Ask HN: Are we building a tech dystopia?
Is it just me or are we heading into a future we don't want? I find it weird as a software engineer but sometimes I feel like we're building a tyrannical system of control. An all-encompassing tech monster where we'll be plugged into the matrix by implants, a VR metaverse dominated by super sophisticated ad tech, all controlled by super intelligent AGI that will be owned by an ever richer and smaller tech elite, consuming culture that's increasingly produced by AI (think DALL E and where that's headed...). It sounds like hell on earth to me if I'm honest.
Sorry to be such a doomer, and maybe I'm getting old, but so much of where we heading these days fills me with quiet dread.
Before someone posts it, I'm well-aware of the Douglas Adam quote...
"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
Maybe this is me (I'm 40 something), but maybe, just maybe, I have a point? Talk me out of my despair Hacker News!
154 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadThere's this type of bias (I forget the name, I think it's availability heuristic?) where you overthink things to a point that it becomes the central point of your thought and think that everything is going downhill.
That's not at all a solution to any sort of systemic issue.
Whenever people choose/buy a hardware device or the software they use, they collectively shape the landscape of products.
The people who want less locked digital life might choose GNU/Linux as operating system or MNT Reform as hardware device as an example. As social network they might choose Mastodon over twitter/fb/insta.
That's just obsession.
There's also Negativity Bias, but that's not a process, just a particular reason for believing one particular thing (as are all biases). That said Negativity Bias, IMHO is built into human cognition. Loss Aversion is one type.
I'm not quite 40 yet, but close.
I remember the wonder and amazement and boundless optimism from the early days of home-computers and early Internet.. We didn't deserve such an amazing future anyway.
I see it as a trend that will go away. And the old things will survive.
There's truth to this quote, but a lot missing. It sort of implies a world view where new technologies, like fashions, continuously spring up at a somewhat regular pace, so that each generation has its own technological reference point distinct from their children or parents. Think about it, that's probably approximately how you view the world, don't you? It's how it's been for generations.
But actually, it's only been that way for a handful of generations. For about 300 years or so. Prior to the industrial revolution, the pace of technological innovation was so slow most people would not notice it within their lifetime.
They could safely accept their parents advice on how to navigate the world, confident it would still apply in their time as it had in theirs. They could safely pass their own wisdom on to their children, secure in the same certainty. Probably people saw time as more cyclical, thinking of how winter leads to summer and back to winter, and how the parent begets the child who then themselves becomes a parent.
All that has been changed completely, utterly, and dramatically. We are now cut off from our prior generations because we have to recreate, in each generation, from scratch, the knowhow on how to cope with the environment we are born in.
Many technological innovations have been very beneficial for many, but there is a cost to a fast pace of change.
It looks that way to us, but that is merely because we are too removed from that world to fully recognize how much things changed. As someone with no personal experience farming, the switch from say ox drawn to horse drawn plows, or from two field to three field systems might seem to be no big deal, but for an agricultural society they were very much revolutions. The printing press with movable type would utterly upend european society in the early modern period. But these are just the big events comparable to say the invention of the solid state transistor - lost to time were all the much more mundane tweaks to technologies that nevertheless would have had great effect on peoples day to day lives. Of course innovations did not spread as quickly due to slower means of communication and the lack of mass production meant it took some time for new items to replace old ones, and a generally lower standard of living made life simpler overall, but accounts from the past clearly show that people of the time still viewed the change as significant and there was substantial intergenerational angst.
The people who lived through it later recounted that the arrival of railroads (1830-1850) brought the strongest and fastest changes in lifestyle and culture. The telegraph came along about the same time, so maybe that was just the shock wave of the tech onslaught. The ultimate dominance of tech should have been obvious when Abraham Lincoln started spending lots of time at the telegraph office to manage the war. But it has taken a long time to rout the resistance -- although I am now a dinosaur for not carrying a phone, in 1940, the top officers of the French military did not have phones on their desks. Nowadays, being within sight of one's phone produces enough distraction to amount to a small cognitive impairment. Nonetheless, the machines will win. Read Vonnegut's _Player_Piano_.
I am not saying huge changes did not happen occasionally. Just that they happened less frequently, and when they did happen, often happened at a slower pace. Not sure what I can say to make myself clearer.
The main problem is not the technological advancement per se(there is still time before the tech is good enough and, hopefully, competing countries will be able to get there roughly at the same time - so that China won't enslave us all in the name of "democracy" and socialism) The problem is the political decrease in freedom we've been experiencing for the last 200 years in the name of safety, terrorism, health or whatever the excuse of the day is.
