Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?
3 times in SF this week, a Cruise AV has driven past my car and triggered my automatic windshield wipers, even though it was totally dry out. (probably the LIDAR interacting with wipers' infrared sensors).
Got me thinking about what unintended consequences can spring up because of new technologies. Anyone have other examples, current or historic?
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadhttps://api.slack.com/tutorials/tunneling-with-ngrok
The free version is easy to install, has no enterprise oversight controls and can be pretty dangerous when you are trying to secure a network.
One should primarily be concerned with laser powers that unintentionally exceed design power, or if they're ultra-fast lasers, with the peak power.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/01/man-says-ces-lidars-las...
Why would you allow anyone to do that? :O
I haven't done it yet and wouldn't be proud of myself, but it would feel good.
https://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2018/08/barcode-donatio...
Restaurants usually have a "tip screen". But now I'm unsure where the tip goes (after the whole Doordash expose)
Life has become nothing but a series of google searches and finding the best tech for the job, while finding the most efficient way to pay bills.
Meanwhile, we are centralizing these institutions and therefore power brokers are being more disparate from the powerless, using the technologies that were supposed to give voices to the masses. Now the masses can enforce you to only speak in lock step with them.
That effect has broadened to new areas and increased in degree, with the rise of ubiquitous mobile Internet.
Product placement goes back to the 19th century. Remember the candy brand in E.T.? It was chosen because the company paid $1M to get them eaten by the short green man. Then there was payola, wherein the music you heard was actually a commercial paid by the record company.
I think that kind of loss of meaningful interaction is a pretty small thing, but it can add up over time and have a greater impact with high usage of services like Google that automate things that previously generally involved more human interaction. And sure, no one's forcing anyone to use Google or Amazon instead of talking to people, but it's a fairly subtle opportunity cost that comes with using those services. And those kinds of services are convenient and useful enough that it's quite easy to make a habit of using them, and habits aren't easy to change.
I think many easily turned to the web for recommendations because as wholesome these kind & knowledgeable book and movie human recommenders are, they simply weren't available to a lot of us.
Amazon book recommendations and keyword search are garbage. Sometimes even a direct search for title and author name will put the result halfway down the list. The two good things Amazon has going for it are the huge catalog (great for finding the right ISBN), and reviews dating back to the 1990s. Makes it easier to decide whether or not to purchase the book from a more ethical retailer.
Out of all the online bookstores, Thriftbooks has the best recommendations in my experience.
The best ways to find good books are still bibliographies and large public and university libraries - browse the shelves, ask the librarians. Online library catalogues usually beat online retailer catalogs for keyword searches.
Examples:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/wiki/booklist
... uh, what was I doing again?
Being miserable because "there's no point in doing anything" is definitely a sign of depression if it's persistent and starts interfering with your life.
Not saying technology does or doesn't factor in here.
"America's Founders understood clearly that private property is the foundation not only of prosperity but of freedom itself. Thus, through the common law, state law, and the Constitution, they protected property rights"
https://www.cato.org/cato-handbook-policymakers/cato-handboo...
2. Whenever somebody starts telling me what the Founding Fathers thought I expect some BS which is only there to support their opinion and is so lopsided that it might as well be called a lie.
Folks who say this assume they have a right to someone else's labor aka slavery
Completely nonsense in a modern society.
If you read the article I posted, you'd see that your cursory objection is thoroughly false:
> Proudhon was clear that his opposition to property did not extend to exclusive possession of labor-made wealth.
Of course, as large absentee owners themselves, the Founders were only too happy to let that consequence of Lockean theory slide, just as they were able to write "all men are created equal" while keeping men in slavery. But that merely shows that Upton Sinclair's quote, cliché as it may have become, still holds an inescapable truth.
The fact remains property is required to exercise any right. I wish the US would go back to only landowners being able to vote. Would realign society IMO
I also believe the corporations having rights of a human without the punishment is a problem on that side. If a corporation breaks the law they should put the C level and the board in jail just like they would any other person.
