Tech Dystopia

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. — Upton Sinclair

Swisher is a great example of what went wrong in tech reporting through Silicon Valley’s long boom, from the starting gun of internet privatization to the post-Trump techlash. Journalists like Swisher got far too close to the people they covered and bought into the lies they were weaving as the money rushed in and everyone got rich. They got too absorbed in the deceptive story the industry told itself to question whether it all made sense, even as they helped sell the narrative of tech’s promise and inevitability to the public. Now we’re all dealing with the fallout of that period, and while some have admitted they got it wrong, far too many are trying to pretend they were asking the hard questions the whole time.

Swisher spends her last chapter repeating much of the bullshit about generative AI that tech executives have been spreading for the past year, calling it a new “Cambrian explosion,” musing about the ways it could improve virtually every aspect of life, and complimenting Musk for conflating human and computer intelligence a few years back. It shows just how little she’s able to cast a critical eye on what she covers, and how influenced her opinions are by the tech power players she turns to for assessments of the industry. Swisher closes the book by pasting in some nonsense generated by ChatGPT and repeating claims about driverless cars and workplace automation that feel a decade out of date. After all this time, she still can’t see through the hype when it actually matters.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/103229

We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.

The truth is, functioning markets are not "free" at all. They are regulated. Unregulated markets rapidly devolve into monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, and, if things get really bad, libertarianism.

The job of market regulation - fundamentally a restriction on your freedom - is to prevent all that bad stuff. Markets work well as long as they're in, as we call it in engineering, the "continuous control region," that is, the part far away from any weird outliers. You need no participant in the market to have too much power. You need downside protection (bankruptcy, social safety net, insurance). You need fair enforcement of contracts (which is different from literal enforcement of contracts).

The major rework we need isn't some math theory, some kind of Paxos for Capitalism, or Paxos for Government. The sad, boring fact is that no fundamental advances in math or computer science are needed to solve these problems.