[HN Gopher] "Accelerationism" is an overdue corrective to years ...
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"Accelerationism" is an overdue corrective to years of gloom
Author : jseliger
Score : 49 points
Date : 2024-02-12 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thenewatlantis.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thenewatlantis.com)
| quantified wrote:
| The investor class makes the most money when there is a new
| growth area. Ergo, getting more of new growth areas is in their
| interest, and it makes sense to be putting new echoes into the
| chamber, maybe some will escape to the wider world. Perhaps AI
| will be as impactful as splitting the atom, who can tell.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > [...] but to widespread public concerns about the risks posed
| by the tech industry at large. Effective accelerationists worry
| that these concerns have become so entrenched that they threaten
| to extinguish the light of tech itself.
|
| Those "years of gloom" (which aren't very many years -- has
| everyone forgotten when the tech industry was widely seen in
| optimistic terms?) have been brought on by the behavior of the
| tech industry itself, in large part because of the misapplication
| of the idea "move fast and break things" (which is, unless I'm
| misunderstanding, the very essence of e/acc that this article
| discusses).
|
| Our industry has been breaking a lot of things that people don't
| want broken, then tends to shame people for being upset about
| that. The problem isn't some inherent fear of tech itself, it's a
| (supportable) fear of the tech industry and what other things it
| may damage as time goes on.
|
| If the industry wants to assuage these fears, the solution isn't
| to move _even faster_ and break _even more_ things, it 's to
| start demonstrably acting in a way that doesn't threaten people
| and the things they hold dear.
| fallingknife wrote:
| There is no possible path for advancement that doesn't threaten
| people and the things they hold dear. It never worked that way
| in the past, and it won't now.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Tech is like a fission reactor: powerful, elegant, delivering
| value through leverage, but requires strong controls and
| protections (moderators, containment) for humans so it
| doesn't ruin us all.
|
| People worry about AI paperclip maximizing, but Tech is
| already that in some ways (find or build moats, blitz
| scaling, no concerns for the harm incurred). It's just fuzzy
| cohorts of tech workers and management doing the paperclip
| maximizing, for comp and shareholder value respectively. Not
| much different than AI reward functions.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes, but there's a critical difference now. Now, the tech
| industry breaks many things at an unprecedented pace, and
| largely doesn't offer a reasonable replacement for the things
| that have been broken.
|
| People can only handle a limited amount of loss within a
| given period of time before they start pushing back hard
| against further loss and consider those causing them harm to
| be forces of evil.
|
| There's also another factor that the tech industry is largely
| blind to: tech people tend to think that "we know best" and
| that pushing our ideas on the general public against their
| will is a Good Thing. But it's not a Good Thing, it's a Bad
| Thing.
|
| Another thing we need to be doing is allying with the general
| public rather than dictating to them.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Who is pushing anything on the public? The tech industry
| wouldn't exist in the form that it does now except that it
| gives people something they want, not the other way around.
|
| Disruption from tech advancement is caused by tech changes
| displacing existing industries and it hurts the people
| currently making money from those industries. But to be
| against that disruption you would have to believe that
| those people have some sort of right to make that money and
| continue doing the things that make them those profits when
| the public wants the more efficient tech. So really it's
| the anti tech people who are pushing things on the public.
|
| E.g. people often complain about Amazon displacing small
| retailers, but really it's just that given the choice, most
| people choose Amazon.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > except that it gives people something they want, not
| the other way around.
|
| That used to be true. Now, though, a very common thing
| I've noticed with people is that they use tech not
| because they want to or because it solves a problem for
| them, but because they are disadvantaged if they don't.
|
| It's an important difference. If people willingly choose
| to use a thing, then they'll be inclined to think about
| it positively. If they use a thing because they feel they
| have no choice, then that thing is more likely to be
| viewed as adversarial, because it is.
|
| I think that's largely where the tech industry has
| arrived at. Further, the tech industry shows little to no
| empathy to those whose lives are worse because of what it
| does.
| fallingknife wrote:
| People may feel that way, and I'm sure in some cases they
| really mean it. But the reason they always give for why
| they have to use it is some form of "because every one
| else does." And it had to get to that point because
| people wanted it in the first place. Otherwise it just
| wouldn't have sold in the market when it came out.
| hooverd wrote:
| Leaded gasoline is a good example of an advancement where the
| naysayers were right.
