about. The stuff that makes LLMs exist now and not earlier.

"big machine farm" reminds me of folding@home, which needed the same and got it.

"manual curation" is what Wikipedia did, as well as the free software community.

"technical expertise" is present in the free software world too. It is sparse since it is sparse in the world as a whole, but it exists.

"no Linus Torvalds figure" might be the main problem ATM.

[ahartmetz]

I also thought of these after writing my comment. The main problems that I see with these solutions are:

- Training seems to need a lot of data available at the same time, which is difficult to handle on commodity hardware.

- Manual curation can be a mind-numbing task, it might need to be gamified somehow.

There is a chance that the curation could be higher quality than the current corporate stuff. Pretty sure that it's not an intrinsic property of LLMs to write like TED talks.

[stevenhuang]

> there is no Linus Torvalds figure neither for this, as of now

Well yes there is. It's Karpathy.

[apsurd]

The State are the people and the people want tech billionaires because they want the same chance at being that (tech) m/billionaire.

Temporarily embarrassed millionaires; I cannot get around that issue toward collective action, toward myself contributing to an answer. I'm stuck. I can't unsee its truth =/. The individual will choose enrichment. We all will.

[rixed]

No we won't, and that's why we had free software in the first place. Many people dream of a community not of being forever singled out.

[watwut]

It does not seem like people want tech billionaires. It is fairly common to hate them.

It is just that peoples preference dont matter as billionaires have disproportionally more power.

[apsurd]

My example is always Bezos; everyone "hates" greedy tech Billionaire Bezos but how did he get there? We all put him there every day, every hour, every purchase.

If basically everyone transacts with Amazon, willingly, how is it possible that Bezos is the bad guy? I get that it's not black and white but the point stands: he didn't overthrow the government, the we put him there.

[worik]

> It is hardly feasible to train your own LLM as a private person or even a small company

Yet

[lyu07282]

This is exactly right, it gets examplified by Chinese people's attitude to new innovative technology. It's all doom and gloom in the west. But the thing is that both are correct stances on this technology for exactly the reason you mentioned. It's fundamentally different systems of governance of the same technology. One only ever saw new technology result in consolidation of power and collective decline and genuine grievances ignored, the other has demonstrated the ability to make new technology increase the collective well being of everybody. It's the low vs. high trust society, see the inverse of Francis Fukuyama's 1996 book Trust.

[mlinsey]

That's definitely too broad a statement. I'd argue encryption, oral contraceptives, and the printing press were all strongly decentralizing.

[mystraline]

The Public won the encryption battle against the USG and ITAR idiocy. Well, until climate destroying shitcoin. Thats a big Lose.

The printing press had sooo much state violence over that everywhere.

Oral contraceptives are a fight the USA is losing to the extremist christian republicans. Right now the line is right on Misoprostol. And shithole states like Texas even criminalize day-after pills and 'suspect' miscarriages.

And horrible tech like "weatherproof camera + AI + battery + solar + cell" (FLOCK) are easy to implement and already have been used in tracking women with miscarriages in Texas and across the country.

It seems for every new tech, theres 1 really cool good thing for the public, a few neutral things, and 1-3 absolutely terrible things.

And those terrible things make money. Lots of money.

[mlinsey]

You're describing efforts by powerful institutions to squash the technology, which they definitely try to do, but that's just a strong signal that the technology itself is inherently opposed to centralized power, not an enabler of it.

Other technologies like surveillance (and, perhaps, AI) are more clearly centralizing and enabling of power.

The difference matters a lot if you're having mixed feelings about working in technology.

[mystraline]

You are anthromorphizing technology. He doesnt like that.

[blast]

mlinsey wasn't anthropomorphizing technology, and your GP comment seems extreme to me.

[krackers]

>In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate must depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society must be highly organized and decisions have to be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision

[idle_zealot]

I don't know what you're quoting, but I wish it were the case that something affecting a million people granted each affected individual about a one-millionth share in the decision. I don't think that would always yield good outcomes, but at least it would be democratic. Structures that enable that are what we should be building.

[tejohnso]

With our level of technology I don't see why we couldn't have that kind of decision directly put into the hands of individuals rather than leave it to "representatives" or worse yet corporations that aren't even required to ask. Maybe I'm not thinking through the difficulties well enough, be what we have with elected representatives campaigning on one set of ideals and then voting the complete opposite way is unacceptable. At least, that should be grounds for imprisonment. Maybe that would be sufficient to get the representative voting system working well enough.

[atmavatar]

> With our level of technology I don't see why we couldn't have that kind of decision directly put into the hands of individuals rather than leave it to "representatives" or worse yet corporations that aren't even required to ask.

Reading the contents of proposed bills is a herculean task, to the extent that even our elected representatives dedicated to the task don't do so a significant fraction of the time. There's perhaps a good argument that's mostly because representatives (particularly in the House) spend too much time fundraising, but imagine the outcome when the burden is placed on people who have (sometimes several) completely independent, full-time jobs.

