Technology

People who think you need to have optimist outlook of the future to be able to somehow manifest that into being are fucking idiots. I can enjoy my life, while being pretty hopeless about the future for human race, while still trying to do whatever I can to try to make things better.

If you can't do whatever you believe is right, because you are "pessimistic" about it working the way you want, then in my opinion you have fundamentally flawed view of the life as a whole, and probably don't know how to deal with negative emotions in a healthy way.

"We act because we have values, not because we know that our actions will definitely succeed"

-Jem Bendell.

And on topic of resiting tech, I work in IT and have more versatile tech skills than most people I know. Show me something that works and is useful, and I won't resist it just because it is new. But if you keep trying to sell me bullshit disguised as progress, than I will always tell you to fuck off.

If your AI product doesn't get mass adoption because of my negativity, then it is a shit product.

Comparisons in the article are also stupid. Sure I don't like coal used over nuclear, but nuclear is also kinda overhyped tech, that has been given so much benefit of doubt, but failed to deliver. Sure there has been some people who are irrationally afraid of it.

"Countries such as India, Brazil, Mexico and Thailand have run from vapes – outlawing them, while permitting traditional tobacco cigarettes for 1.8 billion of their citizens. Better unsafe than sorry."

Not a cigarette fan, but harder to ban those at this point, but with vapes it is still doable, and if not to protect peoples health, then maybe to avoid e-waste from disposable vapes.

"In the US, Robert F Kennedy Jr runs from vaccines towards natural herd immunity – although he might be having second thoughts now that the risks have become less abstract." Sure use antivaxxer idiot as an example of a tech critic, instead of anyone credible.

Same with 5G, sure there are conspiracy theories about it, but how about just asking wtf we need that fast internet for everywhere? For my phone use past 50 megabytes it doens't really make any difference if it gets faster.

"Stories that don’t make us forget that brain chips can liberate paraplegics, robot dogs can protect us from landmines, AI can prevent super bugs and VR can connect us rather than cut us off from reality – even if their vibes are “a bit Black Mirror”."

This last sentence really revealed the author as a tech bro. -Superbug thing is overhyped, they had used same AI for previous similar study, giving AI extra context that made it easier to solve that. Still impressive, but not representative of AI as a whole.

-VR is the rich kid of tech, always given money and second chance and always fails to deliver anything useful.

-Robot dogs and landmines, really? How about police using robot dogs to target protestors? Much more likely scenario for most people, and we already have used robots to defuse bombs for a long while now.

-Brain chips might liberate paraplegics and then company goes bust or stops supporting the product, re disabling that person. Has already happened with other tech meant to help disabled people. If I had to choose between neuralink (or anything from Musk) and being wheelchair bound for rest of my life, I would still take the latter.

I always consider both good and bad sides of tech, but most of the tech we are hyping now seems to come more down than upsides tbh.

/rant but this article really annoyed me.