Things are imbalanced on both sides and the concept the US is not a Republic but is a Democracy is being sold so propaganda machines can manipulate the public.
Term limits on congress, remove the ability of congress to vote themselves raises and get bribes via lobbying. Eliminate the poor from being able to vote themselves other peoples money... things like this would set is off to a better direction.
And as bad as property is, rents—the current model—is certainly worse.
Now I'm back to a ~25K track FLAC library and a small collection of LPs for fun. It's backed up to a NAS, to a cloud storage account and to a portable drive I keep in my locker at work. Nobody gets to take the music from me.
And, after one adverse incident, I am very diligent about exercising that download option. Turns out, artists can withdraw themselves and their music from the platform at any time, which leaves customers without access... mostly. For some reason, I still have access to that music on my phone, though I haven't tested whether that's only thanks to the local cache.
There are two options for artists/labels on Bandcamp if they want to remove an album from sale, for whatever reason.
One is to deactivate the album, which removes it from public view, but keeps it in the backend, so people who bought it still have it in their collections.
The other is the "nuclear option" of completely deleting the album everywhere, which also takes it away from the people who bought it.
While I can understand why they need to have the latter option, probably for legal reasons, I do find it troubling that something I've bought can just be arbitrarily taken away from me.
It really should be impossible to completely delete content from Bandcamp, without contacting them first. It should not be an option directly in the artist/label control panel.
Then you will see why your attitude is abhorrently wrong. Or maybe not. Up to you.
I think you've shifted context from general sidewalks to red lights though. I think 99 percent of red light running cyclists would agree you have to do that carefully and assume people will step out at that point. The bad apples are the ones who aren't careful about it.
Bycicles are very light, narrow and slow so it's odd that as a society we expect them to follow rules designed for fast, heavy and wide vehicles.
Two words: Air Zound. It can get the attention of even the most oblivious jogger. ;)
I can't stand to wear headphones when walking or biking. I want to hear what's around me.
That assumes they are not playing anything though.
I recently started to notice how many people - young and old - nowadays are walking on the wrong side of the road, i.e. in the same lane with other traffic in the same direction.
As a kid I always learned you should be in the opposite lane, so you can monitor oncoming traffic coming towards you, jump out of the way if needed. A safety measure (4 watchful eyes instead of 2).
I guess more than half of people no longer do that, and I wondered if that was also an effect of our self-centered, smartphone society: 'I can't be bothered to take note of you, but I expect you to take notice of me'.
Accidents are more dangerous in frontal collisions and the reaction window is shorter.
I bike daily and I've been surprised a few times by other bikers coming against the traffic, especially in turns.
edit: I think I misread you. You're talking about pedestrians. Oops.
This has made land prices track productivity, leaving most on the breadline forever.
Today everything is written down, much if not most of the information we receive is via written documents, especially online. There is a level of bias and intentional misleading that is often hard to believe. Hearing something from a well informed friend seems far more credible than a news story now, since you can't depend on journalists to research and relate the available information without intentionally withholding, minimizing, or amplifying to create a narrative that is in line with what they want people to believe.
I'm not screaming 'fake news' here. An example would be an NPR story that claimed a certain person, previously employed in a professional field, was 'unable to find work' for 6 years. Clearly the person had struggled with substance abuse, but that was never mentioned, and the narrative was 'In This Economy' despite the fact that if you show up drunk to job interviews that is an essential fact in a human interest story about a person being unable to find work. The journalist and/or their editors wanted to write a story about how hard it is to find a job 'in this economy', so they hid facts that didn't reinforce that narrative.
Not really her fault, but I guess I would have heard a bus coming.
Does it matter what one is extreme about? Shouldn’t we be extreme on certain issues, like the difference between food and cyanide?