I would also argue that there's value in debating bills before passing them, but this opportunity for debate would all but disappear in a direct democracy, both because it's an additional burden on top of the time needed to read the bills and because it's a logistical nightmare to set up a proper debate venue that can properly accommodate everyone.

On top of that, you have to deal with the fact that the majority of US adults' literacy levels are below 6th grade, making them less likely to understand legislation they read or be able to engage in meaningful debate about it.

I think I'd want to fix our electoral system to make it more representative of the public (i.e. use something better than winner-take-all, first-past-the-post) before I'd even want to try tackling the monumental problems that we'd face in trying to enable a direct democracy for anything beyond the local city/municipality level.

> Maybe I'm not thinking through the difficulties well enough, be what we have with elected representatives campaigning on one set of ideals and then voting the complete opposite way is unacceptable. At least, that should be grounds for imprisonment.

I'm with you somewhat in spirit, but I think the devil's in the details.

A particular concern I'd have with doing this is that it's fairly common for representatives to attach riders to bills that have little to nothing to do with the original text. As such, there may be times when my representative may be forced to vote against a bill, the core of which is something they campaigned on, because one or more riders are completely unacceptable.

I do think there's probably value in providing a mechanism to recall representatives and senators, not the least of which is because we've seen in recent history several such politicians do full 180s and even change political parties upon election.

I don't think we want to open the pandora's box of incarcerating representatives based upon their voting history, though.

[rglover]

In some circles, he goes by Uncle Ted.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

To quote a movie:

In the 1960's there was a young man graduated from the University of Michigan. Did some brilliant work in mathematics. Specifically bounded harmonic functions. Then he went on to Berkeley, was assistant professor, showed amazing potential, then he moved to Montana and he blew the competition away.

[ajdegol]

But you forgot about Vickers

[kingofmen]

That is why the writer specified "on average", which clearly remains true, at least in the case that the decisionmaker is part of the affected group. The optimistic part is in assuming that latter.

[fidotron]

Let's go there: this is what the Unabomber was on about, and there has long been an effort to stop people noticing this.

Ultimately you end up with either going for totalitarianism (either to arrest development in the status quo, maintain a state of anarcho primitivism or technocratic tedium) or we resist that and break out by trying to forge forward into some unknown unchartered territory.

In practice we have no choice but to aim for the unknown and hope. Can't lie and say I can see what the way through all this is though.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

Not so long ago, I have come to a rather unpleasant realization that whether a lot of that will happen, will depend heavily on whether the ones currently trying to make technology control every facet of our lives decide to allow society get dumber first ( think Idiocracy, which AI very much could allow ) or not in which case it is anyone's guess, because people will still have some basic skills and memories of what could be.

I am hoping for the best, but life has taught me hard not to bet against humanity's worst instincts.

edit: add whether

[fidotron]

100%. Same applies to any hypothetical sentient AI that may or may not arise. The incentives to keep everyone weak and dumb are too strong.

I have a friend in a position of some influence, and am currently trying to persuade them to stop being so comfortable trusting in humanity to come to the right decisions for exactly that reason.

[JuniperMesos]

The thesis of Idiocracy is that society gets dumber in the future because intelligence is mostly genetically-determined and smarter people systematically have fewer children than dumber people, i.e. literal evolutionary selection against human intelligence over many human generations. This is clear in the first several minutes of the movie. People who recognize that this is what that movie is saying often then condemn it for being Nazi-adjacent pro-eugenics propaganda.

In the logic of Idiocracy, the way that an AI would "allow" the future society portrayed in the movie is by letting dumb people systematically have more kids than smart people, and "not allowing" this would entail some kind of coercive eugenics policy aimed at getting smart people to have more kids than they would otherwise be inclined to.

[throwaway173738]

Idocracy is basically arguing against the idea that progress is inevitable so we can just sit around and do nothing. Joe’s character development is in his shift away from getting out of the way and toward a follow or lead choice. It’s called out at the start of the movie when he’s sitting on his butt at the military library and his CO is like “you’re not supposed to get out of the way.”

[tremon]

because intelligence is mostly genetically-determined

None of the points of Idiocracy depend on whether intelligence is by nature or by nurture. The premise of the movie stays exactly the same if you replace those two minutes of backstory with a dysfunctional education system, the return of child labour, an increase in teen pregnancies, and anti-intellectualism in general.

[cjbgkagh]

I think the opening scene makes the hereditary position very clear, I don’t know how anyone could interpret that as not marking the case of ‘nature’ determining intelligence.

Edit; sorry, either I misread your comment or it was changed. On the premise that ignoring the intro a nurture based idiocracy could be possible, I would suggest it’s the thoroughness and extent of dumbing down that wouldn’t be possible if it was based on nurture.

[tremon]

smart people are born into dumb families pretty regularly

Are you implying widespread infidelity here, or are you making the case that something besides "nature" may be determining intelligence?

[iugtmkbdfil834]

Is it hereditary when parent is a dumb jock who creates a ridiculously bad environment in terms of 'nurture' aspect? I am not sure you thought your argument fully through.