| itishappy wrote:
| Kinda the point, no? If history shows progress is disruptive,
| then accelerationism seems likely to accelerate disruptions.
| Many people can connect these dots, and not everyone sees
| this as positive.
| jwond wrote:
| "Advancement" implies improvement. Just because things are
| changing does not mean they are improving.
| the_snooze wrote:
| Yeah, it's a misguided and naive way of thinking. Deciding
| whether a technological development is good (and for whom,
| and to what extent, and with what trade-offs, and on what
| time horizons) is a really difficult task. So some folks
| will replace it with a much easier question: "Is this new?"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I agree mostly, though I think the "break things" bit got
| twisted and misunderstood.
|
| We were supposed to break; limits, barriers, status-quos,
| ossified ideas... Instead we broke; treasured social norms,
| privacy, mutual respect and dignity. There's a difference
| between benevolent innovation and reckless iconoclasm. I think
| it started the day Peter Thiel gave money to Mark Zuckerberg.
| trgn wrote:
| I understood it much smaller fwiw. As long as you can add
| useful features really quickly, it's fine if your website
| crashes every once in a while.
| Kye wrote:
| Yep. It came from Facebook, and it was changed to favor
| stability while moving fast almost a decade ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History
|
| >> '"On May 2, 2014, Zuckerberg announced that the company
| would be changing its internal motto from "Move fast and
| break things" to "Move fast with stable
| infrastructure".[40][41] The earlier motto had been
| described as Zuckerberg's "prime directive to his
| developers and team" in a 2009 interview in Business
| Insider, in which he also said, "Unless you are breaking
| stuff, you are not moving fast enough."[42]"'
| __s wrote:
| Last night I changed some solid-js ui code to replace
| mutating game in ui state with updating ui state with
| mutated clones _(cloning is efficient & shares most data,
| optimizations made for AI efficiency long ago)_
|
| ofc, with these stale game references around, I soon got
| reports of broken things: targeting was broken, pvp was
| broken, fade out animations were broken
|
| A few hours later these issues were resolved. The players
| are used to these things happening sometimes. It's fine
| since the stakes are low. It's just a game after all. &
| being free, the active playerbase understands that they're
| QA
| chmod600 wrote:
| And, crucially, you'd generally be around to help fix the
| website.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| No? You're projecting what you want it to mean. The "break
| things" is don't be afraid to break
| functionality/features/infrastructure in the process of
| improving it (new features, new scaling improvements, etc
| etc). That's why it was renamed "Move fast with stable
| infrastructure".
|
| > The earlier motto had been described as Zuckerberg's "prime
| directive to his developers and team" in a 2009 interview in
| Business Insider, in which he also said, "Unless you are
| breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough."
|
| It's about growth at all costs and then once Facebook got big
| enough they had to balance growth against other factors (+
| the things people were doing that were causing breakages
| weren't actually helping to grow).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History
| iakov wrote:
| Mottos like that live their own life. Take google's "dont
| be evil" - people remember that, and see all the evil shit
| google does now, of course they are going to recall the
| motto and laugh at the irony. Whatever Sergey meant when he
| coined the phrase is irrelevant imo.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > You're projecting what you want it to mean
|
| Maybe true. But then if it's just about development it's a
| rather mundane old chestnut about reckless engineering
| versus good software engineering etc. Granted, that's a
| different discussion and we can see the tide turning now in
| terms of regulation and mandated software quality.
|
| Sure, the Post-Office/Fujitsu scandal, Boeing etc, show how
| bad software actually ruins lives, but for the most-part
| the externality imposed by the reckless software engineer
| is measured in "hours of minor inconvenience".
|
| That said.. I wonder if you did a ballpark calculation of
| how much harm lies behind the Google Graveyard [0], whether
| the cost of what is broken outweighs the benefits of it
| ever having been made?
|
| [0] https://killedbygoogle.com/
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Engineering was literally taught to me in a well
| respected engineering university as making an appropriate
| cost/reward trade off and being careful in taking that
| risk. But the economics of the business were important
| too as it was part of the competition of driving more
| efficiency into a system. In classical engineering, there
| can be more risk because you're dealing with people's
| lives and so you have to be more careful and add extra
| margins of error even if more expensive.
