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I’m a techno-pessimist. Technology has enabled all sorts of terrible things, or at least it has accelerated and amplified the previous low-tech versions of those things. Doxxing and public shaming. Digital vaccine passports. Mass surveillance. The scourge that is social media and online dating.
Like you, I also write code for a living. But my pessimism has nothing to do with my knowledge or lack thereof of how technology functions. It’s the effects that are the problem, not how it works.
And this is just pessimism about what we have here, right now. We haven’t even gotten to the abuses that will likely be possible in the not-so-distant future. I live in fear of the day when the last manual car has been taken off the road and only self-driving cars are legal.
Fellow code monkey, why are these things worse than the vices of yesteryear? Is it because they're novel?
It seems to me that we've traded one set of abuses for another. Today, instead of being called out for eccentric behavior and socially shunned, you get doxed or canceled. Today, instead of being invigilated by the local priest (and his fans around town), you're surveilled by all the devices around you. But, like then, you have options to defend yourself, at least to some extent.
In other words, this is just another episode in the eternal fight between the collective and individual. Everything you're saying truly exists. But is it really more awful or is it nostalgia?
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It's not the tech, it's the distrust of your rulers. But rulers have always had ways of preventing or eliminating protests even without rerouting self driving cars. It involved blood but at a time when people were more used to it anyway. Yes, the AI will serve the ruling class but so did law, religion and much of what we call civilization.
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