The real question is whether we're worse off or better off overall than we were in Socrates' Athens.
There's a distinction to be made between "worse off " and "worse". Socrates was arguing that writing-users would be worse as people, not that they would experience lives they didn't like as much.
Agreed. And I think he was wrong. Literacy allows individual humans to be exposed to and understand far more of the world's culture and knowledge than the conveyance of knowledge through recitation of epic poems would ever have allowed.
Hell, I would never have had the pleasure of arguing with you without it! :)
The Industrial Revolution - the greatest thing ever to happen - required the British govt to deploy more troops against Luddites than they had fighting Napoleon at the same time. Damaging machinery was made a capital offense and they had dozens of executions, hundreds of deportations. At every stage, the steady progress of civilization is fragile and in danger of being suffocated. Its opponents cloak themselves in mo…
This kind of black and white moral thinking is corrosive to one's intelligence. You're allowed to talk about who benefits from massive society change and who suffers. You are allowed to talk about the ways that technology is implemented and how that leads to pros and cons. An attitude of "if we ever stop moving forward and think then the evil bad people win" is deeply anti-intellectual.
Ironically, AI facilitates self-driving cars, which promise to _reduce_ the need for private automobile ownership.
There is very little connection between ownership and who does the driving. I still want to own my own cars even if a computer does most of the driving. That way it's always available, and more importantly I can keep my own stuff in it.
And you should be able to. But people who don't want that or don't have the means to afford it can have the benefits of automobile transport without the capital expense.
Those are all enormous benefits to you and you alone. The greatest thing about cars are the things they do for you. In order for someone else to have those benefits, they also need a car. If as a society, if we could feel the same way about public transit, bike lanes, sidewalks, that you do about your own personal vehicle - we'd be better off.
Sure, on your own land, just like you can drive more-or-less whatever you want as long as you stick to your own property, today, including vehicles that aren't "street legal". On public roads? No reason we'd have to license private cars for that, at least not for just any purpose.
How about the fact that any country that tries to ban private ownership of cars would completely fall behind in all car-related technologies, infrastructure and services, which would very soon negatively affect all those commercial or logistical use cases that our civilization vitally depends on? Trying to ban all private cars while keeping our car-dependent civilization working is unrealistic, no matter how you look…
> "Other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living and society that you apparently take for granted. You can choose to ONLY look at the negative impacts, but the comment as stated is ridiculous. THIS! I am shocked that some people don't realize that modern civilization and our modern quality of life depends on cars to a huge degree, even for people don't personally drive. Such a lack of knowledg…
> THIS! I am shocked that some people don't realize that modern civilization and our modern quality of life depends on cars to a huge degree, even for people don't personally drive. Such a lack of knowledge about modern industry and logistics.. I'm more shocked that somebody thinks that modern civilization and logistics depend on personal cars. Can ypu expand on your statement that modern industry and logistic depend…
The distinction between personal and commercial cars is too small to allow effectivelly banning one while keeping the other. Any country that tries to do so will inevitably overshoot in one of the directions: either the ban will be too permitting, so people will still use personal cars, just less as today, or the ban will be too broad, which would negatively affect the commercial or logistical use cases and the economy will suffer.
This is a must-read series of articles, and I think Kyle is very much correct. The comparison to the adoption of automobiles is apt, and something I've thought about before as well. Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. That said, I'm more open to using LLMs in constrained scenarios, in cases where they're an appropriate tool for the job and the downsides can b…
All blocked in the UK, sadly.
He's gay, and being gay online contravenes the UK Online Safety Act. Complain to your legislators.