Programmer Humor

but you need to hit it with a hockey stick otherwise the science doesn't happen

People think I’m crazy for apologising to my roomba when I trip on it and for saying please and thank you to Alexa and Siri, but I won’t be surprised at all when the robots rise up, considering how our scientists are treating them. I’ll have a track record of being nice, and that has to count for something, right?

Since when were Boston Dynamics robots sentient?

Those are just brainless bodies, currently. They don't have sentience and have no ability to suffer. They're nothing more than hydraulics, servos, and gyros. I'd be more concerned about mistreatment of advanced AI in disembodied form, something we're dabbling potentially close to currently.

"Brave New World" warned against genetic engineering, but that's turned out to be a great technology for curing diseases and improving crop yields.

I was still a teen when I read the book, but that wasn't really my take from it when I read it. We are still far away from genetically designing human babies. And you also overlooked the part about oppression/control via distractions such as drugs and entertainment.

Just because some tech bros can make money from the Torment Nexus it does not become a good idea. Profit is not a great judge of ethics and value.

I stopped reading when you said the goal of tech companies is to solve real world problems. The only goal of tech companies is to create products that will make them a profit. To believe anything else is delusional. That's kind of why our society is crumbling and the planet is dying.

Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush. If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.

Genetic engineering is enabling us to harvest monocultures that completely fuck up the ecosystem, in the long run not only underlining important dynamics such as species needed for polluting plants, but also the very soil on which they grow.

It's been a while since I read Brave New World, but that also didn't stand out to me as the most central part of his critique to me. In my reading it was about how modern society was going to turn us into essentially pacified consumer slaves going from one artificial hormonal kick to the other, which seems to be what social media is for these days.

Things that seem like short term good ideas, and certainly great business ideas, might fuck things up big time in the long run. That's why it's useful to have some people doing the one things humans are good at - thinking creatively - involved in processes of change, and not just leave it to the short term interests of capital.

Maybe I read things too literally, but I thought "Fahrenheit 451" was about a governing class controlling the masses by limiting which ideas, emotions, and information were available.

"Brave New World" struck me as also about controlling the masses through control of emotions, ideas, and information (and strict limits on social mobility).

It's been too long since I read "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", but I thought of it as a celebration of human ingenuity, with maybe a tinge of warning about powerful tools and the responsibility to use them wisely.

I don't see a lot of altruistic behaviour from those introducing new technologies. Yes, there is definitely some, but most of it strikes me as "neutral" demand creation for profit or extractive and exploitive in nature.

Palantir exists, every cyberpunk warned us, and it’s definitely not going to be good for the average person

When they imagine a new technology they aren't going to get paid unless they come up with a story in which that new technology poses some kind of threat that the heroes need to overcome.

You don't read much sci fi, do you?

On the other other hand, maybe we only understand the dangers of the Torment Nexus and use it responsibly because science fiction authors warned techy people who are into that subject about how it could go wrong, and the people who grew up reading those books went out of their way to avoid those flaws. We do seem to have a lot more of the technologies that sci-fi didn't predict causing severe problems in our society.

How about the following examples:

• Autonomous weaponized drones with automatic targeting (Terminator)
• Mass surveillance and voice recording (1984)
• Nuclear weapons (HG Wells, The World Set Free)
• Corporate controlled hypercommercialized microtransaction-filled metaverse (Snow Crash)
• Netflix to create real-life Squid Game (Squid Game (speedrun!))
• "MoviePass to track people's eyes through their phone's cameras to make sure they don't look away from ads" (Black Mirror)
• Soulless AI facsimile of dead relatives (Black Mirror)

Tech companies ... goal isn't just to recreate something from a sci-fi novel for the sake of it; rather, they are motivated by solving real-world problems.

This is so naively wrong it's laughable. Ever heard of profit motive?

Speaking of Fahrenheit 451, weren't there seashells mentioned in that book? Little devices you could stuff in your ears to play music? And those ended up being uncannily similar to the wireless earbuds we have today?

What did they do this time?

Totally is. Because it makes the AI look and feel much better than the smoke-and-mirrors it actually is.