|
| One person's recklessness is another person's calculated
| risk. The consequences of FB engineering mistakes are
| minimal in both impact to customers and FB's business. As
| FB scaled, the impact to individual people is still
| largely minimal (perhaps even beneficial) but the impact
| to their own business is larger and same for their
| customers if their ads aren't getting eyeballs. So they
| shifted as big companies do. It's kind of the best case
| of thoughtful risk taking - we're rolling out a new
| system and we don't know what could go wrong at scale and
| we put in monitoring of what we think we need. If there's
| problems we'll catch it with our monitoring/alerting and
| rollback or fix. You see the outages but not 99% of
| changes that go in without anything going wrong which
| lets the business resolve issues quickly and cheaply.
|
| As for Boeing and Fujistsu, I'd say those are very
| different situations and aren't an engineering problem
| nor do they indicate a move fast and break things
| mentality. As with many things like that, the engineering
| mistakes are a small detail within the overall larger
| picture of corruption. Boeing wanted to escape being
| classified as a new aircraft and met a perfect storm of
| skimping on hardware and corrupting the FAA through
| regulatory capture. I don't fully understand Boeing's
| role with the recent failures as a subcontractor is
| involved, but my hunch is that they're nominally
| responsible for that subcontractor anyways. Same goes for
| Fujitsu - bad SW combined with an overly aggressive
| prosecution mandate and then cover ups around having made
| mistakes based on the assumption that the SW was correct
| rather than assuming new SW that hadn't run anywhere
| before may contain bugs (not really sure whether Fujitsu
| hid the bugs or if politicians did or what happened but
| certainly the Post Office officials hid the reports of
| the auditors that found bugs in the sw and continued with
| prosecutions anyway).
|
| Btw in engineering classes, all the large scale failures
| we were taught about involved some level of corruption or
| chain of mistakes. A contractor not conforming to the
| engineering specs to save on costs (valid optimization
| but should be done extra carefully), overlooking some
| kind of physical modeling that wasn't considered industry
| standard yet, kickbacks, etc.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| We probably had similar rigorous educations at that
| level. In SE we studied things like the '87 Wall St.
| crash versus Therac-25. The questions I remember were
| always around what "could or should" have been known, and
| crucially... when. Sometimes there's just no basis for
| making a "calculated risk" within a window.
|
| The difference then, morally, is whether the harms are
| sudden and catastrophic or accumulating, ongoing,
| repairable and so on. And what action is taken.
|
| There's a lot about FB you say that I cannot agree with.
| I think Zuckerberg as a person was and remains naive. To
| be fair I don't think he ever could have
| foreseen/calculated the societal impact of social media.
| But as a company I think FB understood exactly what was
| happening and had hired minds politically and
| sociologically smart enough to see the unfolding
| "catastrophe" (Roger McNamee's words) - but they chose to
| cover it up and steer the course anyway.
|
| That's the kind of recklessness I am talking about.
| That's not like Y2K or Mariner-I or any of those very
| costly outcome could have been prevented by a more
| thoughtful singular decision early in development.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I'm talking strictly about the day to day engineering of
| pushing code and accidentally breaking something which is
| what "move fast and break things" is about and how it was
| understood by engineers within Facebook.
|
| You now have raised a totally separate issue about the
| overall strategy and business development of the company
| which you'd be right about - if it were required to have
| a PE license to run an engineering company, Zuckerberg
| would have to have had his PE license revoked and any PEs
| complicit in what they did with tuning for addictiveness
| should similarly be punished. But the lack of regulation
| in any engineering projects that don't deal directly with
| human safety and how businesses are allowed to run is a
| political problem.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I see we agree, and that as far as day-to-day engineering
| goes I'd probably care very little about whether a bug in
| Facebook stopped someone seeing a friends kitten pics.
|
| But on the issue I'm really concerned about, do you think
| "tuning for addictiveness" on a scale of about 3 billion
| users goes beyond mere recklessness, and what do we do
| about this "political problem" that such enormous diffuse
| harms are somehow not considered matters of "human
| safety" in engineering circles?
|
| Is it time we formalised some broader harms?
| mquander wrote:
| Picture of two little identical castles, towns, and armies,
| caption:
|
| Their barbarous "barriers", "status quo", "ossified ideas"
|
| vs.
|
| Our blessed "privacy", "treasured social norms", "dignity"
| samatman wrote:
| The alternative to describing the meme here is to call it
| by name: a Russell conjugation.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| I always thought move fast and break things used at FB was to
| empower the ambitious, talented, fresh crop of ivy-college
| grads with confidence to move forward with poor decisions due
| to lack of experience.
