> As someone approaching 40, who was a techno-optimist back then and still generally techno-optimistic today, I'm feeling increasingly out of place in the tech world. As evidenced by this blog post and the vast majority of comments here, I'd say the HN-adjacent space is majority negative on technology.

I think this is because 10 or 20 years ago, when tech wasn't a particularly prestigious or high-paying career, you got into tech because you really believed in it, and so other people who were in tech also really believed in it - hence the optimism.

Today, most people in tech are in it because it pays well. Not only do they not believe in it - I suspect they begin to dislike it because they feel "forced" into it, as you might when doing anything you don't particularly enjoy for an extremely long amount of time.

I am one of those people who got into tech as a teen in the late 90s when Microsoft was the capitalist bad guy, Google was the underdog, and Linux was socialism. Things were largely contained to the tech ecosystem.

What I find interesting is as tech has grown and people enter it who are not that interested in tech is you see tech’s influence seems to have gone further and further away from our industry niche.

Do I think VCs should be making decisions for millions of Americans so they can get more rich? No. Do I think tech workers should push a progressive narrative that the rest of the country should ascribe to? No.

Tech has an undue influence on the world on both the left and right. All of us mistakenly ascribe our unique situation as how the world should work. Maybe we should just focus on what we are good at?

HN is a bubble within a bubble. It’s where Kagi rules the search world and Google is all but a dessicated corpse. It’s also a place with a karma system, encouraging only the most bubbleworthy discussion and discouraging any posts from dissidents. I would put a negative weight on sentiments here when averaging them with those elsewhere.

Welcome green commenter!

I regularly see "posts from dissidents" here on HN, but I do notice that they are all strongly written, well-argued and often contain citations to support their position. Is there an asymmetry in the way karma is awarded to "bubble" and "non-bubble" positions? Probably, but that doesn't mean non-bubble never makes it.

Could it be that karma rewards different things than you believe?

So it takes strong writing, good arguments, and citations for a dissident to have any hope of being seen. Since that doesn’t describe every upvoted HN comment, what are you really saying here?

Not saying you are wrong, but let's not dismiss the need for good argumentation when you say something out of the norm. Dissidence with arguments does a great service to everyone involved.

Having said that, people here do downvote based on opinion allignment, which is very hurtful. I've seen perfectly legit comments (with sources) that are out of the norm being downvoted because people just don"t agree with them

> what are you really saying here?

that expecting to see the full range of human opinion on any even vaguely controversial topic in a single context is foolish, and that i'm tired of people complaining about "dissidents" not showing up on HN when they clearly do (even if they are (surprise!) in a minority of top-ranked comments.

ps. I never downvote on HN unless someone has actually made a grievous factual error or is being personally abusive.

if you turn showdead on in your profile, you'll see a lot of absolute crap that should be dead. But I've also started to notice more and more comments that don't deserve to be flagged dead. Just comments against the hivemind, which sucks. I asked dang if he'd be willing to give an endpoint that just surfaces dead items but he refused.

HN is useful for discussion on cutting edge stuff. It's a great place to overhear conversations about what's important to tech people. I've learned a lot from this community. But you're right -- certain insular, minority opinions seem to get unusual airtime here. They make the discussions unbalanced.

I've long thought about making a bot which automatically upvotes all downvoted comments. If enough users here used it, it would reverse these trends and force dissenting opinions to be taken seriously. This is not reddit, where the average greyed out comment is some nazi stuff. Here, most greyed out comments are just feather rustlers doing their duty. We are lucky to have them, else we surround ourselves with sycophants and yes-people.

Pro-AI comments regularly get downvoted. I find this amusing or sad. Or maybe both.

>I've long thought about making a bot which automatically upvotes all downvoted comments.

You'll just get banned.

The two biggest advancements in tech in recent years: Crypto and AI have had major negative impacts for society in particular the vulnerable. And arguably have done far more harm than good.

Compare this with advancements before then: Personal Computers, Internet, Smart Phones and they have had overwhelmingly positive impacts for the world.

So I see there being a completely legitimate reason to be negative about tech today but optimistic about its future.

People have always thought this about new tech.

https://pessimistsarchive.org/list/computer "Technology is making us uncivil", 1990

https://pessimistsarchive.org/list/television "Television addiction", 1977

https://pessimistsarchive.org/list/recorded-sound "A profit without honor", 1930 (https://external-preview.redd.it/Js-HSYL7H4FuXSQ-ZmSDXZ6uYZq...)