The other part of that "scale" is that these fringe views are presented with the same facade of authority as a more mainstream view. Generally speaking, something like Google will present the search results in a non-biased way... so googling for "flat earth" will bring up links, just as "moon landing" would. So to a naive viewer, "Google" is approving of the idea of a "flat earth", if that makes sense...
Probably accurate for some tiny portion, which is astounding no matter how small of a group that is.
Despite that all the information in the world is available to us, we only seek out what we want to see/hear/read and then get fed new information based on those queries. It doesn't lead to free exchange of ideas and values, it has created polarized societies where we are digitally segregated by our own sense of identity and community.
People talk a lot about the political side of this, the "echo chambers" online. But I think it's worse than that. We see racial segregation on Twitter, feedback loops of content on YouTube that reinforce themselves, news outlets tailoring their content for users that reach them from their own site and optimizing for usage metrics that feed usage metrics... and we all are in love with it.
It reminds me of Farenheit 451 in the sense that this almost-dystopia wasn't created by some fascist dictator or single-party state; we built it ourselves. We wanted it.
That's not to say there isn't beauty on the internet, and we live in an era where more people talk and share and love and fight more than ever with language and ideas. It's just a strange departure from where most futurists thought we were going to be.
Technology created polarized society? Before internet search, we were better educated and understood each other better?
In the Soviet Union they kept a tight control on the media, and Pravda was controlled by the ruling party to amplify it's message as a tool of propaganda. It would ignore inconvenient facts and stories based on their propaganda value, or if something inconvenient was too well known to ignore it would mention it only to discredit it.
Today many people get most of their news from sites like Breitbart or RawStory. Doing this is voluntarily signing up for Pravda like propaganda. Yes, we have a free society and you aren't restricted to a single source of news like Pravda, but if people intentionally and voluntarily limit themselves to a site that is manipulating stories in the same way as Pravda and for the same motivations, we just have two groups of oppositely propagandized people, and of course that will increase polarization. There is no expectation that these sites would uphold journalistic standards, be generally honest beyond when it is convenient, and their bias is considered a feature.
This is part of the myth making that took hold after the New Deal, when the Establishment decided how things were going to be and made it so. If you have licensing powers over broadcast media you can use this to ensure that discussion stays inside the bounds of discourse you deem acceptable. Because these local media companies often had both broadcast and publishing arms they had a strong incentive not to piss off the regulators who could take away their broadcasting licenses.
This long period of manufactured consent lasted until the people who realised it was artificial retired or died and then technology allowed more diversity of opinion. Cable and talk radio allowed many, many more voices to be heard and expanded the Overton window, bringing the US back to normal politics where people really, really hate each other unless there’s an external enemy to hate more.
In the immediate post colonial period Aaron Burr killed Hamilton in a duel. In 1856 Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner with a cane on the floor of Congress. Andrew Jackson was held in much the same esteem by large swathes of the US population as Trump is now. In the 1960s there were over 3,000 domestic bombings and riots and demonstrations aplenty.
The media being hyper partisan is not new. What’s new is how obvious it is. It took decades for Walter Duranty’s lies about the Holodmor, the Ukrainian Holocaust to be exposed, and the Pulitzer Prize Committee still hasn’t revoked it. This for a cover up of millions of deaths in the pages of the NYT.
The prestige press is no more unbiased than Mother Jones or Breitbart.
https://deadline.com/2016/11/shocked-by-trump-new-york-times...
> For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”
> It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
As a practical matter, I think the only thing a person can do is consciously seek out both sides of the story. Read a credible conservative daily (WSJ, Chicago Tribune) and a left-leaning Sunday paper (WaPo/NYT)/news magazine. Get both sides of the issue and see which you find more persuasive.
The fact that either the Washington Post or the New York Times is considered left-leaning is one of the problems in US media. They are both corporate rags pushing the neo-liberal plutocrat agenda. Try Jacobin or the London Review of Books as a somewhat left of center starters.