| reissbaker wrote:
| IDK, I think a big part of the "years of gloom" was an official
| (but secret) NYTimes policy of only publishing negative stories
| about tech, as confirmed by Vox journalist Kelsey Piper. [1]
|
| 1: https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
| captainbland wrote:
| Ultimately it's the purse string holders who want to move fast
| and break things. Investors are the people who would rather try
| to shove ten figures into undercutting taxi markets everywhere
| to try to build a monopoly. Imagine if instead they'd put that
| into cancer treatments and diagnostics or novel forms of energy
| generation. Move fast and break things is shit compared to
| building new things at the centre of human need and at the edge
| of human understanding.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| This other thread [0] "Easy to criticise, hard to create" and my
| remark here [1] about the demise of market research have
| something in common with this topic.
|
| It's about the gravity of the mob. Risk taking in business (which
| is now being called "acceleration" AFAICS) is about the courage
| not to think about "what everybody wants". I observe it's really
| hard for the SV tech mindset to escape that gravity. Downvote me
| all you like for saying such uncomfortable things.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39346374
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39344991
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| "Finding what the market wants and providing it" only worked
| when the market had wants, and wants are finite. Once those are
| all taken care of, everything past that is engineered desire,
| which is where consumer culture comes into play.
|
| You don't need to explain to someone why they want food. Of
| course they want food, they're hungry. You do need to explain
| to them why they want a pizza covered in gold leaf. You don't
| need to explain why they want a car: they want to get around in
| the United States, and a car is more or less mandatory: you
| need to explain why they want a $100,000 SUV that gets worse
| fuel economy than a comparable van while holding less cargo and
| has such terrible visibility there's a non-insignificant chance
| they will run over and kill one of their own children with the
| thing. You don't need to convince them they want a smart phone,
| you need to convince them they want a new smart phone that's
| 11% faster than the old one even though their current one works
| fine.
|
| Tons and tons of business, not even remotely isolated to the
| tech sector, has nothing at all to do with meeting consumer
| demand or fulfilling wants in the market; it has to do with
| building slightly different versions of products that already
| exist, and then spending millions if not billions of dollars so
| you can scream at the market's ear as loud as possible until
| they think that voice is coming from inside their own heads,
| and they'll buy it to make it shut up. And then repeat.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| as a contrast to "accelerate" let's consider "addiction" cycles.
| Business-driven tech seeks addiction cycles in consumers due to
| orders of magnitude larger results.
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| If you're writing a nostalgic tech "thinkpiece" please be
| specific about what you're nostalgic for.
| debacle wrote:
| In political circles, "accelerationists" believe that the demise
| of the US is inevitable, and that the faster it happens the
| better the world will be.
|
| I see similar parallels to the tech sector. Is the death of SV
| inevitable? If so, is the world better off if it dies quickly or
| slowly?
|
| Kind of a tangent to the core article, but it seems to me that we
| are in a large-scale transition of society in many ways, and the
| redemocratization of technology is a critical aspect of a bright
| future..
| namlem wrote:
| That's a different type of accelerationism.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Accelerationism is the best way to go at it since it ensures
| either a quick death or a fix and not the ugly in-between we're
| all starting to slowly catch a glimpse of
| JohnFen wrote:
| So in that view, accelerationism is about placing a high-
| stakes, binary bet that such actions will result in a utopia
| rather than utter destruction.
|
| But what gives those people the right to gamble with the lives
| of the rest of us in that way? The entire line of thinking is,
| in my view, not only horribly egotistic and authoritarian, but
| antagonistically so.
| pfdietz wrote:
| My attitude about safety of AI is this: if AI is an existential
| risk dangerous enough to justify draconian measures, we're
| ultimately fucked, since those measures would have to be perfect
| for all future times and places humans exist. Not a single lapse
| could be allowed.
|
| And it's just not plausible humanity could be that thorough. So,
| we might as well assume AI is not going to be that dangerous and
| move ahead.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| I guess but its similar how diplomqcy and international
| agreements need to be perfect forever to prevent nuclear war
| but so far it has worked and its worth it to keep trying.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Your first paragraph is exactly how I feel about nuclear
| weapons, to put it into context. I don't think the logical
| conclusion from that viewpoint is that nuclear weapons aren't
| that dangerous so we should just move ahead.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I don't think nuclear weapons are the kind of existential
| risk that AI doomsters imagine for AI.