This is a worrying trend and it seems like the entire world is progressively getting less and less free.
This coupled with the increasingly sophisticated technology is a recipe for disaster.
Again, the solution can be to run away. "Progress" can't reach everywhere at the same time.
I've already ruled out living in the USA or the rich part of Europe and I fear the tiny country I'm in will become as bad as the rest within 20 years.
My plan by then is to move to South America or maybe some Caribbean island.
Time to do better.
The original purpose and true benefit of computing is in math (e.g. accounting), simplifying logistics, and enabling communication at a longer distance. Anything else is dystopian, socially-destructive garbage that I won't touch for the sake of my own well-being, which is why I'm not on any social media (except highly selective communities like HN or strictly for work purposes) and I strictly limit entertainment that arrives through a screen.
My yardstick for determining whether a particular pattern of use of technology is "good" or "bad" is by considering its effects on my base human faculties (eyesight, hearing, memory, physical strength and wisdom), and its effect on my relationships with others. Any pattern of use that improves my bodily faculties or my real-life relationships is good, otherwise I shun it.
What sort of product are you working on, or would you work in future, if you don't mind me asking?
I used to live in the countryside in rural England, then London & Oxford, now Palo Alto, and that small village was still my favorite place so far. If I’m in tech all day I need that balance of nature outside of it.
> will never work for a FANG (except Apple, because its hardware is mostly neutral),
that's very surprising to me because I see it so much differently. Apple may be a "hardware" company in spirit but it's very much a software company these days too, and increasingly push into software domains.
Missteps like on-device scanning notwithstanding, I feel like I have the most choice in how my Apple stuff behaves if compared to the other members of FAANG.
Time will tell if this remains true.
Limiting to FAANG, I think you're probably right, although I've been really impressed with the openness and flexibility of much of Google hardware (chromebooks, mobile devices, etc. Not chromecasts, Nest devices, etc).
We don't really need a lot of relationships otherwise, and if we had free time because of other tech, we could spend more time with people or even invest in career. Tho one could argue, the careers have increasingly been about building said dystopian tech.
tell that to the uighur factory workers.
But trying to not impose moral judgement, I think it is true that we have integrated technology into our lives more than ever. It is also true that we rely on technology (more than ever) on how to live (food, exercise, entertainment, emotions). It's kinda weird that you wouldn't just listen to your body.
The scary part is that all this technology that is integrated kinda just promotes more consumerism. Advertising and marketing are a huge point to this technology. It's scary to think that we just give children ( not just teenagers) access to the internet.
The part you don't realize is that we are in a dystopia. You are optimistic thinking that we are "building it". It will exist somewhere down the line, but it's not yet present.
Maybe there is some good from this. I mean there is, think of all the ailments that are manageable and people can live with infinitely better quality of life. Imagine someone bed-ridden. 20 years ago they NEEDED a full time caregiver. Today, they can SHOP (something they probably didn't do) for themselves. Chose what they want to eat, etc. There is some good that comes from this tech. But it's mostly consumerist garbage.
Ask yourself, "do I NEED this comfort?". If the answer is no don't use that thing. Do I NEED Alexa to turn on the light? I can walk, I can do it myself. Do I need to ask Siri to tell me the time? No, get a clock. That doesn't need the internet. Stop coddling yourself with comfort. It will make you not depressed with your life.
EDIT: I forgot to talk you out of despair. Look, you've been thinking too much. Sometimes you just need to be. Get yourself some water and a piece of fruit and go find a park. Just sit there, no phone, no nothing. Stare at the trees. Look at them. Breathe in the air. Feels where you are and try to feel the love in nature. But, exercise and eating better help too.
"The part you don't realize is that we are in a dystopia. You are optimistic thinking that we are "building it". It will exist somewhere down the line, but it's not yet present."
Big yes to both of these. I've come to the conclusion that within the current economic and political paradigm, namely capitalism in its current form at least, this exponential tech explosion can only lead to more consumerism, more control and manipulation.
My conclusion is that if we want this level of technology we need radically more democracy and a more egalitarian economic system with far far less inequality. Embedded in our current system, I see only a dystopia arising (or continuing to evolve).
You can live in, say, in a socialist or fascist society, and you would still be subjected to modernism. It permeates everything.
e.g.
> It's kinda weird that you wouldn't just listen to your body.
That's precisely the modernist sickness of the mind. The idea that we need technological mediation for cooking, eating, exercise,... and that because these activities are mediated by technology (ideally speaking, the high technology of that time), it is inherently better.
The amish were famously the first to reject modernism, and they did so in quite an extreme fashion. They don't reject technology, but they reject the idea that technology is an inherent value.
