We really seem to indulge in dystopian thinking. And we love it. And I really wonder why that happens. I don’t know how you feel about this, but it really stresses me out. And it kind of bothers me that it’s still a lot of times easier to imagine the end of the world than how we could live on a sustainable planet.
Archive
Many of the concerns of the cyberpunk genre have come true. The rise of corporate power, ubiquitous computation, and the like. Robot limbs and cool VR goggles. But in many ways, it’s far far worse.
We have a lot of proposals on how technology should work in this society, how we want to avoid all the dangers we can see that others cannot see. But we do a very very bad job at communicating it.
So here’s what happened. If you tell people you’re going to have this super-open, absolutely non-commercial, money-free thing, but it has to survive in this environment that’s based on money, where it has to make money, how does anybody square that circle? How does anybody do anything? And so companies like Google that came along, in my view were backed into a corner. There was exactly one business plan available to them, which was advertising.
When you look at your online profile, is that really you? It’s a representation of you that can be acted on when you’re not there. But where do you end and the machine begins? The thing is that humans and technology have coevolved with each other over time, being very very cocreative. We have survived because of technology, and technology has survived because of us.
When we talk about technologies such as AI, and policy, one of the main problems is that technological advancement is fast, and policy and democracy is a very very slow process. And that could be potentially a very big problem if we think that AI could be potentially dangerous.