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Comment by jaredcwhite | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, the ol' "you can't put the genie back in the bottle" argument—which is completely nonsensical.

Everyone can just decide not to use these tools. Simple.

Put another way, take a look at all the cities around the world making great strides to limit motor vehicle usage…and in some areas outright banning cars. Decades ago, that would have been unthinkable! Today, it's real and it's happening more and more.

Never underestimate the ability for society to wake up from collective amnesia at various junctures and realize, y'know, actually these technologies suck and we can reach for better ones.

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> Everyone can just decide not to use these tools. Simple.

Stated like this it feels like parody of your position. We aren't going to have everyone just deciding to stop using the tools.

We could plausibly get legislation that makes it less attractive for people to make use of these tools in their work, resulting in illustration/translation/programming/etc. still requiring the same amount of human labor for a given output. I don't think any governments are in a particular rush to do this currently, but as you say sentiments can change.

I genuinely don't understand this seeming inability to call for effective activism.

We get people to stop using these tools because we convince them it's wrong to do so. Society becomes convinced of things all the time—norms change, what was once considered fine (let's dump all our toxic waste in the river next to our town! what could go wrong?) suddenly becomes verboten.

I cannot for the life of me grasp nihilistic resignation in the face of Big Tech declaring war on human creativity and flourishing. People, you must fight with every fiber left in your being!

> I cannot for the life of me grasp nihilistic resignation [...]

I agree that change is possible through a hard-fought battle, both legally and socially. On the other hand, "Everyone can just decide not to use these tools. Simple." sounded like a naive expectation to the extent that I'd expect to read it as a strawperson set up by someone making the opposing point that unanimous voluntary relinquishing of easily-available tools, against self-interest, is unrealistic.

I'm also relatively optimistic about the future machine learning. If I thought the change you wanted was entirely impossible, it'd probably be "smug contentment" rather than "nihilistic resignation".

CO2 emissions are ripping and will continue to do so in China and India. You can't stop that train, either. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

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