[dinkumthinkum]

Why is saying things that are true called propaganda? Also, it is not just genetics but that is a part of it. The idea is also that parents with lower intelligence will value education for their offspring less and care less about whether their kids learn to read well, etc. Honestly, it just completely obvious and is playing out in real time. It's just obvious.

[atq2119]

> The idea is also that parents with lower intelligence will value education for their offspring less and care less about whether their kids learn to read well, etc.

Educated people can neglect their kids. And less educated people can still recognize when education is valued by society.

Now look around. Do you feel like we're living in a society that values education? Did the successful people that kids see in their formative years get there through education, and/or do they visibly value education beyond lip service?

Some of them, yes. But I'd argue that between influencers, teachers' pay, and the increasingly obvious nepotism and corruption by people in power, the situation is looking pretty dire. We don't truly value education as a society and are therefore teaching a new generation that education isn't to be valued. And that has nothing to do with genetics.

[dinkumthinkum]

But, all your exceptions, at best prove the rule. Just go and observe out in the world. That is why I said it is happening in real-time. I think you are not looking at what's in front of you. Teacher's pay? Teachers were never highly paid. It is quite clear that many of the families of kids in low performing are not families that push education or reading or any of that sort. Yes, you can have a well-to-do family where both parents are lawyers and they neglect their kids. I think its not a coincidence that many such families produce kids that are lawyers. You may think overall people are valuing education less and that might be true but that is not what my argument. My argument is there are clearly families that value it much, much less and that is a cycle and it is not down to teachers or all the the other boogeymen.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

Here is a problem, I am not arguing "Idiocracy: the process as presented in the movie"; I am arguing "Idiocracy; the resulting dumbed down populace". Admittedly, it is a mental shortcut and a bad one since it clearly did not land as I had hoped.

[tardedmeme]

That's the story they used in the movie. It's possible that real life will arrive at a similar situation by completely different means.

Also did you think about why dumber people might have more children? A large part of that reason is national policy choices.

[rixed]

  The thesis of Idiocracy is that society gets dumber in the future because intelligence is mostly genetically-determined

I don't remember the movie taking side on the nature vs nurture debate. The thesis is that intelligence is _inherited_.

Friendly reminder that plenty of nurture is inherited too.

[lelanthran]

> People who recognize that this is what that movie is saying often then condemn it for being Nazi-adjacent pro-eugenics propaganda.

In this respect, that movie is a great filter for virtue-signalling low-intelligence societal rejects.

[SanityPlease]

I recently saw a razor commercial where a man was shaving his cheek. I immediately condemned the company for being Nazi-adjacent propaganda since the actor was one step away from giving himself a Hitler mustache.

[rexpop]

This issue is evident to many smart people, and it would behove you to find a few whose conclusions were more prosocial, and sustainable.

One such perspective is Tools for Conviviality, a 1973 book by Ivan Illich.

Your ultimatum is imaginatively anemic.

[a_victorp]

In my view, the core of the solution here is to realize that no system will be stable and "perfect" forever. That is, we may chart into the unknown and arrive at a pretty good solution that benefits people, but over time, as people relax, some people will try to take power and eventually succeed. My point is: some people will always try to get advantages. So it will always come to the community to put in work to improve society and guarantee the benefits are given to all. There is no defining a set of rules and forgetting about it

[jimbokun]

Or find a way to make government respond more to voters than dollars.

[Aurornis]

> Let's go there: this is what the Unabomber was on about, and there has long been an effort to stop people noticing this.

There has not been "an effort to stop people noticing this". The Unabomber Manifesto has been available everywhere and published across mediums from the start. The topic beat to death by everyone from anarchists to eco-fascists to internet edgelords since it was released. It has also occupied a place of debate in academia, being studied and criticized in a lot of courses.

The Unabomber Manifesto wasn't even a particularly good critique in this topic. It just happened to become a popular one because he was a terrible person who murdered a lot of people and wanted to murder a lot more. The common criticism of the manifesto is that it was a bunch of cliches tied together with some writing that appeared eloquent, and then he forced it into notoriety by being a literal terrorist.

It doesn't stop comments like this from implying that he was on to something or the next step of implying that there's some broader conspiracy to stop us all from noticing that he had a point. The latter conspiracy breaks down when you look at how much everyone knows about the manifesto and how it has been reprinted and discussed to death for years. He even wrote and published entire freaking books from prison.

[tardedmeme]

"uncharted territory"

[hackable_sand]

I mean, I don't see what the rush is.

It's like Silicon Valley overdosed on Adderall.

You can have the same tech, just in 5 human generations. I don't see why you have to have it now.

[BowBun]

For about 5% of Silicon Valley, reaching these new 'heights' of civilization is the goal. For the rest, including a bunch of folks in these threads, their primary motivator is building generational wealth for their family, humanity be damned. I'll just keep nodding my head at these HN discussions while pushing down the thoughts that a majority of this crowd is complicit (myself included). Every day, I grow more confident in my choice the eschew my legacy and leave y'all to it.

