It's even more dystopian than Bladerunner 2049. From the film it seemed like Joi was a local model that he could even download to his own device.
It's really depressing to me as someone who grew up with the tech optimism of the 80s and 90s to watch how this whole area has transformed into a horror show. Everything since the PC revolution has been a net negative for regular people: mobile devices (addiction, manipulation, mental health crisis), cryptocurrency (gambling, pump and dump scams, ransomware), cloud (no privacy, no data ownership, perpetual rent), streaming (DRM, paltry royalties to artists), and now AI (manipulation, un-filterable spam, political propaganda).
All these technologies are used in very positive ways too, but it seems like that's only for the highly tech-savvy or those with money. If you are neither tech-literate nor wealthy they're weaponized against you.
The ethos of the industry seems to be: if you aren't smart or rich, not only are you fair game but you deserve it. That's the vibe I get from the hyper-elitist ideologies that have proliferated in this culture. I'm talking about things like neoreaction and related ideas.
As a tech person myself I feel like I'm now part of some kind of corrupt wicked black magician priesthood destined to rule over the rest of humanity. If I extrapolate forward to where this is going I see a future where most of humanity is fully addicted to things like infinite feeds, VR games, and AI girlfriends and controlled by misinformation and psychological manipulation. Essentially the bulk of humanity is given an API whereby it can be programmed and marshaled as a service by a mix of the rich, governments, and criminals.
This is exactly cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was by far the most prophetic genre of sci-fi. It achieved this by being optimistic about technology but pessimistic about human beings.
> All these technologies are used in very positive ways too, but it seems like that's only for the highly tech-savvy or those with money. If you are neither tech-literate nor wealthy they're weaponized against you.
Honestly, even if you are wealthy and highly tech-literate they are still weaponized against you. You literally can't protect yourself and still use some products, and some (like the cell phone you carry) are too useful to be avoided. I go out of my way to avoid as much of it as I reasonably can, but technology is leveraged against us everywhere. You can never avoid all of it and still participate meaningfully in society
>As a tech person myself I feel like I'm now part of some kind of corrupt wicked black magician priesthood destined to rule over the rest of humanity
It’s funny to hear the worker bees think this, while all the data and code is really owned by the emergent mega corp. I guess it’s easier to swallow psychologically that you’re part of the secret cast of rulers rather than a cog who is subject to the rubber hose treatment at the slight change in a law like the rest of the workers.
For a group so supposedly smart, a little class consciousness would go a long way.
As my age slowly starts to creep into the earliest phases of "Old Man Yells At Cloud", I find that I'm not distrusting new technologies because they're just ambiently bad because I didn't grow up with them. I find I'm distrusting new technologies... and a generous helping of old ones too... because I don't trust the people behind them.
Not quite the same thing as the traditional "I just don't like anything new".
A good AR toolset sounds like fun. But am I so arrogant as to believe I can resist all the "nudges" that will inevitably be applied to everyone using the tech? There's simply no way the nudges are for my benefit; claims that they are are just part of the marketing campaign.
It's seriously annoying because I'd love to play more with these technologies and figure out how to use them. But it's clear rather a lot of them come with implicit clauses in the contract I'm not willing to sign. I'm not interested in running my political opinions past Silicon Valley AIs. I've got a finite amount of tolerance to poke through with-malice-aforethought uses of addiction mechanics against me to try to figure out how to use technologies to my advantage. And so on. The more amazing the technology, the shittier the deal on offer it seems.
This isn't "old man yells at cloud." This is a subset of a larger realization that dawns on all engineers over time:
A lot of the things you thought were technology problems are actually people problems.
I've come to this realization about a lot of what's bad about the Internet's architecture. It's not because we can't do it differently. It's because there are human social and especially economic incentives that make it this way, and introducing better tech won't change those.
This gets poo-pooed here on HN a lot, but it's also because a lot of software engineers don't have much training in ethics or even a basic ethical framework they can use to say yes or no to a questionable project. For a lot of people "This project is technically interesting to me" is all the justification they need. How the higher-ups end up using the technology is "not my problem as long as I get to develop a cool new algorithm or publish a paper about it!"
We engineers are actively building this cyberpunk dystopia. It's not just springing out of the ether.
> “Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook,” he writes. “You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”
> It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs”, so lacking in class consciousness that we don’t even realise that the tweeting and posting that we’re doing is actually building value in these companies.
Misinformation, maybe. But if people really get addicted, it'll hurt the economy, and then the invisible hand will step in. That's why opiates are illegal
I don't see that. We've given up on the idea that human beings have any value beyond their impact on GDP, so if the lower classes aren't seen as necessary they will be allowed to die on the street.
Addicting them to cybernetic control systems might be seen as a better alternative because it'll allow them to be "monetized" in some way-- make them go get gig jobs, then gamble away their earnings online.
You can see this future already in some cities like San Francisco and across the poorer parts of rural America.
AI girlfriends solve the 'angry single men' (AKA drone AKA incel) issue even better than pornography - and I've seen a lot of public health types touting the benefits of pornography.
It's really depressing to me as someone who grew up with the tech optimism of the 80s and 90s to watch how this whole area has transformed into a horror show. Everything since the PC revolution has been a net negative for regular people: mobile devices (addiction, manipulation, mental health crisis), cryptocurrency (gambling, pump and dump scams, ransomware), cloud (no privacy, no data ownership, perpetual rent), streaming (DRM, paltry royalties to artists), and now AI (manipulation, un-filterable spam, political propaganda).
All these technologies are used in very positive ways too, but it seems like that's only for the highly tech-savvy or those with money. If you are neither tech-literate nor wealthy they're weaponized against you.
The ethos of the industry seems to be: if you aren't smart or rich, not only are you fair game but you deserve it. That's the vibe I get from the hyper-elitist ideologies that have proliferated in this culture. I'm talking about things like neoreaction and related ideas.
As a tech person myself I feel like I'm now part of some kind of corrupt wicked black magician priesthood destined to rule over the rest of humanity. If I extrapolate forward to where this is going I see a future where most of humanity is fully addicted to things like infinite feeds, VR games, and AI girlfriends and controlled by misinformation and psychological manipulation. Essentially the bulk of humanity is given an API whereby it can be programmed and marshaled as a service by a mix of the rich, governments, and criminals.
This is exactly cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was by far the most prophetic genre of sci-fi. It achieved this by being optimistic about technology but pessimistic about human beings.