ddkper
If you're looking for tech-skepticism read any mainstream news outlet. Even the majority of articles on tech centered news like ARS or TechCrunch are from a tech skeptical viewpoint.
>>They are fully capable, as am I, into taking into account tradeoffs and changing our opinions.
That may be, but people generally are incentivized to be far more charitable to their position than the opposition. Reading the opposition from the oppositions own formulation will be a far greater defense of what they actually think in terms of tradeoffs.
>>Like I have an aesthetic interest in disallowing corporations from implementing psychological manipulation to prevent me from e.g. quitting their services.
Ben himself in the article you are referring to says this is shady, but he also points out that its generally not nearly as bad as say the NYT which requires you to call via phone to unsubscribe, and that the conflict with the regulators is comparatively heavy handed and doesn't take into account the tradeoffs he wants to discuss in his article.
>>So, fine, he's not a person I want speaking for me or, like, affecting any policy on the matter whatsoever.
Ok, not really up to you though. Ideas enter the marketplace and compete with each other. The ones that people find the most persuasive end up affecting the policy. Clearly his view points are not affecting the policy that much seeing as he is directly responding to regulation that is occurring and antithetical to what he believes is correct.
Beware of an active search for an echo chamber. Because for example:
>>it constantly runs the wrong way if you're at all skeptical of, like, giant business or ads or AI... at a social level.
Is a viewpoint that could very well be wrong when faced with the analysis from a different perspective from yours. Having someone repeat your values to you doesn't make it true or take into account trade-offs that are being made which could prompt you to change your opinion.
Severely limiting the ability to be acquired reduces the incentives for new founders as well as investors in new companies if the only realistic path is waiting for them to go public. Especially since being acquired doesn't require you to be in nearly as good a financial position in terms of profit as going public does.
Look at any major technology and you'll have armies of people talking about the downsides. You'll see that a cure for sickle cell is created and then you'll see everyone complaining that it's only for the rich. Ignoring every cost curve in history and the fact that these companies make the most money by being able to sell to the average consumer. Apple is worth a 3 trillion because its products can be afforded by almost anyone in the first world and a large number in developing countries (especially if a few years old).
For example, to predict in the 1970's TCP/IP would be used to enable bitcoin would be articulating the invention of bitcoin. Nobody predicted it, it was creatively developed using technologies that the founders invented with no idea it would be used for cryptocurrency.
You can always find a reason to be a doomer about the technology because it's easier to predict negative consequences than to predict the good that will come of it. To argue the negative side, one must only create a hypothetical. To argue the positive, one must practically invent the positive use-case which requires work and creativity.
You can say CRISPR is far too dangerous and allows for designer babies, a moral dilemma. This creates a strong hypothetical argument right off the bat, but for it to be proven a beneficial technology it actually needs the time to develop positive use cases like curing sickle cell disease.
The pessimist position is that there are some technologies so destructive that by pure chance once we develop them we will extinct ourselves.
The optimist position is that problems inevitably arise in a complex universe but that humans are problem solvers (within the bounds of physics) and that it is possible to address them.
A classic example of pessimists is that you could develop a 3D printing machine allowing the regular person to create bioweapons easily. Yet they don't apply the same logic of if a technology is that powerful, it can be easily used to instantly create the antidote/vaccine to any bioweapon developed using it.
The optimists believe that technological advancement on the whole is good because the good cases take care of themselves and the bad cases can be solved with human ingenuity. The alternative of halting progress or centralizing control of technology is worse. Example: around 40k americans die per year in auto-accidents. Every year that self-driving cars are delayed, 40 thousand americans die. The alternative is the already bad status quo or problems we dont see coming like pandemics or asteroids or solar flares - which we will not have the technology to address without faster progress.
Even still it is impossible to avoid the constant deluge of how bad and dystopian technology is or will be. One of my favorite examples was going to Wired's website and seeing front page an article about how the NASA Dart mission could be negative because of space debris. Here we have humans developing a way to defend ourselves against meteoric extinction and we are looking at the downsides of a small amount of byproduct space debris in the infinite expanse of space.
Go to the technology subreddit and count how many upvoted posts have positive sentiment versus negative sentiment. You don't have to agree with the rest of what Mark says to see the validity in how pessimistic the views presented to us are about technology.
These pessimists like the writer are usually committed to an ideology that views humans as evil and wasteful (as if those values hold any value to an inert universe) and that we must fail in order to show us our evil ways. The writer is claiming that technology has failed to produce large productivity gains. He's not clear on the timeframe but yet he's typing on a laptop utilizing micro-processors and the internet to share his message. He's writing on a blog enabling him to reach audiences across the whole world and get paid to do so.
He's sitting in a post-covid world where our economies were saved by advanced telecommunications networks and video-conferencing technologies. Where millions of lives were saved from MRNA vaccines (technology), that were developed in record time. They were developed in record time by sharing the data realtime via the internet (technology), and Moderna even used AI (technology) to develop the vaccine in 2 days within computer space before physical production. Yep, an effective vaccine designed in 2 days certainly isn't a productivity boost /s
People that are pessimistic about human's abilities to solve problems with the application of science (technology) usually do so for moralistic or philosophical reasons, not for anything grounded in reality. If something isn't ruled out by the laws of physics it is possible to do given the right scientific knowledge.