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by matkoniecz 3 days ago
If you judge on aggregate then "Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive" is nonsense.

You cannot judge aggregate positively and conclude that therefore each segment was positive.
1 comments
Marha01 3 days ago
> If you judge on aggregate then "Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive" is nonsense.

It's not nonsense. If you think so, provide one great technology that has been a net negative.

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Alwayshasbeeb 3 days ago
That's quite easy.

Fracking

Social media infinite scrolling and targeted ads

Short form videos (tik tok, YouTube shorts, instagram reels)

Coming soon: Deep sea mining

Some of these are not great technologies, you might say. Well if they're impactful enough to turn everyone I love into a phone zombie and make the political landscape violent and insane then that's enough.

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Marha01 3 days ago
Those are just specific applications of some technology, not comparable to AI in general.
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matkoniecz 3 days ago
> It's not nonsense.

Yes, it is. You cannot go "overall progress was positive" and conclude "every change was positive".

> provide one great technology that has been a net negative

nuclear weapons + nuclear energy (luckily we had no nuclear war, but benefits here are not worth risks)

AI in general and LLM specifically so far

smartphones in general and social media specifically

maybe internet overall, maybe computers overall

biological weapons

leaded gasoline

(I know that you already excluded "social media" as "specific applications of some technology", I disagree with it)

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Marha01 21 hours ago
>nuclear weapons + nuclear energy (luckily we had no nuclear war, but benefits here are not worth risks)

>AI in general and LLM specifically so far

>smartphones in general and social media specifically

>maybe internet overall, maybe computers overall

I disagree that these are net negatives.

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