I don't think things are really that much different now compared to late 2011. At least not different enough to be considered an "absolutely incredible leap"

The truth is, not that much was different between 2000 and 2010 or 1990 and 2000. But 2010 and 2020? This last decade has marked such massive improvements in ways we aren't noticing, and in things we aren't using. Everything from cameras with resolutions and ISOs that are off the charts, OLED, LiPo Battery density, robotics with walking and flight, guidance, wireless transmission and encoding/decoding, Machine learning in everything including your phone, and our phones... they are amazing pieces of kit. Oh, reusable rockets that land themselves! Cars that literally drive themselves. Spot, the robot dog? Right in my office right now, ultra-thin laptops, compact high quality microphones, headphones with unbelievable noise-canceling, 3-axis gimbals, 10-bit n-log external recorders, wireless solar powered remote security cameras, drones with amazing stabilized video quality that you used to need a helicopter to shoot, and on and on and on. The last decade has been insane, turning future dream tech in to Walmart black-friday super sale items. You may not appreciate or even notice the tech advancements in the last 10 years but they have been monstrous compared to any other decade.

For example, planning a trip together for, say, 30 people. It used to take weeks. Today, you can basically decide the day before to join or not.

The whole SMS thing, with minor messages delivered in seconds, changes peoples behaviour. Not being contactable in a few hours maximum is not normal today. It used to be. A small message to shop something on the way home did not exist.

The worldwide students against climate movement could not happen at that scale in the 1990's, the comm infra simply wasn' t there .

Nobody remembers phone numbers anymore.

Now that's cellphones. Add internet and GPS, and your society is massively different in a decade.

That's really not the truth at all.

Those alone have the potential for incredible changes.

The last thing i can think of was the internet. Maybe cell phones. There's probably a bunch of medical stuff, but I'm not well versed in that area.

I mean real inventions. Things that didn't exist. Like light bulbs, or automobiles, or steam engines, or rockets, or jet travel. It seems like the era of real invention petered out in the 1950's to 1970's.

Now things like social media and ad targeting and viral videos are somehow considered innovation. Even the one recent thing I'm impressed by - commercial space flight - is just an iteration of something that already existed.

We have the proliferation of electric vehicles and (at least in the US) a large charging network. There is also a massive difference in the wearable markets. The watches are getting so good that health monitoring and early warning signs are either already here or on the horizon. Cell phones are significantly better. A decade ago a video call would be a novelty and now it is done without a second thought. We finally have the futuristic edge to edge screens and foldables are now on the market.

There are others but they may not fall into the technology that we interact with daily. Things such as the drug technology used to make the covid vaccine. There are also changes in ML with the significant improvements in deep learning and model training.

I'm not sure if any of those count as an incredible leap, I think each one was developed incrementally, but when looking over the course of a decade it feels like a large leap to me.

Even if you believe that Apple is somehow different from Google and Facebook, I think you're missing a key part of the argument made in the article: the technology not only can be used for unethical purposes, it almost certainly will be.

Apple itself doesn't need to be evil. The technology it's pushing is inherently vulnerable and given the value of what it enables to bad actors, will almost inevitably be hijacked for nefarious purposes eventually. Pretending that your technology isn't vulnerable and imminently capable of causing great harm to people is indeed unethical.

> When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked. It has nothing to do with technology.

Have you ever considered that technology has played and is playing a key role in the development of our money and fame-obsessed society? Money and fame have existed in some form for millennia, but thanks to the web and social media, for example, people are now bombarded with a previously unfathomable amount of media that glamorizes it in ways never before possible. This exposure now starts at a very early age and therefore almost certainly shapes how children relate to money, fame, their impressions of themselves, etc.

I think the moral issues around a lot of tech is more than just "lying is bad" - to conflate it to that means that subtler moral issues will go unnoticed.

What are the moral issues people have with advertising? Is it that lying is wrong? No, I don't think so. What are the moral issues people have around the rentier structure of modern "App stores"? Likewise, it's not just about lying.

I also can't tell if your comment is suggesting that this moral breakdown is a break from the old, or a continuation. Most of the historical evidence seems indicative of a continuation.

But technology can be made without doing bad, see Librem or Pine64.

If you subtract Librem from Apple, what you're left with is anti-consumer surveillance stuff.

(None of that is specific to Librem/Purism or Pine64, but mostly applies to the tech industry at large, of course.)

> All tech giants share a desire to digitise the world. What is left unsaid by Apple and others is that digitising the world entails surveilling it: recording everything, making it taggable, trackable, searchable – and hackable. Of course, asking tech companies not to digitise the world is like asking builders not to pave over natural areas. Unless society sets limits, that is not going to happen. That’s why governments create protected areas when it comes to building.

I'm not suggesting one is better or worse than the other. But there is a subplot, and it's about control.

