alt Hacker NewsEconomies of scale is how society lowers the cost of meeting the demand for things people want. Uber, Airbnb, and Meta have negative externalities that have gone “unpriced” in the market because our policy makers are incompetent. But at large, they’ve net benefitted society, many more times over than they’ve hurt anyone whose job was displaced from the cycle of innovation and those individuals have found new jobs, or adapted to compete (taxis making a comeback, except they’re not fucking scumbags anymore because they don’t have a monopoly).
If you believe technology and innovation is characterized as “using economies of scale to exploit the average person” you’d necessarily come to some pretty weird positions throughout history.
Take the natural ice trade for example. Were refrigerators an evil means of exploiting and displacing the 100,000 workers who powered the natural ice trade? Or was it a better solution to the public health hazards, brutal dangerous working conditions, and high price paid by society to the Ice Monopoly?
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I am not weighing in on the fundamental issue you are debating with the other person, but clearly Facebook has provided no benefit to society lol wth
It's just a parasitic, largely useless, and often actively harmful advertising machine. The only possible positive it has done is transfer a lot of money and capital to employees who often come from middle-class backgrounds.
I vehemently disagree that meta or airbnb have done more to benefit society than not, but I'll take the overall argument; that technology, on the whole, benefits society overall.
Which is true, on the long term. But we have no reason to believe that AI will be different in that case. In the short term, technologies have absolutely been used to exploit the average person; the industrial revolution benefited us all over time, but tell that to the kids killed in early industrial manufacturing centers.
Look at how the transition to globalization went in the 80's-10's; entire sections of the US were essentially shut down because of the improvements in communication technology, and unless you're in support of the current state of the US, you'd agree we're still dealing with the consequences of that.
Even in your own case, there's an argument to be made that CFCs meant the overall damage to humanity was greater than the ice trade, just spread out over more people. The exploitation was similar, but it was less visible. Even if we've eventually reached a point where people were better off, you can't argue that the health of the average person was never exploited for the benefit of the few.
To be clear, I'm not separating myself from this; I'm fully aware that work I've done has displaced people. I'm just chafing against the moralizing around it. It feels like the people making these arguments are trying to remove themselves from responsibility while continuing to build on top of companies like Amazon, that are built on top of exploiting people that absolutely cannot advocate for themselves.