The above description of the NYT, however, is (a) not only a conservative's idea of what an opposing partisan newspaper would look like, it's almost a parody of such an idea (b) only sustainable through the lens of confirmation bias.
It's a huge difference. In one case you have a system meant to deliver information to inform, and which can be criticized if it fails to do so, which it often (or even mostly) failed at. Then there is these new media sources of 'information', which are not even trying, and nobody expects to try. One is a subversion of the standards which are explicitly expected, and the other is a system that has no standards whatsoever.
This is only partly true. One example that comes to mind, in the early 20th Century, Winston Churchill deliberately started a successful newspaper whose sole purpose was to disarm a general strike by workers who were underpaid. Not only did it suceed but Churchill bragged about it in Parliament to the opposition party after the strike had been defeated!
> In the Soviet Union they kept a tight control on the media, and Pravda was controlled by the ruling party to amplify it's message as a tool of propaganda. It would ignore inconvenient facts and stories based on their propaganda value, or if something inconvenient was too well known to ignore it would mention it only to discredit it.
I think it's worth mentioning here how most media companies are totally or partly controlled by the acting CEO of FOX News, Rupert Murdoch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch). In the UK he controls almost all paper-based newspapers that the public read, in addition to most non-BBC channels. As a result, the papers have a staunch xenophobic, neoliberal attitude -- to the point of openly calling leading members of the opposition party in the UK "Maoist" (One newspaper in particular published 1500 words of fan fiction about the opposition party's socialist policies, mixed in with the ordinary news) and naming and shaming members of the UK high court for ruling that does not agree with the paper's stance. The papers have been known to publish outright lies about the European Union -- to the point the EU set up a website specifically to debunk the lies published in mainly Murdoch-controlled papers: https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/
Newspapers ignored inconvenienent facts all the time, probably for all of human history. Even when they don't completely ignore some facts, they often choose to make a big deal of some facts and not of others.
Some examples of the former would be the missing reporting on the US atrocities in South America, except maybe the Contra deal. The 100 catholic priests murdered in SA by US or US-supported troops were never mentioned, but the Soviet murder of 1 priest was an international scandal (as well it should be, but the others should have been an even bigger scandal).
A very good example of the latter should be the COINTELPRO[1] revelation of the FBI actively seeking to blackmail and even assassinate members of civil rights groups, including an attempt to convince MLK to commit suicide, threatening to reveal his extra-marital affairs otherwise. This was reported to some extent, but then Watergate happened at around the same time, and, despite being much less worrying for normal people, it became one of the largest scandals in media, and COINTELPRO was forgotten from public discourse.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
There's the matter of both motive and degree. Of course newsprint journalism always had its issues (heh). Of course there's always been various struggles to rise to journalistic standards of objective reporting. And of course there's always been people with agendas who wanted to bend reporting a certain way.
It still wasn't anywhere near as common for outlets to aspire to be Pravda or for individuals to aspire to read from an outlet that was.
For one, few in the Soviet Union trusted Pravda, whileoat people in the US trust the picture of the world that the newspapers present. So, while the US newspapers were overall far more correct than Pravda, they were nevertheless much more effective propaganda tools, when they did choose, intentionally or through deep-seated biases, to 'massage' the truth.
I'm not entirely convinced this is accurate. It definitely is in part, but not in whole. We wanted these better search tools and we like recommendation systems. But I know a lot of people are frustrated with algorithms like YouTube's recommendation system trapping them. (e.g. watch one Joe Rogan video and you get firehosed with more JRE videos). The thing is we also don't notice that this reinforcement also pushes us away from one another. But the solution sounds very similar to the solution to the complaint. People are complaining about being walled in by the algorithm (I for one am one of those people). People are asking for new suggestions. As in new topics, not just other youtubers doing the same thing. I think the difference is that it has become so obvious now that we're noticing and saying "wait, that'd too far."
That's a very different situation though.
This is as if you went to the library and the librarian only showed you other books by that author and the books that might be (poorly) related to the one you just read.
