201–210 of 251 posts
The window to fix this is closing.
I don't know what the future holds, but owning a few acres in rural nowhere and knowing how to build stuff gives me a sense of security.
Someone needs to find a way to turn dirt into a 3d printing material.
This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable. And by working for them, you are enabling this. It offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email. It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
I lived the original post and left working in tech a years ago for essentially the reasons in the post. I agree the article stops short of offering solutions, but you also acknowledge there's a legitimate problem but then don't engage or offer alternatives. From my experience, the problem I saw, and why I really respect OPs post, is that many good and smart people were lying to themselves in those environments. They'…
Working to make your home more efficient is not going to suddenly make anyone retire early. That’s the stupidest take I have heard. If you have some cool idea which makes home energy usage lower like a revolutionary heat pump, you should build your own company and sell that to everyone and scale up. You sound like a FatFIRE person that has quit professional life and is now trying to justify why sitting at home and helping your family members is a virtuous thing to do as opposed to working for some BigTech.
A lot of the danger with BigTech is just the fact they are very big and so have accrued a lot of power. A simple solution is to use the anti-trust laws to break them up into smaller entities. I don’t think the problem is the products/services they build.
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> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided. I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily wo…
> None of the above was possible just 20 years ago. Most of those things were actually possible. In many cases they weren’t as convenient, but as a child of the 80s I can tell you that life wasn’t like the dark ages before we all got smart phones. In any case, I don’t think anyone here is arguing against technological progress. What we’re saying is that big tech has been too powerful, and too unregulated, for far too…
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> None of the above was possible just 20 years ago. Most of those things were actually possible. In many cases they weren’t as convenient, but as a child of the 80s I can tell you that life wasn’t like the dark ages before we all got smart phones. In any case, I don’t think anyone here is arguing against technological progress. What we’re saying is that big tech has been too powerful, and too unregulated, for far too…
As a child of the 80s, who lived 20 miles away from a city, I can tell you that my life was pretty much dark ages before I understood that driving was not just something parents did; I could also do that. And that there were people with similar interests as me at the end of that drive! Took 18 years.
You lived closer to a city than I did but the UK doesn’t have insane zoning laws like the US so there was still plenty to do even in my small town.
The premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or…
> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. We’re nowhere near it, but there is a point at which the marginal utility of laborers is worth less than the security risk the laborers represent by continuing to exist. This is already happening with a lot of manufacturing and resource extraction. > This is the lump of labor…
Let's say that somehow we end up in a world where capital is the only thing separating one set of humans from the other, and that separation is large, and the overwhelming majority of humans are in the underclass. Such situations usually correct themselves violently.
> Such situations usually correct themselves violently. Historically, they did because everyone's capacity for violence was equal. What about now that the best the average person can do is a firearm against coordinated, organized military with armoured vehicles, advanced weaponry, drones, and sooner than later, full access to mass surveillance? Also, how will a revolution happen once somebody trains a ML model end-to…
This is so wildly ahistorical I'm immediately suspicious of your intentions.
The US alone offers plenty of counterexamples from the last ~50 years.
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Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance. By working for them you are enabling this.
> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided. I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily wo…
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They're not making my life miserable. I definitely wouldn't want to go back to the tech we had in the 90s. You don't have to use social media. Advertising is annoying but it's not really any worse than TV ads back in the day.
You don't think the political situation is a teensy bit worse now?
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Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance. By working for them you are enabling this.
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