by stego-tech | 2025-06-26 20:32:52+00:00
The poster hits the nail on the head in the summary alone, but I’ll go a step further:

We have been duped for half a century into solving increasingly niche problems whose benefits accrue ever upward beyond our reach, and whose harms are forcibly distributed across an unwilling populace. On the whole, technology has done exponentially more harm (mass surveillance, psychological exploitation, automated weapons, pollution, contamination of data, destruction of natural resources, outsourcing, dehumanization) than good (medical technology, targeted therapies, knowledge exchanges, Wikipedia, global collaboration). Instead of focusing on the broader issues of survival staring us in the face, we have willingly ceded agency and sovereignty to a handful of unelected Capitalists who convinced us that this invention will somehow, finally, inevitably solve all our ills and enable a utopia.

Not one of the boosters of any prior modern “technological revolution” can point to societal good that outpaced the harms caused by their creation. Not NFTs, not cryptocurrency, and certainly not AI. Even Machine Learning has seen more harmful than helpful use, despite its genuine benefits to human society and technological progress, enabling surveillance advertising and the disappearance of dissidents instead of customized healthcare and efficient distribution of resources in real-time.

Yet whenever someone dares to point this out, we’re decried by proponents as Luddites - ignoring the fact the real plight of the Luddites wasn’t anti-technology, but anti-Capital. To call us Luddites derisively is analogous to admitting the indefensibility of your position: You’re acknowledging we are right to be angry for being harmed for the sake of Capital alone, but that you will do everything in your power to stop our cause. We aren’t saying we want technology to disappear and to revert to the dark ages, we’re demanding that technology benefits everyone more than it harms them. We demand it be inclusive rather than exclusive. It should amplify our good works and minimize societal harms.

AI in the current context is the societal equivalent of suicide. It robs us of the remaining, dwindling resources we have on yet another thin, hollow promise that this time, it will be different. Four years ago we literally had Crypto Miners lighting up Coal Power Plants while proclaiming cryptocurrency and NFTs will solve climate change somehow, and now AI companies are firing up fuel turbines and nuclear power plants while promising the same thing.

We need to stop obsessing over technical minutiae and showing blind faith in technology, and realize that these are all tools of varying utility. We have mounting evidence that AI is causing more harm than good now, and that there is no practicable roadmap where its benefits will outweigh its harms in the near term. For all this obsessing over share value and “progress”, we need to accept the gruesome reality that our talent, our intelligence, and our passion is being manipulated to harm the masses - and that we alone can decide to STOP. It’s about taking our heads out of the sand, objectively assessing the whole of the system and superstructure, and taking action to change things.

More fuzzy code and token prediction isn’t going to save our asses or make the world a better place. The only way to do that is to acknowledge our role in the harms we perpetuate and choosing to stop them, regardless of the harms to ourselves in the moment.