Like books with similar words in the title or books that people grabbed after that one.
YouTube is pure trash for discovery 90% of the time because the algorithm is tuned for addiction : you are fed content that is designed to keep you hooked and it will always, always bias towards that because that's the business decision.
I'd love to see a recommendation engine that intentionally surfaced "similar but different in key ways"
I think it works because I don't see those topics in my feeds.
What we’re seeing today in online spaces is the possibility of people connecting online, forming their own bubbles of people with their own spirals – it has become much easier to sidestep the “general” spiral of silence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence
[0]Tmur Kuran https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580
Auditory: I can't tell you how accustomed to hearing stuff constantly everyone is. Cars (even just the tires on a busy street), Air Handling, Refrigerators, Beeping timers (ovens/microwaves/calendar reminders).
Visual: Web notifications, web advertisements, billboards, "news," spam phone calls/texts.
Social: Many people have an expectation that sending a message entitles them to an immediate response. In the age of quick answers from Google, people often forget about slowing down for the speed of thought.
Mental: We (humans) can only make so many decisions in a day yet we are overwhelmed with false dichotomies constantly in order to choose one or the other of basically the same thing.
Or just the light pollution. I definitely think this has an affect on people. I used to live in AZ for awhile and the nights were so beautiful. I'd spend hours looking at the night sky. Now I'm in the PNW and almost never look up (something I've done pretty much my whole life). I'd think light pollution has similar effects as cloudy skies. I used to do some of my most creative thinking late at night staring at the stars. But maybe that's just a change in me. Maybe both.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_scarer#Ultrasonic_scare...
This one honestly bothers me the most. “But I sent you a message! You didn’t respond, you could have been dead in a ditch!”.
Or, you know, I didn’t look at my messages for a few days. If you were worried you could have called any time.
That sounds circumstantial at best and in no way definitive proof.
> Dating Apps are part of the reason that birth rates are generally dropping in first world countries
That definitely requires some study before being considered true.
> Women while away their younger years in careers and chasing after unrealistic men before settling at an older age and maybe having 1 kid.
I'm not sure how career factors into all of this; I don't want to strawman you, but your phrasing implies that you dissaprove of the trend. Then, is the implication of what you say that women should focus less on career and dating when they're young and instead focus on getting married early and having multiple children?
Separately, how is only having one child necessarily a bad thing?
> Approach patterns have changed. Men approaching women in real life is now rarer than it was in favor of online meeting through Apps.
Absolutely, because often women don't like being approached in person and find it creepy. Bars and clubs still absolutely have dating approaches. Also, we've gotten past the point that men are expected to make the first move in heterosexual encounters, and that's only going to become more true.
> Many relationships now happen based on online dating. In a sense, a series of algorithms are already dictating human reproduction.
Sure, but there's also a ton of people that you interact with on these apps to even express interest. I don't think the apps are actually having that much of an effect on who people pick, they are just making finding people you're interested easier.
> Before Apps, people mainly shacked up with equivalent looking people at a fairly young age, but today women have access to the best men in town they’d otherwise never have a chance to meet.
Why is that not a good thing? It also goes the other ways, I'm not sure why you're focusing on women looking for men
> The dating marketplace is pretty skewed with roughly 80% of women chasing after 20% of men.
I think the real issue is the statistical quality of the genders. We have a 50/50 balance, so there's no reason it should be skewed one directionally like this naturally. I think that a lot of shitty behavior masculinity has historically been is getting called out now, and toxic masculinity is only just getting called out. The answer to being in that 20% (and expanding it as a result) is not something outside of people's control, it's just hard. Toxic masculinity negatively affects all genders.
> Elite men can get dozens of sex partners. Women can usually get sex, but not commitment from lots of men they like.
This just feels like stereotyping without reason.
> Average or subpar men are essentially invisible in the dating market as evidenced by declining rates of sex by most people. This causes a lot of problems in society as many men drop out and exist as gamers in a dull existence or turn to drugs due to lack of ability to find a connection.