| thrill wrote:
| Other than those that have called for nuking AI
| datacenters.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That presumably demonstrates they think nuclear war is
| less dangerous than AI.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| I feel obligated to point out that nobody has argued for
| nuking datacenters; the most radical AI existential-
| safety advocates have argued for is "have a ban on
| advanced training programs, enforced with escalating
| measures from economic sanctions and embargos to, yes,
| war and bombing datacenters". Not that anybody is
| optimistic on that idea working.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| I think it has been empirically demonstrated that lapses in
| regards to the control and use of nuclear weapons can occur
| without the destruction of humanity.
|
| (I am not an AI doomer, nor do I feel that nuclear weapons
| are not dangerous/should be less controlled)
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| I think that's the same kind of attitude that makes a lot of
| people not take global warming seriously.
|
| It's a way to process ideas you don't want to be true, sure,
| but it's not a sensible or cost-effective way to deal with
| potential threats.
|
| (And yeah, you can argue AI x-risk isn't a potential threat
| because it's not real or whatever. That's entirely orthogonal
| to the "if it's true we're fucked so don't bother" line of
| argument.)
| bparsons wrote:
| The author lacks any context for what accelerationism is.
|
| The original idea comes from Marxists advocating for the adoption
| of free market capitalism as a means of bringing about the
| alienation of the working class, which is a necessary
| precondition for socialist revolution.
|
| The idea of effective accelerationism (which was a joke making
| fun of people like Musk and SBF) is the rapid, uncontrolled
| promotion of AI as a means of destroying the entire tech industry
| and all that surrounds it.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Am I the only one that associates the term "accelerationism"
| mostly with right-wing extremism and terrorism?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism#Far-right_acce...
|
| If you are a techno-optimist, you should ask your AI to come up
| with something less associated with race war and neo-nazi
| ideology
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| I mostly associate the term with the original left-wing version
| of accelerationism (which is a little further up in the
| Wikipedia article you linked to). In both versions, the view is
| essentially that the society we have now is so bad as to be
| practically unredeemable, so the next best course of action is
| to accelerate this society's downfall so the new "good" society
| can be built instead. Obviously, the vision of the "good" thing
| that comes next is, uh, wildly different.
|
| In either case, seems very different than what proponents of
| e/acc are about, but in a cynical sense, not totally unrelated.
| The Wikipedia does include, "It has been regarded as an
| ideological spectrum divided into mutually contradictory left-
| wing and right-wing variants, both of which support the
| indefinite intensification of capitalism and its structures as
| well as the conditions for a technological singularity, a
| hypothetical point in time where technological growth becomes
| uncontrollable and irreversible."
| devmor wrote:
| e/acc seems very similar in premise to the original left wing
| accelerationism, but with the very important caveat that its
| proponents trust implicitly that whatever the current capital
| market decides is worthy of funding will somehow be the
| appropriate technology to accelerate.
| keiferski wrote:
| It's a bit funny, a bit annoying, and a bit scary how these e/acc
| people don't seem to understand the slightest thing about Nick
| Land's philosophy, which is ultimately where the term
| _accelerationism_ came from. Probably because it 's extremely
| dense, filled with "Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis", and
| because Land himself is hard to follow or understand. He gets
| described as a neoreactionary, which is pretty accurate to my
| reading, but...it definitely has little to do with, quoting from
| the article: "Do something hard. Do it for everyone who comes
| next. That's it. Existence will take care of the rest."
|
| I am by no means an expert or huge fan of Land, but he's
| definitely more along the lines of, "the machines are going to
| eat everything and there's basically nothing you can do about
| it."
|
| So, in some sense, this is just another round of "economic elites
| co-opting someone else's culture."
|
| Edit: I did some searching on Twitter and found this great quote,
| which really does sum it up:
|
| > _E /ACC is a fitting end to Accelerationism. After having been
| passed around by dissident intellectuals and online deviants it
| can finally settle into retirement as another kitschy pastel MS
| Powerpoint Californian grindset aesthetic stripped of all its
| substantial insights._
|
| https://twitter.com/augureust/status/1691893969678913692
| ultra_nick wrote:
| Actually, the e/acc community has stated it rejects Nick Land's
| more recent work.
|
| If you read older posts, you'll find the earlier e/acc members
| got started with Fanged Noumena.
