In hindsight, we could have listened to the people who warned about how the internet would make our lives worse. Can our society withstand another generation of worsening on par with the effects of social media etc?
Whether the internet has made our lives better or worse depends on the perspective (half full or half empty), and is an excellent water cooler conversation. :-)
The internet has objectively made life worse, and the people who say it hasn't haven't experienced the alternatives. Many people will never know true joy because of the internet.
Oh no. I looked at a screen. There goes all my joy...
/s
Objectively worse in some vectors, Objectively better in others. Being able to get medical advice quickly. Being able to communicate to vastly different people broadening your horizons. And yes, more comparisons to make (the thief of joy).
You're an ant to them. All that data they have tells them this action won't hurt them.
An incredibly important turning point of this era is that businesses have learned that they no longer need to fear acting hostile to consumers. Consumers don't practice agency.
2. Customers prioritize convenience and (perceived at least) low-prices over being treated well.
Look at airlines: Unless you happen to be traveling between two major airports, there will typically be at most 2 airlines with a reasonable schedule for the two endpoints, and most people will not pay $100 more for being treated like human beings over cattle.
I mean for starters it’s obviously not true. Almost every electronic device has programming and none of them allow you to run your own arbitrary code. Video game consoles, MP3 players, drones, roombas, TVs. In fact Apple is the one that pioneered the idea of a “personal computer” in the first place, there was no expectation that you could program your devices before this.
There's lots of comments here where people promote trading the freedom of installing arbitrary code for the security of the app store keeping them safe.
> I've been interested in understanding what would make people more amenable to data centers.
We've been slowly boiling alive in the reality that the tech industry has long been evolving to hurt us more and help us less each year. We'd be neutral or welcoming to data centers if we didn't know that storing and processing all that data was going to be used against us.
Also Frank Herbert: "Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
I mean, people are talking about the butlerian jihad without any sense of irony or subtext. Dune is literally a feudal hellscape that takes place in the wake of that event. It didn’t make things better. Lmao
I agree that many people miss the subtle irony of Frank Herbert's books. He seems to be debating himself to a certain extent in that series.
That said, there is no obvious reason to posit that the intergalactic feudal system, CHOAM, or the empire, came to be because of the butlerian jihad. The concrete side effects of the jihad were in fact hyper specialization of cognitive faculties in humans: mentats, guild navigators, and soldiers all possess super human specialized abilities.
Yeah. I'm not saying the jihad was the cause. But elimating AI didn't prevent the feudal system. It didn't really help, in other words. Honestly, I kinda think Herbert just didn't want to have AI or sophisticated robots in his narrative, so he contrived an elaborate reason why that tech doesn't exist.
But it did "help". Mentats had supercomputer computation capabilities; navigators folded space and charted non-collision paths; warriors had robocop like abilities. These were developed precisely because the use of thinking machines was forbidden.
I don't think feudalism is going away one way or another. It persists [in various forms] because of certain biological realities, ranging from genetics to loyalty engendered by familial relations. [This is merely an observation.]
In sum, the argument against current AI trends isn't that once addressed we will wake up in utopia. No. The point is that these natural tendencies of humans are hugely amplified and set in generational stone once the elite have control over thinking machines and lord it over a population that has experienced generationally diminished independent cognitive abilities.
p.s. All this somehow reminded me of 'Spock's Brain' episode of Startrek /g Note: the elite there were overcome because Kirk and his landing team were cognitive high performers ..
I suspect the cause-and-effect in creating the narrative is the reverse of what's in the narraitve: Frank Herbert wanted the intricate dynamics of the Guild and Spice and Mentats and exciting close-quarter combat for a more intriguing narrative. But AI and robots made those all obsolete, so he made it disappear with a handwave of "because Butlerian Jihad."
I always thought the Butlerian Jihad was the biggest plot hole in Dune, but I deeply appreciate the world and narrative it enabled.
There are a number of different things being conflated here. My inital statement was just acknowledging the lack of appreciation of the subtext behind the Butlerian Jihad. People are unironically embracing it, which I gather is not really how the event functions in Dune.
At the level of the text, none of those things you mentioned strike me as positive developments. They just siloed computation to a biological track and those biological resources are employed by those in power, which is the same problem in a different form.
This is an aside, but feudalism is not inevitable. The vestiges of it still exist, but capitalism largely upended it.
The amusing thing and perhaps the reason I've embraced it as my username, is that people around here are bringing it to life in a certain way.
It may not prove to be effective or as momentous as the fictional one, but it began when I saw stickers slapped onto utility poles that read:
DEATH TO CLANKERS
BUTLERIAN JIHAD NOW
And I stopped to read them (because they were posted in a neighborhood where my people's cultural center is) and I pondered the intents and methods of those who were slapping up stickers. Surely this was more than just an in-joke or coy sci-fi reference?
The next time I fell victim to the jihad was with a crop of Lime e-Scooters, again on a block where my people have established businesses. I wanted to rent a Lime. I found one with a full battery. I located it and tried to scan the QR. Guess what? The QR had been sanded completely clean. There was no code, no serial number, nothing to scan and no way to uniquely ID the conveyance. There was only a sticker slapped prominently onto its side:
DEATH TO CLANKERS
BUTLERIAN JIHAD NOW
At this point I began to suspect the initial aims and methods of the "real-life Butlerian Jihadis". It is sort of ironic that they should start so small, by denying micro-mobility to innocent consumers, but perhaps they will graduated to lighting Waymos and Teslas on fire.
That is funny. I don't know. I always kind of cringe when I hear the term clankers. I know people often aren't serious but it seems like maybe we shouldn't be trying to invent new slurs.
I think your other comment is basically right that what Herbert really wanted was a fantasy epic with feudal structures, knife fights, and humans with near-magical abilities, and reverse engineered a vaguely plausible future that might bring that about without invoking any actual magic. Arguing whether this is supposed to be considered "good" or not is kind of beside the point. Fiction novels are mostly meant to present worlds that are interesting to read about more than advocating for or against those same conditions replicating in the real world.
The only thing I've really taken from what Herbert himself said, not something a character in one of his books said, is distrust of messiahs and centralized power being an inherently corrupting force, even in the hands of good people.
Unfortunately, I would have to say right now my bets on the most plausible fictional future becoming reality is WALL-E.
You think his argument was that we should welcome the likes of Google controlling the direction of our cognition? The book was about the dangers of asserting our independence from those who control technology? Admittedly, I haven't read the sequels.
They didn't assert independence though. That's my point. They just siloed computation to biological organisms, and it led to the concentration of power anyway.
An aspect of AI that's really underdiscussed is just the basic switch from doing all your searches logged out to now being forced to be logged in somewhere. That much alone is disqualifying for me.
Just because you're not logged in doesn't mean that your searches aren't being stored and monitored nor that they can't be subpoenaed. It is possible to be pretty anonymous on the internet, but it's not easy.
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