I think a better comparison would be to big oil, steel and manufacturing in the early 1900s. Big tech has its problems but provides significant tangible benefits to people and the world. Tobacco is purely a negative, not innovative, and relies on the chemical addictive properties of a plant to offer a needless service.
Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
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Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#42We can draw parallels, but you've never developed lung cancer doom scrolling twitter.
Sharply increasing suicide rates among teens due to social media isn't something to just shrug off, either.
Do you know what had the largest impact on suicide rates of teens in recent years? Them returning to schools after covid. Could it be that things can, at the same time, have both positive and negative effects on people?
Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#43There are similarities, just exchange lung cancer with suicides among teens. Big Tech must take its responsibility more seriously and not pretend it's not their fault.
You and the author are both lumping all of Big Tech in together with Big Attention-Exploitation.
The latter is the subset to which people’s ire should be directed.
Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#44Gonna risk the downvotes and qualify that I am a parent who keeps social media away from my kids: what big tech is peddling is IMHO not on the level of addiction, carcinogenicity and all cause mortality as smoking. It's up to me to raise a mentally resilient kid, part of which is limiting their screen time, but it is not something I cut out altogether. It's not like I have some special parenting power to protect their lung epithelia.
Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are poor people in villages around the world that now have access to information they never would have been able to get had it not been for the development of smartphones, web browsers, the internet, and mobile networking technology. That is prosperity. It might not be perfect, yet, but it is in the right direction.
Yes, I’m sure the poor people in villages watching the world becoming ever more desperate, unequal, and fundamentally unstable on their smartphones share in your notion of prosperity. That’s why they’re drowning en masse in the Mediterranean, dying of exposure on the US border, or being imprisoned and tortured in any number of migrant detention facilities around the world. Because they’re so “prosperous” now.
You can also refer to “they” as the ones who now have access to more accurate information about their health, or weather, sex education, math, science, etc. There are 8 billion people in this world, surely there are a wide spectrum of experiences being lived.
Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#46can we not conflate facebook.com and twitter with big tech? big tech is driving many of the technological advancements that have brought a new era of economic prosperity and growth to the world. hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs, tools for small businesses, a wealth of high quality information at our fingertips, the likes of which was one generation ago unimaginable. tech is like humanity's one hope.
> big tech is driving many of the technological advancements that have brought a new era of economic prosperity and growth to the world. Companies that actually do that are rarely big tech. And Big Tech as term colloquially refers to Facebook, Google etc.
There are tons of educational videos on YouTube. And maybe Facebook too, or connections being made there, I don’t use it though.
Either way, I have learned how to do many things from watching instructional YouTube videos, and it does not seem anyone else has been able to make the economics work like Google has.
Sure, there’s bad too along with the good, and maybe the bad outweighs the good, although I would need convincing that is true.
Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are poor people in villages around the world that now have access to information they never would have been able to get had it not been for the development of smartphones, web browsers, the internet, and mobile networking technology. That is prosperity. It might not be perfect, yet, but it is in the right direction.
Yes, I’m sure the poor people in villages watching the world becoming ever more desperate, unequal, and fundamentally unstable on their smartphones share in your notion of prosperity. That’s why they’re drowning en masse in the Mediterranean, dying of exposure on the US border, or being imprisoned and tortured in any number of migrant detention facilities around the world. Because they’re so “prosperous” now.
Poverty rates worldwide have been going downward at a decent pace since the late 1800s, and really started plummeting faster between the mid-1990s and today. Here are some cheery graphs:
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
That doesn't mean that everyone is rich, but it is actually a really big deal. Next time you're tempted to write a phrase like "watching the world becoming ever more desperate" when talking about poverty, please take a moment first to remember that the opposite is true.
Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#48Apple sells devices and consumer services. Microsoft sells an OS and Office suite to businesses. Amazon is a retail marketplace and a cloud operator. Nvidia sells graphics cards. Adobe sells graphics software. Netflix makes movies and TV. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments all design chipsets. Salesforce sells CRM. Oracle, IBM, Cisco and the like all sell various business services. Go down the list of big tec…
A lot of the companies you mentioned have non trivial investments in ads. I recently was surprised to find how big of an ad business Adobe has for example. Not sure that these companies would cease to exist if it weren’t for advertising but ads do influence these companies’ products.
Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prosperity does not equate to betterment of humanity. The prosperity of concentrated to a small section of the population, at the expense of the majority. It is nowhere near the deliverer of hope you're making it out to be, it's an enabler of great negative paradigm shifts that is slowly starting to be recognised. Social media is starting to be recognised as a harm on society but slowly... It'll probably take a few d…
There are poor people in villages around the world that now have access to information they never would have been able to get had it not been for the development of smartphones, web browsers, the internet, and mobile networking technology. That is prosperity. It might not be perfect, yet, but it is in the right direction.
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Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are poor people in villages around the world that now have access to information they never would have been able to get had it not been for the development of smartphones, web browsers, the internet, and mobile networking technology. That is prosperity. It might not be perfect, yet, but it is in the right direction.
Yes, I’m sure the poor people in villages watching the world becoming ever more desperate, unequal, and fundamentally unstable on their smartphones share in your notion of prosperity. That’s why they’re drowning en masse in the Mediterranean, dying of exposure on the US border, or being imprisoned and tortured in any number of migrant detention facilities around the world. Because they’re so “prosperous” now.
I think your worldview has been poisoned too much by news and social media, which demonstrates exactly why I avoid it.