| keiferski wrote:
| Interesting. I don't doubt that the earliest online people
| were familiar with it, but I am extremely doubtful that the
| big names dropped in the article have even heard of Land.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| I wish they would have explained what the original
| Accelerationism actually means instead of just giving it a quick
| nod:
|
| >"Accelerationism is unfortunately now just a buzzword," sighed
| political scientist Samo Burja, referring to a related concept
| popularized around 2017.
|
| _Accelerationism_ is a political reaction that basically works
| like this: when faced with any kind of dilemma, choose the option
| that is the most progressively destructive. The idea is that
| society & institutions are so tainted, that the only way to fix
| it is to continue knocking down all those boundaries and
| Chesterton's Fence's in order to effect some kind of
| institutional collapse that's being headed toward anyway.
|
| Why slowly implement policies that spell our doom when we can
| implement them fast - accelerate!
|
| That's the idea. And they should have mentioned that in the
| article, because the contrast with the Globo Tech notion of
| "Effective Accelerationism" is just good irony.
| adverbly wrote:
| Can we just stop with these absolute positions already?
|
| You can justify horrible atrocities if you strongly believe in
| extreme outcomes.
|
| Effective altruism, accelerationism, doomers... All of these
| mindsets are toxic for the same reason that extreme religious
| stances are toxic. Believing that the world is going to end or
| that it's going to reach salvation or whatever extreme outcome
| you feel like, and then using that to justify short-term
| atrocities is not the way.
|
| Stop putting infinity in your forecasts. It breaks everything. We
| have been down this path before many times and it never ends
| well.
| sp527 wrote:
| Beff is a late-stage capitalism incarnation of the useful idiot,
| sucking off the landed technogentry in hopes of securing a life
| raft in the economic apocalypse e/acc is attempting to usher in.
| When 89% of US stock equity is owned by the top 10%, you know
| that e/acc is a sclerotic and thinly veiled "fuck the poors"
| ideology being perpetrated by precisely that well-insulated 10%,
| who have little to nothing to fear from a world where labor value
| goes asymptotically towards zero.
| astrange wrote:
| > When 89% of US stock equity is owned by the top 10%, you know
| that e/acc is a sclerotic and thinly veiled "fuck the poors"
| ideology
|
| You forgot to control for "older people own more stocks because
| they spent more time saving for retirement".
| AlexandrB wrote:
| There's a combination of exploitation and lack of humility that
| marks recent tech. On the one hand, a lot of newer tech treats
| you like some kind of tech peasant: no sideloading, endless
| dialogs that have no option to say "no", arbitration clauses, no
| ability to fix your own devices, little or no customer support,
| etc. On the other hand you have proclamations about what the
| future will look like that turn out to be terribly wrong:
| blockchain, metaverse, VR, self-driving truck convoys, etc.
|
| After such an atrocious track record of tech leaders being
| completely wrong about what "the next big thing" is, why should
| anyone trust these people and why are they so certain they're
| "accelerating" in the right direction?
|
| Edit: I miss the era when tech companies treated their users as
| customers, not as marks to be manipulated for the purpose of
| profit maximization.
| tmaly wrote:
| 50 year cycle? All of the recent breakthroughs seem to be
| happening on every shortening cycles.
| Animats wrote:
| _" Or, perhaps, wanting to be regulated is a subconscious way for
| tech to reassure itself about its central importance in the
| world, which distracts from an otherwise uneasy lull in the
| industry."_
|
| There is that. There hasn't been a must-have consumer electronics
| thing since the smartphone. 2019 was supposed to be the year of
| VR. Fail. 2023 was supposed to be the year of the metaverse.
| Fail. Internet of Things turned out to be a dud. Self-driving
| cars are still struggling. All those things actually work, just
| not well enough for wide deployment.
|
| LLM-based AI has achieved automated blithering. It may be wrong,
| but it sounds convincing. We are now forced to realize that much
| human activity is no more than automated blithering. This is a
| big shakeup for society, especially the chattering classes.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Holy crap, I'm realizing it's been 4 years since Half Life
| Alyx. I really wish it had been the first of many.
| browningstreet wrote:
| e/acc is just the logical +1 follow-up to hodl.
|
| a tech subculture: creates its own acronym, posts a lot of self-
| referential coded messages, add exclamation marks, ignore those
| who decry it as annoying. no whining no complaining no critique.
| helps to get a tech alpha to engage/retweet you. tolerate a
| little discourse but mostly exclaim. make sure everyone knows you
| think X rulez. pro$it.
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