Before reading the article, i just have to say that technology has advanced hugely in the past 20 years, in ways that have completely changed the world. And we are on the cusp of further tremendous advances, especially involving artificial intelligence.
So if the thesis of the article is really what you said in the title, its just not anywhere close to true.
That said, I’ll report back after reading it.
lmbo, AI is 10% matrix multiplication and 90% exploiting the global south for slave waged piecework “training the model”.
Technology has not progressed since Benjamin Franklen. We’ve been stagnant since 1776.
Well yes. AI is just a tool. It is no different than a lathe or a loom. The only thing that matters is who controls it and for what ends.
AI is impossible. like one individual cockroach is smarter than the best computers in the entire world. It’s all a scam to rope in money from nerds who think sci fi is real
If/then still outperforms their most advanced AI. 90% of AI startups just end up hiring humans in secret.
Before reading the article, i just have to say that technology has advanced hugely in the past 20 hears,
how? society has not moved and inch since the 80’s. if technology was as transformative as it was in the past we’d see the 80’s as a hopelessly antiquated time abyss instead of the last time mass culture created anything
This is just head in the sand doomerism. You’re deliberately ignoring the evidence of your own senses.
The internet has put the sum total of human knowledge in the palm of our hands. I have a universal translator in my pocket that I can point at a road sign or written document and see it translated in real time. These are changes that are fundamentally changing society the world over.
You could argue that the changes haven’t been for the better, but the changes aren’t finished yet. These technological changes are causing social upheavals that likely wont be resolved for decades to come.
For the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created “flexible” work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security and increased working hours for almost everyone. Along with the export of factory jobs, the new work regime has routed the union movement and destroyed any possibility of effective working-class politics.
The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue. Had the Internet been described to a science fiction aficionado in the fifties and sixties and touted as the most dramatic technological achievement since his time, his reaction would have been disappointment. Fifty years and this is the best our scientists managed to come up with? We expected computers that would think!
We went from full genome DNA testing costing 100 million dollars in 2001 to $1,000 today.
Fat load of good it’s done, we don’t even have brain computer interfaces or implantable drug glands or people with Iridescent skin because of gene editing
Part of the answer has to do with the concentration of resources on a handful of gigantic projects: “big science,” as it has come to be called. The Human Genome Project is often held out as an example. After spending almost three billion dollars and employing thousands of scientists and staff in five different countries, it has mainly served to establish that there isn’t very much to be learned from sequencing genes that’s of much use to anyone else. Even more, the hype and political investment surrounding such projects demonstrate the degree to which even basic research now seems to be driven by political, administrative, and marketing imperatives that make it unlikely anything revolutionary will happen.
how? society has not moved and inch since the 80’s
lol I love how cranky this take is. I’m not going to go and list all the tech advancements and medical breakthroughs that have occurred because it would honestly be a waste of time.
You’re delusional (and likely privileged) if you really believe that we haven’t advanced technology, culture, and society at all.
Technology has advanced hugely. What the predictions of the 50s and 60s got wrong is the notion that those advances would be working to improve the lives of the average person. The sophistication of the algorithms running Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon are truly staggering, and are leagues ahead of what was possible even at the turn of the century (much less 50 years before that). The issue is not that we haven’t advanced–it’s that all those advancements have been turned to the purpose of enhancing capital, exploiting normal people, and generally making the lives of everyone except the ultra-rich much, much worse. We live in an age of wonders, but those wonders ain’t for you.