Money and fame are self-propagating, you're able to sell more products with fame and make more money with money. Kindness, sincerity, and moral virtues are better than their absence, I agree, but being kind to one person doesn't have the capability of exponential growth, you can't expect that the one act of kindness will allow you later to be kind to 100, then 10,000, then 1,000,000 people.

Technology is a blessing and a curse, it's a Pandora's box that allows scalable ideas to scale to previously unimaginable levels. There was an article here yesterday about how WhatsApp scaled to 1 billion users with just 50 engineers. That kind of action - and its effects on society - would not be possible without technology.

Likewise, I believe that dishonest, wealthy, power-hungry sociopaths make poor political leaders, and yet we seem to elect a lot of those.

Power and morality are not well correlated - they might be orthagonal to each other, or even inversely correlated!

Some people will maximize the $$$ in any society. It's how to make the strive for the $$$ the most beneficial and the least destructive that is the challenge.

It worked pretty well for 18th century France.

Plus, it's not like Apple's been caught lying before. Remember when they had to take down their M1 graphs because they were so obviously deceptive? Or how about that time when they said 'political slave labor is not used to build iPhones!' and then we found out that political slave labor is used to build iPhones?

Unless Apple adopts some form of transparency, I don't think I have the capability of trusting them. I agree though, I'm tired of this arguement too which is why I'd really appreciate if Apple gave us something other than a whitepaper of how things should work with no way for security researchers or the common person to verify if that's actually true.

You may say slave labor is wrong but will you pay $500 more for an iPhone? Most people won't. They will point the finger at Apple while shopping for the cheapest deal on Amazon produced by yet more slave labor in China. Anything to avoid taking on personal responsibility and score a few more $$ for the retirement account. Only widespread personal responsibility works, but it can only arise within a culture that respects and rewards those who take it on and judges people a little more broadly than "success" and $$$.

Issues of spinning up a new production line aside, I don't think the large mobile phone manufacturers would go for this idea, because it would mean admitting that the majority of their products are produced unethically.

> Since version two the Fairphone is produced in Suzhou, China, by Hi-P International Limited.[3]

> Fairphone's founder Bas van Abel acknowledged in 2017 that it was currently impossible to produce a 100% fair phone, suggesting it was more accurate to call his company's phones "fairer"

I really enjoy this thought exercise: what if everything was made ethically and cost reflected that. The world would probably be unrecognizable from what it looks like now.

The original iPod would never have been as wide-spread, for example, because the cost would have made it, truly, a luxury. That's if it was even invented at all, because it's pretty obvious that the iPod wasn't the first consumer electronic. Computers might be only affordable by large corporations, universities, and governments, so most of us here would not be working in the tech industry. Etc.

I think that this is important to remember because it really emphasizes that nearly every aspect of modern life is built on the backs of the disenfranchised. It's impossible to live truly ethically in this system. As a sibling post points out: there's no +$500 ethical iPhone option, so the power is literally out of the hands of the consumers (and I'd argue that having some sort of technology is very nearly required to function in our society, at least in the US).

As the saying goes: there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

The mRNA technology is interesting but unproven as we are seeing with the relative ineffectiveness of the Covid vaccines.

Software technology has been largely focused on new iterations of web frameworks and languages that target the young developers du jour who think that 5 year old frameworks are old school.

Mainly, small iterations of the same stuff is what has been dominating the technology space the last decade. My guess is that we are poised for some interesting new technologies, since it has been a largely ho-hum period for the last decade.

If only the efforts could be focused more toward actually making our lives better instead of focusing only on scraping our lives and diverting our eyes for the benefit of mega tech corporations and their wannabe startups.

Also, to suggest these companies are not making an impact on the world is insane. We are talking about companies like Apple and Google and yes… Facebook. Sure, they are not perfect moral companies but they have made massive impacts on the world.

It’s less that morality isn’t taught in college and more that the system is structured such that those who don’t do the song and dance lose out big time. No that’s not great, but it’s no fault of the majority of individuals. The system itself needs to be changed. Make sure that people don’t have to work the majority of their waking lives just to have a chance of getting ahead and morality will become a more practical consideration.

It is. Anything that can be abused will be abused, especially by governments. Companies rolling out clearly problematic technology adds legitimacy to them, it makes them normal.

> They have been taught nothing but capitalism, they know nothing but chase money.

Nobody is "taught" capitalism, it is imposed on them. We want to live comfortable, happy lives. We want to have influence in this world. It's not like some trillionaire is gonna come to me and just give me all that.

Also your comment strikes me as someone who doesn't actually engage with anyone under 30 in any real world way but only what is written on the internet. That would create a bias because all the people who might want to talk online to game out their compensation is probably a specific subset of individuals who would reinforce your worldview.

Society is made up of many people and it isn't built by select few. I suggest you reach out to different communities and find people who aren't as jaded as this rant post or offer a way put your energy into engaging and changing the trajectory of society towards where your values lie. Change takes work instead of arm chair quarterbacking a straw man.

So you actually do want to destroy the capitalist system.