I love this website. It captures how people think they have unique opinions about <new_technology> being bad, but in reality, it's a tale as old as time.

No one wants to be the person resistant to change and progress. But the fact of the matter is that most people are, even technologists, even here on HN.

20 years from now, when AI-generated drugs are curing major diseases and scarcity is even less common, these comments will be just another entry in the Pessimists' Archive.

I really love the website too. Your last paragraph reminded me about this text from this excellent essay Misunderestimating Openness by James Boyle:

> Will we look back on today’s anguish over open content being mined to train neural networks and marvel at how blind we were to the importance of huge, open datasets for democratic, transparent AI? Will we say that the mining of open content is vital if we want models that are less biased than those trained on smaller proprietary datasets? Will we think that open datasets are also vital if we care about barriers to entry in the new world of the data-rich and data-poor?

Source: https://openfuture.eu/paradox-of-open-responses/misunderesti...

> have had major negative impacts for society in particular the vulnerable

such as?

Crypto has been one of the largest wealth transfers ever seen. With the level of criminality e.g insider trading, rug pulling, money laundering being unprecedented for a new technology i.e.

https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2024-crypto-money-launderin...

AI has seen the less well-off parts of society e.g. artists, customer service lose work in favour of making productivity higher for knowledge workers etc.

To be fair, whether or not this is "more harm than good" depends on your moral views.

> Crypto has been one of the largest wealth transfers ever seen.

Need a citation for this.

> With the level of criminality e.g insider trading, rug pulling, money laundering being unprecedented for a new technology

Not all crime is bad. I just so happen to belong to a marginalized group that requires crypto to do financial activities (e.g. commissions, donations for activist fronts). I am grateful for crypto's existence, even though like many (even in the crypto community), scams are disliked.

> artists, customer service lose work in favour of making productivity higher for knowledge workers etc

It is true that automation in general seems to increase inequality amongst education lines [1]. But the solution isn't to ban automation, it's to have equal-opportunity education (e.g. subsidies, retraining for obsoleted workers) and to financially support those that get left behind.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_automation/#wiki...

The deep irony is that your critique of AI is exactly Trump’s critique of globalization, just with different people impacted.

Scammers seem to be using AI generated voice extremely effectively, causing serious harm to their victims.

AI generated video seems to be getting used for that kind of thing now too.

Well done AI voice generation people, well done. /s

I don't see any real evidence that either AI or crypto have had "major negative impacts for society."

That was addressed to those that do not deny climate change.

The energy consumption of both crypto and AI are way overstated. Total energy budget of crypto is less than a percent of world electricity consumption (not energy consumption, electricity). And a ton of that electricity is particularly no-carbon.

AI is harder to get numbers for and obviously is a moving target, but plausibly half of the consumption that crypto is.

For more information: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...

To help with your wonderings, I was a tech optimist who became pessimistic. I enjoy working on and thinking about technology problems, but it's so hard to keep my own creations from going on to become harmful. Perhaps my pessimism began with Jevons paradox. If I got a redo, I'd pick a different field.

I want to be a techno optimist, and my feelings are that the potential that tech could be an enormous positive utility for humanity. This falls apart not because of tech, but because of human flaws: desire for individual power, categorical error (cultivated in an extreme way in the drive for engagement), and a slew of other human weaknesses that leave many without the critical and emotional facilities necessary to live in the current world facing the onslaught of misinformation.

It was possible to build tools that increased human happiness and connection, but by definition such tools would ultimately lead to each fulfilled person reducing engagement in the interest of actual face to face connection with others. There is no profit to be made in producing such a utility. It doesn't help that the human brain is addicted to novelty, meaning that a technical utility that did this cannot compete with utilities that are work primarily towards engagement.

Ultimately, we need critical faculties, emotional intelligence, and real community to negate the negative effects of engagement driven tech, but these are extremely difficult to develop when this technology is already driving the population towards the easy path: categorical "reasoning", emotional content, or just feeding vanity.

Ultimately, I think we had a small window when Facebook did a study in 2012, where it manipulated the emotions of a number of people (60k) and wrote a paper on it, to declare this practice of algorithmically managing content to be illegal psychological human experimentation.

