Again, I deplore the colossal waste of human effort and talent that is going into building a sophisticated panopticon for the noble purpose of better targeted advertising . For fuck's sake, what a waste of the best minds of our generation.
Of course this comment was downvoted. I really want to know what's the opposing view to this statement. Who's going to step forward and say why they think this is wrong? At the very least, make an argument like "the AI needed to trick a teenager into spending half their awake time on Facebook can also be used to solve actual problems."
- free video delivery channel, that has created its own industry
- communication tool that has changed news delivery & how people organize protests
- free chat communication (with e2e encryption) for nearly everyone in the world (including some of the poorest)
- on demand data center infrastructure at ridiculously low cost
- instantly freely searchable data set of most of the worlds written information
- self driving cars
- ubiquitous hand held computers
- free easy to use video conferencing
- a social network that connects a gigantic part of the planets population (if you are into that sort of thing)
Just some of the mind boggling technology at least partially funded by internet ads in the last 15 years.
Are there issues that have arisen? Of course, what sort of funding model doesn't have downsides? Acting like working for pay from advertisers constitutes some sort of modern Gallipoli is such a vacuous argument in the face of the staggering amount of tech it has at least partly helped bring about, I'm shocked that the comment hasn't been down voted more.