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Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

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Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#381

Post by Ellington »

eldavido wrote: post #123
barry-cotter wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Newspapers were at least, historically at least in the 20th century, were expected to inform and keep a separation between opinion and news. They clearly had a political slant, but they couldn't just ignore facts that they found inconvenient, or only mention them in hit pieces meant to discredit them. Exceptions to this, like Yellow Journalism and Hearst's use of his papers for personal and political ends were at l…

This is a great point and pretty much mirrors my own views. I read the NYT but I'm under no pretense it's "neutral" or "fair and balanced". It is a highly partisan, albeit factual, news source that is selectively edited and clearly pushes a very specific worldview, through which every story is filtered. This worldview includes beliefs like: unions are always good, capitalism is at best suspect and makes a few rich, a…

WaPo are NYT do not lean left in any way. They are neoliberal media and push a corporatist agenda. Look at how they treat Bernie Sanders, the first leftist to ever run for president of the USA in my lifetime.

Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#382

Post by [deleted] »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #280
mattlondon wrote: post #234

My favourite one that surprised me and continues to surprise people: kids that have grown up with smartphones and iPads from birth are computer illiterate. People see their 5 year old using an iPad and the knee-jerk cliche thought/assumption us the classic "oh wow these kids just get technology!" (recall all the "I need my kid to program the VCR" type stuff from the 80s/90s - it is the same thing of older people assu…

I'm curious if, and exactly when, this might lead to sweet consulting gigs for the then elderly, computer savvy generation that I consider myself part of, similar to old COBOL devs called back from retirement. It seems that the ressources for people who actually want to learn computers are excellent and are getting better all the time, so maybe there will always be enough well trained people coming up to solve all pr…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#383

Post by xk3 »

api wrote: post #372

Here's a positive one: smart phones with maps have helped bring about the EV revolution. I got an EV recently and quickly noted how annoying to near impossible finding chargers would be without an app.

I don't really see how this works at all... people would use paper maps or mapquest if personal GPS devices and smartphones didn't exist

(Also a full replacement of gas cars to EV will require 96% of all known Nickel Earth deposit so it is definitely not "the solution" to the energy/resource/transportation problem--buses are)

Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#384

Post by xk3 »

throwaway87378 wrote: post #212
logicalmonster wrote: post #64

The biggest societal altering impacts may be in terms of dating and reproduction. This has major cultural consequences. * There’s more than 1 reason for this, but approach patterns have changed. Men approaching women in real life is now rarer than it was in favor of online meeting through Apps. * Many relationships now happen based on online dating. In a sense, a series of algorithms are already dictating human repro…

> Men approaching women in real life is now rarer than it was in favor of online meeting through Apps. Ask your female friends (if you have any) about this. You might be surprised. > Elite men can get dozens of sex partners. Why so low? I have a few friends who have had more than 100 partners. > Average or subpar men are essentially invisible in the dating market as evidenced by declining rates of sex by most people.…

https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-the-world-is-facing-a...

Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#385

Post by lazyhummingbird »

concordDance wrote: post #356
muzani wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more like some people walk in the office, comment and tag on Trello, reply emails, deal with messages on Slack, convert and forward files on Dropbox. Then it's lunch. After lunch, they reply to some more emails, take a meeting on Zoom (waiting half an hour for that one guy to fix his microphone). Then they have 1 hour of work before the evening scrum stand-up, which is done on Slack or Zoom because half…

This doesn't match any officd I've worked in, nor any office anyone I know has worked in.

Then you're an exceptional person among exceptional people. While it's a no-brainer that tech tools bring us utility, there is a nontrivial time, thought, and effort cost to engaging with nearly any tool. Sometimes that cost outweighs the advantage of the tool or feeds behaviors that are counterproductive. A great example of this. The younger half of my ad agency is on Slack. The older half tried it but it just wouldn't take. The young people are productive together, but their habitual Slacking becomes a distraction when they have teams with more seniors than juniors. The tool unintentionally created a divide. Every solution has costs and benefits like anything else. Iatrogenesis. I've definitely seen offices get so overtooled that they resemble what the above person was saying.

Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#386

Post by lazyhummingbird »

HankB99 wrote: post #87

I have a small device in my pocket that provides access to nearly the sum total of human knowledge. I use it to get into pointless arguments with people I don't know and look at pictures of cats. (I wish I could claim that as original but it is something I read on the Internet. Between cats. :-/ )

My favorite argument: the internet has far less of humanity's knowledge on it than most people believe. There are so many major gaps.

Not only does expertise and apprenticeship for many trades and crafts still exist almost exclusively offline, but also the documentation of accomplishments and the state of the art for so many fields.

Google Books, the greatest library in the history of mankind is collecting dust behind a locked door due to copyright. The failure of Google Books (an ambitious, incredible attempt) is imo one of the biggest tragedies of the information age.

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