[thomaswoodson]

New around here, but… For those interested in a deep dive, I highly recommend reading the Technological Society, by French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul.

[throwyawayyyy]

The Stasi had one informant per 6.5 people. We're moving to a world in which everyone can have their own personal informant. I really don't think I am being hyperbolic here.

[jgalt212]

> Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation.

True during the mainframe. Not true during the PC age. Perhaps true again during frontier model / data center ago. Maybe not true again when hostable open weights models become efficient and good enough.

[jmyeet]

Thing is, technology (particularly automation) could make life better but it not doing that is a choice. Think about it. We could live in a world where people only had to work 20 hours a week or even at some point not at all. We don't do that because we have a system that simply makes a handful of people even wealthier. We will likely see the first trillionaire minted in our lifetimes. That is an unimaginable and unjustifiable amount of money for one person to have.

So you're not really complaining about technology making things worse. You're complaining about wealth inequality, which is a direct result of the mode of production and the organization of the economy.

Internet access should, at this point, be basically free. The best Internet in the country is municipal broadband. It's better and it's cheaper. It's owned by the town, city or county that it's in, which means it's owned by citizens of that municpality.

Instead what we have in most of the country are national ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum and AT&T and the prices are sky high. They are only sky high so somebody far away can continue to extract profit from something that's already built and not that expensive to build.

You will get lied to by people saying national ISPs have an economy of scale. Well, if that were true, why is municipal broadband so (relatively) better and cheaper? Why would there be state laws that make municipal broadband illegal? Why would national ISPs lobby for such laws?

[alehlopeh]

If it’s a choice, then who gets to make that choice? Certainly not the individual. I don’t remember getting to choose anything of the sort. If you say it’s society that makes the choice, how does that work exactly? Through democracy and governance? Well then society did make the choice. Are you then complaining that the choice society made is not the one you prefer? From the perspective of the individual, it’s not a choice at all.

[joe_mamba]

>We could live in a world where people only had to work 20 hours a week or even at some point not at all.

How would your country function, if all medical staff, construction, rail, sewage, police and firefighters suddenly worked half as long or not at all, starting tomorrow?

Because my home country tried this whole "if we seize the means of production from the wealthy elites, we won't have to work as hard anymore" ~80 years ago, and guess what happened to the workers? Were they working less hours for more money, OR, were they working just as much while also starving and being plagued by shortages?

The problem with your logic, is that it only applies to bullshit Western office corporate jobs who are anyway not actually doing much useful work for 40h. All those office jobs that don't need to be working 40h, were just subsidized by endless money printing, that's why you see so many layoffs happening, once the ZIRP era ended when they were hiring people just to raise headcounts to boost stock valuations to gullible investors they could rug-pull, but now the bubble popped and the jig is up.

And it only works in a world where you own the world reserve currency, and globalisation, free trade and international competition does not exist, because the countries who will work harder than you, will outcompete you and subjugate you in the long run so you can make their sneakers and phones for 60h/week, while they kick it back and live from printing money.

[jmyeet]

Your assertion seems to be that those things haven't had massive productivity gains over time. Cleary they have. Firefighters aren't carrying buckets of water or using a horse-and-cart. No, they use fire engines, helicopters and planes. They use more advanced fire suppressants and protective gear.

Medical professionals have better diagnostics, health records, MRIs and other imaging equipment and so on. The medical profession is pretty much a perfect example of my point, actually. Do we train more doctors (per-capita) or just expect existing doctors to work more hours? There are a whole bunch of vested interests in constraining doctor supply.

Likewise, resident physicians are incredibly profitable for hospitals because they create a lot of value and cost nothing. You see this where various parties are trying to increase emergency medicine residencies from 3 to 4 years.

Hospitals hate fully-qualified attending physicians because they can't artificially suppress their salaries. It's why we've gotten things like Nurse Practioners, Physician's Assistants, CRNAs, etc. It's also why, for example, you see a case like in Oregon where private equity is trying to destroy physician organization. I'm of course talking about Peace Health and ApolloMD, a case in Oregon recently.

We also make medical people spend a bunch of time dealing with insurance BS, for literally no reason.

This isn't just a BS "corporate job" thing.

[joe_mamba]

You said a lot off-topic rtants, without answering my question directly: How would your country function, if all medical staff, construction, rail, sewage, police and firefighters suddenly worked half as long or not at all, starting tomorrow?

You mentioned a lot of tech improves since the stone age as an argument, but existing staff working 40h already use those tech advancements.

[zmmmmm]

> Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all

The fallacy is believing that some kind of invisible hand will guide it to automatically produce an equal outcome and therefore any and all regulation is inherently bad. This seems to be a prevailing belief in the US in the current climate.

We have institutions that are designed to redistribute power and they are called governments. People have to believe in their role in doing that enough to actually empower them to implement it though.

[thih9]

One attempt was open source. Or perhaps libre software? I guess it is not a success since only one of these looks mainstream.

