Comment by dasil003

The idea of tech as a tool of oppression is something that increasingly bothers me. I got into tech because I just liked building stuff with computers, and at the time I naively thought it seemed democratizing. Looking back I think this was largely because of the general public’s cluelessness about computers and the internet, so technically minded people with a little bit of access had a huge amount of power in shaping those early online spaces. I thought the future of tech would reflect the ideas of the builders, but I learned that’s not how it works. If something has potential as an instrument of power, that potential will be developed by those with power. Tech, especially the global internet has proven to have incredible scaling characteristics that can be harnessed for massive profit and control. AI is now promising a similar return in kind for whoever controls it. I’m not sure how to counterbalance this consolidation of power, but I do think it should be our major political project of the next 20 years or things are going to get ugly.