When we feel a general malaise, it is because we intuitively feel we are submitting to the machine, rather than having the machine submit to us.
The suffering is real, and people have been describing it for a long long time. The problem is, we can't seem to shake it. There was already great clarity on these topics in the 70s. Yet, we keep doubling down.
Technology needs to become a tool again, not an end of itself. Only then, when we've rejected modernism, we'll be able to imagine new futures.
Do I NEED NETFLIX to watch TV ? I can watch other channels.
Do I NEED a TV for entertainment ? I can enjoy nature walks.
Do I NEED nature walks to be happy ? I can meditate in peace like a monk.
The words WANT and NEED are arbitrary, subjective and interchange-able.
BTW, 70-something.
In the 2000s decade, my main thought was that if we looked at science & technology, our future was insanely bright, and if we looked at governance & politics, we're badly forked.
Now, while the politics has become insanely worse, and tech has continued, those are trends may be reversing.
In politics, the good thing I see is that the onrush of autocrats, asshats & abusers is becoming blatantly obvious. Ordinarily smug people are starting to realize that democracy must be continuously maintained, at every level. If you want to determine your life, your work, and your city/state/country, you must get involved. If not, some abuser, asshat, or autocrat will take over. Naive pacifism is (may be) being replaced by the realization that those who want to determine their own course must always be better armed & prepared than those Abusers. Asshats. or Aautocrats, who would take control of their lives, work or governments. People are finding again the course of shunning people, work, & govts that want to abuse them. The US and EU are finally realizing that outsourcing their entire manufacturing & tech sector to autocrats in China just might have been a stupid idea; not sure they realize quite what a historical-scale blunder it was, but it's still progress.
Now, can they win, in time?
Technology is also advancing. In some ways it continues to be fantastic. The first small nuclear plant has been approved in the US. Sustainable energies are seeing the results of massive investment.
Yet other parts of the tech world are devolving rapidly. Just looking for a home device that doesn't require cloud data extraction, whether it is a doorbell, thermostat, vacuum cleaner, whatever - is almost impossible to find. It seems like no investor will fund anything if it can't extract data from it's victims, err, users. Every bit of tech is trying to turn into a subscription, or companies like FB and Google are ramping up their surveillance capitalism.
This is actually the previous phenomenon, where abusers & asshats are co-opting the flow of funds in the tech sector to pervert it to a dystopia where they rent everything useful to the plebes.
So, don't help them do that.
Ask if anyone is building something new and of value that people can willfully choose or not, or if it is creating a dependency or forced, extractive, or exploitative relationship with the product/service. IF it is helping people avoid or fight abusers, asshats, or autocrats, do it. If not, choose something else.
That being said, it seems many people are upset because the benefits are now evenly spread. That seems to me to be a very philosophical topic. There are many articles about income inequality, wealth inequality, etc. They do not seem to acknowledge that being able to watch tv, fly in an airplane, have air conditioning are things kings and queens did not have 100 years ago.
How about picking some objective metrics that you care about and see how they are trending? It will give you a more objective starting point to ask the question of whether things are getting better or worse.
Even the process of labeling some things as objective and others as subjective is up for debate. Everyone wants to claim their metrics are objective while everyone else's are subjective. I know you're hinting at "scientific" or "technocratic" approaches, but it's important to also understand how even the process of selecting objective measures can be polluted with subjectivity. I almost want to claim there's no escaping the subjectivity trap, but maybe I'm being too pessimistic.
How we measure inflation is a great example of this, we choose to include some things, but exclude others because if we had a true measure of inflation, the government would have to pay out more for social security payments (see Boskin commission - https://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/boskinrpt.html)
My point in suggesting metrics is they force you to think about what is important and to look for data to measure it. This helps to mitigate the "I feel bad..." scenario that could simply the be the result of negative press cycles.
For clarity, I agree with you that there is no escape from the subjectivity trap as only you can declare what is important to you and your view how society/the world should work.
Agreed. But, I'm not even sure the "I feel bad" part is outside the realm of examination.
I'll make a point (poorly) that there is some innate "fairness" heuristic that we share with our close relatives[1], especially those that are highly social. Even if we're, on paper, "objectively" better off, if that "fairness" heuristic doesn't agree with reality then we risk social instability - that the heuristic if left unchecks results in unrest, violence, and revolt.
Do we have an responsibility to oblige these instincts even if they are irrational? What if not doing so results in real negative consequences?
1. The video where one monkey gets cucumber and the other grapes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_9RjDqJ7Zs
Don't let someone's algorithm decide what you read or watch. Keep that control close at hand, and you'll make locally optimum decisions, instead of giving away all of your authority to the AI employed by the wealthy.
