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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, for the vast majority of people, and hence for society, we are past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to truly improving the world with technology. We should now switch from unfettered development to trying to be more sustainable with the tools that we have.

Academia has become a game and tech development has become driven by pure consumerism in the race to replace human relationships with the experience of "The Product" so that we have to continually upgrade to maintain any semblance of social cohesion.

There is very little left in tech development that is good. We should think about being more sustainable instead.

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The Amish decided that a few hundred years ago.

Tech not invented but popular in sci-fi like transporters or replicators could end hunger or change how we move. 3d printing has reach a general price point on par with other manufacturing but when it does it could change things.

Plenty left that is good and necessary. Don't give up because llms and social networks are overhyped.

Agree with your point about tech, and I don't know a lot about academia to disagree.

One of my issues as someone who works in tech is that it so much capital has poured in and so much attention was on the field that there are relatively few innovations where one can create value. OpenAI being an exception that also proves the rule. A true innovation that literally needs billions of $ to have a chance of happening. Microsoft or Amazon didn't need that kind of money to build successful companies on the back of new business models.

This is driven by incentives though...

The same incentives that enable google to exist, then push the same company to be "less good" by prioritizing growth and public market interests.

As long as you borrow capital, there is always a cost on incentives.

Worse than diminishing returns, today we should expect a new invention to be used against consumers rather than improve the world for us.

Consider the DVR. It transformed the experience of watching television before cable companies figured out they needed to acquire it and worsen it. The damage (to them) is done, we got used to fast forwarding through commercials and now that's a necessary feature with cable.

That could never happen today. Profit, advertising, and surveillance are too strongly built into the process of invention right now. Technology companies have mastered enshittification on a level that older industries never innovated on their own.

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