This feels far more related to ethical/political/societal beliefs than apps. The only thing apps are doing is making the process more efficient. Looks are not everything, personality and interests have not gone away from dating because of apps. While everyone loves to talk about Tinder, there are far more than aren't hookup focused than are.
> Alpha males are enjoying life shacking up with the women all chasing after them. Women while away their younger years in careers and chasing after unrealistic men before settling at an older age and maybe having 1 kid.
People have been having children later and less long before apps, I again don't see how this follows. Ironically this is caused by a cultural shift and being reflected in technology, not the other way around.
> As far as cultural impacts go, can’t go bigger than the consequences to reproduction changing.
The only thing that happened was that finding a more ideal mate become more efficient, ever so slightly, and you have a larger natural pool. Everything else is cultural here.
* I think whatever brand of red-pilled you want to call me is the polar opposite of what an “incel” would be defined as. Most “incels”, as far as I can tell, take bad relationship advice about being yourself to heart and don’t seek out successful men who give good advice on lifting and other positive life improvements to really succeed. They fail to get success and feel bitter precisely because they don’t have good male role models who are willing to talk in an unfiltered way to them. To me, the lack of male role models is key.
* Despite not being an “incel” and disagreeing with them on many topics, I feel an immense amount of sympathy for people with this label. Isn’t it sad that there are a lot of men out there, many of whom are smart and productive members of society, who cannot find a happy and fulfilling relationship? We see mainstream society basically wanting to completely shun the unloved. Instead of joining the 2 minutes of hate, why not offer a path to success for them, or at least some sympathy to the unloved? If you’re an “incel”, how do you think you feel when you see stuff like this? https://twitter.com/ekp/status/991817194987114496?lang=en
I had a roommate who confessed to me he had never been in a relationship. He was 30, average looking or around that and it turned out he was rejecting any average looking girls while constantly being rejected by very good looking girls, way out of his league. He had no experience, seemed desperate etc but would not lower the bar at all.. I was getting the feeling that he was self sabotaging somehow. Not sure how it eventually turned out, we lost touch a while ago, but I surely hope he stoped obsessing over looks and just got into some relationship and took it from there.
Personality is underrated these days. I found myself attracted quite often to people’s personalities such that I am totally blinded to what they looke like. And personality can be worked on throughout ones lifetime, looks are pretty much genetics. And working out has at some point of diminishing returns. I’ve seen guys who try to better looks by building some muscle but often don’t know when to stop.
I've fallen for women who haven't fallen for me and vice versa . I don't feel like I'm looking for too attractive. In fact too attractive, as in model looking, is generally a turn off as I'm prejudice to believe they'll be high maintenance.
Rather I keep looking for a "soul mate" type and as an atheist science oriented geek, at least in my circles, it's hard to find my female counterpart. It's a selfish reason I wish there were more women in tech. Every job I've had has been 90-98% men. In general the women I meet are either spiritual/superstitious (believe in things I can't support as a partner) or they just have zero common interests. I'm not looking for a clone but I'd love to meet someone who can share a few passions more than just generic "travel" and "food" but they are few and far between.
I'm sure I am "self sabotaging" but "I found myself attracted quite often to people’s personalities such that I am totally blinded to what they look like" matches me to some extent. I can't say I'm totally blinded but it's definitely a huge attractive attribute, more than looks.
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.
Nothing to do with dating apps. 70% of the adult US population is obese or overweight. Those people have a very hard time finding partners, and obese men have associated coronary issues that can make even maintaining an erection difficult.
> Dating Apps are part of the reason that birth rates are generally dropping in first world countries
About time; if only the population crisis could be solved by dating apps! World population in 1969 was 3.6 billion, today it is 7.7 billion. We need any and all measures to bring down population levels.
That is a paperclip maximiser. I don't think we, collectively, have fully come to terms with how damaging it is.