[krupan]

Free/Open Source software is very mainstream now I'm not sure what you mean, but maybe we are taking too much of it for granted?

[thih9]

I meant that “open source” achieved pop culture level recognition. Libre software never did, most people are still unaware of the difference or don’t care.

A popular claim against open source is that it alone is insufficient to prevent abuse (here: accumulation of power).

Recent decade has shown many cases of that, with corporations adopting open source projects without giving power to their users; e.g.: Android or cloud services.

Perhaps if we understood open source less as a process and more as a movement (so: if libre software movement was more popular) things would be different.

[krupan]

I can agree that the original aims of the movement haven't fully caught on, especially the subtle difference between Open Source and Free/Libre software. The pragmatic side of better security, low-bureaucracy standardization, and low price won out over Freedom for freedom's sake.

To me that's most apparent today with LLMs. Those are completely proprietary and privately controlled, yet the software world now LOVES them.

[hamdingers]

It is curious how successful AI developers have been in trying to redefine "open source" as "the binary is free to download"

[echelon]

The OSI is garbage, and "open source" outside of the most viral licenses is too.

I'll go further and say that it accelerated getting us into this mess we're in today.

The OSI is owned and controlled by the tech titan hyperscalers who benefit from free labor.

Useful "open source software" always gets encrusted by the big titans that then build means to control the tech, and then the means to control us. And just to rub salt in the wounds, they rarely compensate the original authors.

Android is Linux, right? Then why can't we install our own software? Why does it spy on us? Open source is so great, right?

95% of humans will never own a phone that gives them freedom. And we enabled that.

Everything we as tech people own is also getting locked down. We're going to have to start providing our state ID to access the internet soon.

But OMG, Year of Linux on the Desktop 2012!!12

Pretty soon you won't even be able to use your Linux. Everything will be attested.

Open source hasn't stopped power from accruing to the titans. It's accelerated their domination.

People rush to defend Google and Amazon when you criticize how they profit off of Redis, Elasticsearch, etc. The teams that build the tech aren't becoming wealthy, and most of the bytes flowing through those systems are doing so behind closed source AWS/GCP/Azure offerings.

These companies then use their insane reach to tax everything that moves. Google owns 92% (yes, 92%!) of URL bars and they tax every search, especially searches for other companies' trademarks. They do even better - they turn it into a bidding war. Almost nothing that exists in the world today can make it to you without being taxed by them.

If they don't like your content, you just disappear.

Mobile platforms have never been ours. We can't install what we want. We're soon going to be locked at the firmware level to just Google and Apple and forced to use their adblocking-free, tracker-enabled "browsers" (1984 telescreens). Any competition can't get started due to the massive scale required, meanwhile Apple and Google tax everything at 30% and start correlating everything you do, everyone you talk to, everywhere you go in their panopticon.

"Open source" was wool pulled over our eyes so that we happily built, supported, and enabled this.

Open source should be replaced with "our proletariat users and small businesses can have this for free, but businesses listed on any stock exchange cannot commercialize this ever unless they pay out the nose for it".

"Source available" / shareware is peak. Give your users the thing, and the means to maintain it after you're gone, but tell Google et al. to go away.

"Fuck you, pay me" as the artists frequently say.

But also, let's stop giving the Death Star free labor.

(edit: I'd love a feedback sampling of the heavy downvotes. OSI purists? Goog employees? Surely MIT/BSD fans and not anyone who follows Stallman.)

[xtracto]

>Pretty soon you won't even be able to use your Linux. Everything will be attested.

I want to rescue this snippet.

Few of us remember the "fight" and discussions that happened when Firefox first pondered the idea of allowing encrypted video on the platform. Same with Linux. This was when The powers that be forced Netflix and other video distributors to introduce that opaque tech in the web. The same thing happened with DeCSS and Linux DVD playing; but that generation was a bit more... revel.

But we as a society are indeed slowly and steadily giving away our rights of many, for the rights of few cartels.

It's been a sad journey to see for someone born in the early 80s.

[echelon]

> But we as a society are indeed slowly and steadily giving away our rights of many, for the rights of few cartels.

Increasing geopolitical multi-polarity may force big tech to give up ground. The EU and ASEAN in particular should be hitting Google et al. with the regulatory hammer.

When we get clearer heads back in power (Lina Khan was great, but moved much too slow), they ought to carve the tech cos into Baby Bells. Horizontally so they have to compete with themselves.

> It's been a sad journey to see for someone born in the early 80s.

The dream of the open web, privacy, freedom of speech, and freedom of computing is being killed by the oligarchy. And they convinced us the progressive thing to do was to give them our labor - they hung us with it.

[bamboozled]

Open source is still around ? It would be vastly improving your life even though you can’t see it.

[runarberg]

GMO was the first technology I figured that out. It was heavily pushed in around 2007 as a solution to world hunger, but at the same time it was very easy to see that hunger was a problem of distribution, not technology. Even back in 2007 we made much more food then was required to feed the world population. Furthering the obviousness of the lie was that in reality GMO was (and still is) mostly used for growing feed or cosmetic products. And on top of that we had large monopolies with patents to protect, and herbicides to sell, pushing this technology the hardest.