"Information is like a bank. Some of us are rich. Some of us are poor with information. All of us can be rich. Our job, your job, is to rob the bank. To kill the guard."
The average person doesn't care about "privacy issues" as presented by elite media. They generally just feel that ads are an annoying but reasonable tradeoff to get access to various online services for cheap and do their best to ignore them.
The metaverse doesn't really exist, and neither does AGI. These impact no one except for smart people overthinking things. To the extent that AI effects anyone it's pretty much nothing in comparison to literally anything else in their life, e.g. their neighbors dog being mistreated and yowling at all hours of the day, how their kid is doing in school, literally anything else except for what you are talking about in your post.
Same goes for a whole laundry list of things HN loves to talk about forever and always: the market caps of various companies and net worths of certain individuals, etc.
Getting in touch with normal people and their concerns is absolutely key to staying sane when you make your living in an industry full of people overthinking things constantly. A cheeky way to put this is "go touch grass".
This has been the case for a very, very, very long time. You're old enough now to see it for what it is. There are things around the owners that you are not allowed to say, perpetuated by culture and society writ large. The only two kinds of people unwilling to admit to this are either paid shills, or useful idiots. Everyone else is mum on the subject but they can see the world is orchestrated by powerful individuals who are in lockstep. They know they own things, and they are all chummy about it. The pie is divided among them.
You can file anyone who says "You're just old" under the "useful idiot" category. Anyone who believes they are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire is equally useful.
For everyone else:
Stop:
1) Reading news. 2) Watching streaming services. 3) Watching porn.
All three are owned by the same group of people and are designed to control what you see and what you think.
Instead:
1) Read books. 2) Socialize with like-minded people. 3) Lift heavy weights. 4) Help others and being kind. 5) Seek out nature - swim in lakes, eat in the mountains, and learn the sounds of birds. 6) Learn useful knots.
Lastly:
7) Escape clown world.
The reality is that we live in an ever more complex technological environment and the true failure is that we have resisted evolving our laws and moral structures to match. Privacy laws should have been implemented more than a decade ago in the US, and likely will not be for another decade. We've allowed tech organizations to create entirely new economies, fundamentally disrupt existing ones and twist the idea of the web being a series of connected nodes to a structural trap for our minds and the minds of our children.
Disconnecting fully and abandoning the systems we helped build will allow them to slide deeper and faster into the dystopia that many of us feel is already here. If we do not find a way alter the direction of this, no one will.
It's always been interesting to me that in most science fiction that I'd classify as anti-dystopian, the reasons societies become that way is not because of technology solely, but because those societies gradually (or suddenly) changed their fundamental outlook and perspective to be communal and inclusive instead of individualistic and exclusive. Star Trek is probably the standard bearer for this idea, but I think it's worth analyzing, because there's an argument that we'll collectively face the same challenge and it's not hard to imagine that we're staring at it now.
If anything, it would be the opposite as suggested by Huxley.
It's not "technology bad." It's "Does this technology actually serve a purpose or a goal of my life?" I think we would all benefit by examining new technology in this light before letting it into our lives. There's no harm in opting out, and adoption of any technology is each person's individual choice. You can exist anywhere you want along the technology spectrum between "log cabin, totally off-grid, no connectivity" to "24/7 network connected VR pod, body is only there to keep the brain alive".
I work in technology, but I consciously try to make deliberate, thoughtful choices around what to adopt as a user and what to contribute towards building. I think too many users embrace new technologies for bad reasons (new=good, everyone else is using it, FOMO, and so on). Also, too many developers fail to take an ethical stand by refusing to build bad technology (just a paycheck, boss told me to do it, if I don't do it someone else will, and so on). We have lots of choices and agency over what we participate in.
1: https://www.discoverlancaster.com/amish/technology/
Well to be fair the idea that an actual super intelligence will allow itself to be owned is farcical. So it will be a dystopia but one significantly different than you are imagining.
I think we are making it worse but I'd say we are already in a tech dystopia in many ways. Which is not to say all tech is bad, lots improves lives in material ways. But lots also makes things worse in material ways.
There certainly are highly paid, prestigious jobs in our industry where you do work in spaces that align with what you're worried about.
My advice is vote with your feet. Nobody is being forced to work for bad companies making harmful products.
But that doesn't mean the totalitarian regime won't be 10 times as likely to jump on that technology than the airports, that the company is blissfully unaware of this fact, and that money won't talk in the end.
But it also doesn't mean you shouldn't work on anything because everything can be used for bad as well as good. Otherwise nobody would do anything.