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Comment by pandoro | Hacker News Reader

Depends on your point of view. Has the web been a net positive overall? If your criteria is "instant access to any information" or "catalyze more technological progress" then positive, if your criteria is "young people's mental health" or "how easy it is to control the public's perception about a certain topic" then negative in my opinion. It's all relative.

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I judge it in the aggregate. Overall, we have higher standard of living than people 30 years ago.

If you judge on aggregate then "Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive" is nonsense.

You cannot judge aggregate positively and conclude that therefore each segment was positive.

> If you judge on aggregate then "Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive" is nonsense.

It's not nonsense. If you think so, provide one great technology that has been a net negative.

That's quite easy.

Fracking

Social media infinite scrolling and targeted ads

Short form videos (tik tok, YouTube shorts, instagram reels)

Coming soon: Deep sea mining

Some of these are not great technologies, you might say. Well if they're impactful enough to turn everyone I love into a phone zombie and make the political landscape violent and insane then that's enough.

Those are just specific applications of some technology, not comparable to AI in general.

> It's not nonsense.

Yes, it is. You cannot go "overall progress was positive" and conclude "every change was positive".

> provide one great technology that has been a net negative

nuclear weapons + nuclear energy (luckily we had no nuclear war, but benefits here are not worth risks)

AI in general and LLM specifically so far

smartphones in general and social media specifically

maybe internet overall, maybe computers overall

biological weapons

leaded gasoline

(I know that you already excluded "social media" as "specific applications of some technology", I disagree with it)

>nuclear weapons + nuclear energy (luckily we had no nuclear war, but benefits here are not worth risks)

>AI in general and LLM specifically so far

>smartphones in general and social media specifically

>maybe internet overall, maybe computers overall

I disagree that these are net negatives.

So we have "biological weapons" and "leaded gasoline" as accepted examples.

No. We do not. So many people are nostalgic about 30 years where you could afford basic things on minimum wage for a reason.

30 years ago was the 90’s, when just about everything peaked.

The things I’d be truly missing from today 30 years ago, would be the advances in medicine really and the fact that we don’t have the ozone layer threat.

Most other things have peaked back then. Rising kids was definitely easier, and healthier.

This is just nostalgia. Most things are objectively better today.

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