Now its been 20 years later. The technology is mature and many of the patents have expired, but GMO has done absolutely nothing to solve world hunger.

[worik]

Yes.

We do not need GMO for food, I agree.

But where is the genetically engineered heart muscle that sits in the engine bay of my car running on nutrient solution, excreting C02 and urine while driving my car with a hydraulic motor?

[pdonis]

> until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all

Here's the problem: you can't.

First, people have disagreements, often very fundamental ones, over what "benefits us all". There's no way to resolve many such disagreements short of brute force.

Second, "enforce"--note the last five letters of that word--means some people are given the power to do things to other people that, if anyone else did them, would be crimes. Throw you in jail, fine you, restrict the things you can do. Indeed, that's how David Friedman, whose "The Machinery of Freedom" is worth reading, defines a government. And the problem is that government still has to be done by humans, and humans can't be trusted with the power to do such things.

Ultimately the only defense we have is to not give other people such power. Not governments, not tech giants, nobody. But that requires a degree of foresight that most people don't have, or don't want to take the time to exercise, particularly not if something juicy is in front of them. How many people back when Facebook first started would have been willing to simply not use it--because they foresaw that in a couple of decades, Facebook would become a huge monster that nobody knows how to rein in? If my own personal circle is any guide, the answer is "not enough to matter"--of all the people I know, I am the only one who does not use Facebook and never has. And even I didn't refuse to use it back when it first started because I saw what things would be like today--I just had an instinctive reaction against it and listened to that reaction, and then watched the trainwreck slowly develop over the years since.

So we're stuck. Even if we end up deciding that, for example, the government will break up the tech giants, slap huge fines on Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc., maybe confiscate a bunch of their property, maybe even make them do a bunch of community service, possibly even some of them serve some jail time--it will still be just other humans doing things to them that no humans can be trusted to do. It won't fix the root problem. It will just kick the can down the road a little longer.

[worik]

> Here's the problem: you can't.

It is not possible to "enforce" a "value system". True.

But we can have a value system we share that benefits us all. We can work together to improve our welfare as a whole.

> Ultimately the only defense we have is to not give other people such power.

That is untrue. We must have webs of trust, and within those webs there are power hierarchies. The trick is that those hierarchies must not be arbitrary nor permanent.

This is a problem that has been wrestled with, and solved, several times in human history. Any human structure is vulnerable to outside attack, and most (all?) vulnerable to internal decay, but they can be established and are worth establishing.

An example I can think of are the Republican Militias as described by George Orwell in Road to Catalonia, and activist groups I have been involved with here in Aotearoa.

Nothing lasts for ever - that does not mean we cannot work together for good things.

--

In one group I was involved on we used to have monthly meetings, by phone, of the organising committee. We had thirty members (all activists running hot with their own opinions), made decisions by consensus. I was on that committee for five years and we went over our allotted two ours twice: Once by ninety minutes (that was a day!) and the other time by five minutes. Nobody ever felt unheard - that mattered to us.

It is possible, people have been doing it forever, the good things we make are vulnerable but we should still aspire to and achieve them

[pdonis]

> It is not possible to "enforce" a "value system".

That's not what I said. What I said was that you can't enforce a value system "that benefits us all"--because "us all" will never agree on what value system that should be, at least not once you get beyond small groups of people. But of course you can just declare by fiat that your preferred value system "benefits us all", and ignore objections, and if you have enough brute force at your disposal, you can enforce it. You just won't be enforcing a value system that actually "benefits us all".

> We must have webs of trust

Yes.

> within those webs there are power hierarchies.

Only if you let that happen. But in a sane web of trust, you don't--because in a sane web of trust, everybody understands that power--in the sense of someone you trust doing something that harms you, simply because you're unable to prevent them--is a betrayal of trust.

> This is a problem that has been wrestled with, and solved, several times in human history.

I disagree. I certainly don't see the Republican Militias in the Spanish Civil War as solving this problem.

> that does not mean we cannot work together for good things

Of course we can. But our ability to do that without violating any trusts is limited, often very severely, by how many people we can get to agree with us, without any force or coercion being applied, on what "good things" to work together for. Unfortunately utopian dreamers and "revolutionaries" throughout human history have failed to recognize this basic fact, and their attempts to make a better world have always resulted in mass suffering and death.

[worik]

Have you ever been sailing on a yacht with friends?

There is s hierarchy. Generally in my experience it is the person on the tiller who will bark commands as the boat moves across the wind.

A hierarchy, temporary, amongst friends.

Everybody gets good things.

[pdonis]

> Have you ever been sailing on a yacht with friends?

Yes. A small group of people, who know each other and want to be together. Sure, works fine.

> Generally in my experience it is the person on the tiller who will bark commands as the boat moves across the wind.

Yep. I've been that person. I've also been the person who had to get out of the way quickly when I heard "coming about!" so the boom wouldn't clout me on the head.

