While I agree, I feel we can't dismiss a technology just because we don't agree with the values of the people doing it, you know? The tech is amazing, let's build it in a nice way.
To the contrary, no one worried about its failure states is dismissing it.
They believe that even if it doesn’t match its hype, it’s going to destabilize society.
It’s already trivializing being rewarded for art. You want to be paid while you learn how to make excellent art work and CGI? Well just how will that work?
Phishing scams are now profitable for victim types it wasnt before.
Education is taking a hammering, that biblical is a fair adjective to apply. Most courses will have to resort to pen and paper exams, a reversal of digitization changes since the 90s.
Why are we doing all this to ourselves? So the rich get even richer while the rest is even worse off?
Why are smart minds enabling this? My university had mandatory computer science ethics classes. I used to think they were a waste of time. Clearly, I was wrong.
> The tech is amazing, let's build it in a nice way.
We tried that before, during the early 2000s there was huge optimism about tech, democratisation of information, people would be more well informed, with access to all the knowledge in the world.
In the end it wasn't built in a nice way, moneyed interests took over, social media exploded, fewer companies captured a lot of different markets after getting extremely well capitalised, buying competitors to stamp them out, or buying them to integrate into their own ecosystems and control new markets (e.g.: social media again).
The tech is amazing, the corporations behind it not so much, the capital investments required are absurdly large which gives even more power to already capitalised entities which, generally speaking, do not behave in moral and ethical ways.
There's no opportunity to build it in a nice way, that's not where the incentives are so inevitably that's not where it will go, hence the pessimism about it founded on historical facts.