We didn't, and now I really do feel we suffer under its shadow.

One cause of the mismatch is that tech did not turn out to be "lucrative" for the vast majority of techies.

Didn't lots of us get six figure salaries?

In the Bay Area six figures ($100000) is poverty level even for a single person. Officially. An average software developer supporting a family on a single income in the Bay means a below median family income. No, it's not starvation. But I would hardly call living paycheck-to-paycheck "lucrative".

There's a lot of 6-figure salaries in tech outside of the Bay Area, and even outside the US.

But you see the contrast between "you are a valuable and well-compensated knowledge worker" and "you have to move somewhere more appropriate for your working-class income"? And how can anyone continue to say this is lucrative with a straight face?

I still love technology. It's only getting more amazing all the time. If you view just that, we're not just living in the future, but way beyond.

The application though, both by others and what I do at work? Meh.

So am I pessimistic about technology now? I think that's a valid way to put it. And yet I also feel "out of place in the tech world" with my viewpoint. Sure there's others with similar positions, but I feel this is not a majority.

I’m an old guy (older than you at least) who’s been working in and around tech since the 90s.

What’s happened is the utopian future turned into the dystopian present.

The technology created by Silicon Valley has profoundly harmed people and society in really visible ways.

That’s not all it’s done, it’s absolutely undeniable that it’s also been a driver of some extremely positive things.

But many people feel increasingly unable to live in this economy, take care of their children, find meaning, and achieve a state of balanced mental health. Many of these people place blame for at least some of this, correctly in my view, on the corrosive effects of the technology sector on the financial and labor markets as well as our personal day to day lives.

How is this different from previous periods in which technology companies harmed people and society as well? (Think coal mines, cars, television, what have you).

I fail to see what is so special about our current day and age, apart from us living in it.

Nothing? Do you expect people to be coal mine optimistic too?

Relevant question for this thread is if let say those coal mines promoted Utopia.

> profoundly harmed people and society in really visible ways

such as?

Here's a nice article exploring some of the ways tech is visibly negative: https://blog.avas.space/tech-utopia-fantasy/

This article is so bias and slanted it can’t stand up straight.

There are so many examples. Widespread ubiquity of pornography and gambling. Proliferation of unstable “gig” work. Flows of large amounts of cash into politics.

There’s a lot more. Like I said there are good effects too but it’s disingenuous to claim there aren’t immediately obvious negative consequences.

So much this. I joined the web in ’97 and back then we had this optimism that the Internet would make the world a better place because it would act as fertilizer for ideas and critical thinking. Some three decades later it’s obvious that this didn’t happen and I’d dare say that social media made the world a worse place. And it’s something that I’m thinking quite frequently the last years trying to figure out what went wrong or if we were just naïve.

I don't think this actually has anything to do with tech itself. Society in general is in a more pessimistic mood than a decade ago, driven on by all sorts of institutions pumping out content that everything is bad, so you should upend the world in their vision.

Maybe I was just too young and inattentive 16 years ago, but before the GFC and Occupy, I don't think there was such a pessimistic narrative overall, and it only got worse over time.

Same. What the author writes seems more of a consequence of economic anxiety and the resulting populism (e.g. "big corporations bad, profit bad") than tech itself.

A lot of people who criticize tech, like the author, would often excuse non-commercial or personal actors for doing the same thing (e.g. "regular people using LLMs are fine, big corporations using LLMs are bad"), which shows that they believe that "doing it for a profit" makes the moral difference. So it has nothing to do with tech at all, but rather whether or not the actor is doing it for a commercial purpose.

I'm an erstwhile techno-optimist who was disabused of his Panglossian views by the Utah Data Center, drone warfare (now advanced to the point of remotely piloted rifles gunning people down on the streets of Gaza), crypto ponzis, AI enclosing and monetizing decades of humanity's collective mental efforts, and the general indifference or even embrace by most of the tech community of all of the above. Technology has liberatory potential, but not in the hands currently wielding it.

If you're not on social media, you might be missing part of what has changed people's minds. Social media is the biggest consumer-facing technological innovation of the last two decades, and it's financially lucrative, but also net-bad for society. I have a sense that we should do something about it, but as you say, doing something would require repudiating the values I held when I was younger.