> A hierarchy, temporary, amongst friends.

Yes: temporary, for a specific purpose where one person is obviously in a position to give orders that the others should follow. The friends don't have to agree on their entire value system or philosophy of life. They only have to agree on who's in the best position to warn everyone of an impending event that they need to know about.

And amongst friends, who aren't going to bicker over all this because they're there to have a good time with each other, and there are no conflicts of interest.

What does any of this have to do with the thread topic?

[pdonis]

> we can have a value system we share that benefits us all

If "us all" is a small enough group, sure. It doesn't scale, though.

[tremon]

It is not possible to "enforce" a "value system". True.

I think that organized religion wants to say a few words here.

[Forgeties79]

> until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all

Tons of us called for common sense guard rails and a little bit of actual intention as we rolled out LLM’s, but we were all shouted down as “luddites” who were “obstructing progress.”

We all knew this was coming. It’s been incredibly frustrating knowing how preventable so much of it has been and will continue to be.

Edit: these responses are absurd. Banning GPU’s…? What are you on about? Who said anything about stopping or banning LLM’s? Did none of you see “guardrails”? “A little bit of actual intention”? Where are you getting these extreme interpretations?

I’m talking basic regulatory framework stuff. Regulations around disclosure, usage, access, etc. you know, all the stuff we neglected and are now paying for with social media in droves? We have done this song and dance so many times. No one is going to take away your precious robot helper, we’re just saying “maybe we should think about this for more than two seconds and not be completely blinded by dollar signs.” I mean people have literally died in my state because Zuckerberg wants to save a few bucks building his data center.

It feels like AI evangelists come out the woodwork seething if anybody even implies you shouldn’t be allowed to do literally whatever you want at all times.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

Sigh, and what guardrails are common sense? Are those the same level of common sense as those advocated for guns ( and narrowed down at every possible opportunity )? Some of us see this tech as possibly revolutionary and thanks to useful individuals calling for muzzling that tech we now have the worst of both worlds: centrally controlled, not really open ( weights are just weights -- though Meta actually deserves some credit here ), and heavily muzzled.

Clearly, powers that be learned all too well from internet rollout.

[Forgeties79]

>sigh,

I stopped reading. No point in engaging this if that’s how you’re kicking things off.

[CamperBob2]

"Sigh" is indeed a thought-terminating cliche. So is "Common sense."

[Forgeties79]

“Sigh” is “I don’t respect you and will now talk down to you.”

“Common sense” at least invites the question, “what do you consider common sense solutions?” and if I were to balk at that then clearly I’m not discussing the topic in good faith.

[CamperBob2]

But it's just argument bait, isn't it? What are the odds that the guardrails you consider common sense will agree with my own?

It's like how 90% of people might be in favor of "common sense gun control," but when you drill down and propose specific gun-control measures, you find that it didn't help a bit to start the conversation by invoking "common sense." We're seeing the same with AI.

[mat_b]

Except that it's not preventable. Technology is always an arms race. If you don't create it, someone else will, and then they'll have the advantage and subjugate you, so you might as well be the one to do it first. Whatever it is that you're trying to prevent, someone is going to do it if it gives them power.

[Forgeties79]

What’s not preventable? What do you think I am saying, exactly?

[zzzeek]

It wasn't "preventable" though. How would you prevent what's been happening ? Pass a law making GPUs illegal ? Just ..."convince" everyone that the machine that can write working software, business letters and render good enough banner and print advertising for nearly free is evil and just don't use it (ask Emily Bender how that's going)? There is no realistic way from stopping any of this from happening. Need a different approach.

[Forgeties79]

I proposed literally none of those solutions or even suggested them.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

<< common sense guard rails and a little bit of actual intention

The issue is that you seem to be proposing nothing but platitudes and when called on it, did not elaborate but high tailed to the cloak of misunderstood defender of sense and sensibility.

[Forgeties79]

It’s not simply platitudes. People use the phrase constantly in this context: https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/2024...

[iugtmkbdfil834]

I read it and even with charitable read on the biggest guardrail appears to be putting a bunch of committees in the process to control the process one way or another. At its core, it is a wishlist for education workers and I am not completely against that, but lets call it what it actually is. Beyond that.. I have not seen an actual proposal.. common sense or otherwise. And that is before we get 'being eco friendly' ( how is that guardrail for AI? ), advancing democracy ( again, not sure how it is a guardrail ) or advancing equity and fairness ( same question ).

The closest thing I saw to an actual guardrail was humans.. which, is not wrong at its core, but again lacks specificity.

[bananaflag]

Well, I love to take showers, which involve a lot of tech like running water and water heaters and soap which I can buy from the supermarket.

I lived in places without any of those and I wouldn't want to do it again.

[hn_throwaway_99]

While I believe the comment you are replying to may be too broad considering "all tech", I also strongly agree with the overall sentiment (and in particular I commend ost-ing for putting a general feeling I think a lot of people have so clearly and succinctly into words).

