It seems like a trend at The New Yorker this week to publish stories about tech pushback with the needed but prosecutorial “investigation” of OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and now this version of tilting at windmills below.
As a veteran of the drop out wars of the 60s, one might observe that going back to the good old days of former technologies can at times be initially attractive… until people try to feed a large group with spades, hoes, and spending every day out in the field.
That takeaway should be that one needs to moderate and guide the development of technology …instead of assuming we should just throw it out and revert.
This moderating and guiding didn’t really happen with Social Media, and we currently are paying the price for that, but it’s unlikely that communication technology per se is going to return to previous methods. Something should be done, and that’s implementing the kind of regulation that we’ve found out the hard way we need to have.
Unguided and unmoderated realities also occurred in the Gilded Age of the last decades of the 19th century in the US.
The effects of unregulated industrial expansion of the US economy became clear ….including autocratic control of politics as well as all the detrimental effects on the environment and the oppression of workers.
There was a subsequent series of movements to address some of the downsides throughout the 20th and now into the 21st century with varying degrees of success. Currently autocracy is surging and we see rollbacks of environmental protection for clean air, water, worker safety, quality healthcare for all etc.
So there’s a lot of work to do, but it will not be wholesale reverting to earlier technologies. It will be achieving the necessary regulations and moderation of effects.
The Age-Old Urge to Destroy Technology | The New Yorker“Techno-Negative” is a radical history of technology told through acts of resistance, not progress.
The history of technology is often told as a history of progress, moving optimistically and inevitably from one emancipatory invention to the next.
Techno-Negative turns this story on its head, taking us on a journey to the critical junctures where people have pointedly rejected and tried to undo, rather than adopt, new technologies. Beginning with Archimedes’s decision to destroy his own war machines, this book explores the will to negate technology as a deep—but persistently condemned—current in history.
Synchronicity? The day after this above on Tech Pushback was posted, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at Sam Altman’s house in San Franciso area, and the man doing the throwing was arrested later at the OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco apparently ready to do more of the same.
One perhaps might see some sort of comment from the Perp along the lines of the Unabomber Manifesto. Will he quote the New Yorker articles of the last week?
Perhaps TNY might revisit the Unabomber’s Tech Pushback for some needed context of how Tech Pushback goes awry.
We can’t know what might have motivated TNY in this instance, and it’s quite possible the Molotov cocktail guy doesn’t read their magazine, though there’s plenty about the articles in social media. Plus there’s about a million issues published and distributed each week.
TNY has a well deserved reputation for reasonable discourse over most of its 100 year long existence. But everyone has blind spots. In general, all knowledge workers at TNY’s level of competence have a great deal at risk with the rise of equally, or potentially more, competent AI knowledge work.