As a Gen Xer, I grew up with a strong belief in the "goodness" of technology, of its power to make people's lives better and to ameliorate suffering. So after 25 years of seeing so much invested into technology that actively makes people's lives worse (e.g. ad-tech, social media algorithms), and even conservatively just results in the huge accumulation of wealth and power to the very few, I can't help but feel extremely disillusioned.

Yes, I like showers and soap and running water, but I rarely see the type of economic investment into tech these days that will have as broad of a beneficial impact as running water did.

[WillPostForFood]

Tyranny of antibiotics and vaccines and MRI machines...

[shevy-java]

> As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy.

Technology is not a good-only or evil-only thing. You have use cases that are beneficial and you have use cases that is not benefical. The technology in by itself isn't what makes things worse. Even many thousand years ago, humans used weapons to bash in other humans. Remember the Ötzi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Body he was killed by arrows, most logically from someone else shooting at him (at around 3230 BC). Nuclear energy is used as weapon or source for generation of energy (or rather, transformation of energy). And so on and so forth.

IMO the biggest question has less to do about technology, but distribution of wealth and possibilities. I think oligarchs need to be impossible; right now they are causing a ton of problems. Technology also creates problems, I agree on that, but I would not subscribe to a "technology makes everything worse". That does not seem to be a realistic assessment.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

This. But suggest that maybe someone should stop being able to 'create wealth' past 7th island in French Polynesia and people go nuts.

[wnc3141]

Read "why nations fail". It essentially covers this. Markets and technologies are great but ultimately bound by the systems of power they inhabit.

[marcosdumay]

> Technology amplifies power

Some technologies concentrate power, some technologies distribute it. "The WWW" is still too coarse of a category to have just one of those effects up there.

Some people just don't show the capacity to handle nuance or complexity.

[themafia]

Technology is simply a technique to leverage and extend human desire. It's a tool. It's in the hands of those who control and use it.

You shouldn't blame technology. You should blame the maniacs that have latched on to it as a way of extending their power. You should blame the government for their failures of regulation. You should blame the media for failing to cover this obvious problem.

The people who want to subjugate you are the problem.

[apsurd]

"The problem is them"

no no, we're not doing that.

[themafia]

I named three specific groups. You can easily find the bad actors within these groups. There is no "them." There is a highly identifiable set of individuals that take actions which cause major problems in our society. On this there is absolutely no question. In fact there is even good social consensus as to who these people are.

I get that hacker news would rather avoid inconvenient issues or simply satirize them but I take absolutely no care of this.

[bicepjai]

I agree, I want technology in the hands of people (I want to control my data) and I don’t believe in cloud anymore since corporate greed and ad tech just destroyed the trust in cloud use case.

[vatsachak]

Technology can also divide power. Think about the amount of open source intelligence that exists.

[keeda]

Technology is primarily an accelerator. It just accelerates things, both good and bad, that were already in motion or at least already possible. Which is why things like healthcare got better but things like wealth inequality got worse.

What needs to change is the system in which that technology exists inside, because otherwise removing technology will still keep us on the same trajectory to the same destination, only much slower and possibly with much more pain.

What we're seeing right now with layoffs and everything else is simply an acceleration of our current trajectory. We were always going to get here, AI just got us here a few decades ahead of schedule.

For once, however, we have a technology that could let us change this trajectory. I've said this before, but the capital class held so much power because it took a lot of people, and hence a lot of capital, to take on large endeavors that created new wealth. But things were rigged such that those who provided the capital also captured most of that new wealth.

Now, just as AI lets companies (i.e. capital) do the same things with fewer people, it also lets people do the work of entire companies by themselves... i.e. without capital. That is a big enough shift in power dynamics to alter the trajectory in previously inconceivable ways.

[toasty228]

> As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy.

I have to very regularly remind myself many people genuinely believe this shit and are not straight up evil/maniacs, it's getting harder

[ismailmaj]

I'm thinking that personally, technology is not bad in a vacuum and not necessarily bad in society, but it just reveals that our system is ill-equipped to guarantee good usage of it.

We could have fun defining what's good usage but we're so far from it, it would just make me sad.

[stevenhuang]

What, so you believe technology corrupts absolutely? Nonsense.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

"Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation"

My theory is that AI and robotics have the potential to break capitalism as we know it. We will probably reach a point where machines will be better than humans at pretty much anything and there will be almost no need for workers who just do a job (like most of us). But if nobody has money to buy things then there is no point in producing anything. Not sure where this will be going but I am pretty sure the capitalists will not voluntarily share the gains.

In theory all this progress should be great and exciting for humanity but without changing the system there may be dark times coming for most of us. I always have to think of Marshall Brain's "Manna" story. It may be a spot on prediction of things to come.

[dag100]

> But if nobody has money to buy things then there is no point in producing anything.

The top 1% can still buy things. They can buy a lot of things, in fact. In 2024 in the US, the top 20% by income account consumed roughly the same amount as the bottom 60% (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm). This gap has widened over time (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1W5px) and will probably continue to widen even further.

[wotsdat]

go steal someone else's money, damn socialists