and so much faster. The access to information it provides is so amazing; I really wish it existed when I was young. The down side is that there is also an enormous amount of crap and deception, and social media is turning out to be detrimental in a lot of respects. We didn't have anything like it when I was a teenager, and that was probably a good thing, considering how toxic social relations could get even among small circles. There was a thing called a slam book, a spiral notebook that got passed around and the kids would write comments about other kids, and it got pretty poisonous and hurtful. Social media amplified the slam book exponentially, glad I never had to be a victim of that. People can be especially shitty when they can hide behind some form of anonymity, which might be the most serious consequence of the internet and social media. There are no filters and no effective fact-checking mechanisms and no consequences for saying whatever the hell you feel like saying. Valuable information is at your fingertips but so is the opportunity to be a total dick to someone you don't know just because you feel like it, or the victim of someone else you don't know who has taken the opportunity to be a total dick to you just because they feel like it.

moderation. But the larger platforms get, the more likely they are to abandon or automate moderation, and pressure to keep growing the platform works against moderation. I've run or helped run forums with moderation systems ranging from moderator approval before any new message can appear (other than messages from a moderator or admin), to moderator approval for newcomers' messages, to filters to block messages containing certain words (and I've seen typos trigger those). A couple of years ago I was invited to help moderate a very large forum with several moderators that I was told was also using AI to assist moderation, but I don't know what type of AI because I turned it down (too busy on other platforms).

are rapidly reshaping the landscape of modern life, giving us incredible potential for increasing our productivity and enhancing our creativity going forward.

Digital music seemed like the greatest thing. But word processing was speeding up work and face it, layoffs began there. Fewer typists because the existing ones worked faster. Then they flattened the corporate hierarchy - laying off execs and pushing tech to the lower workers to do the job, or making those remaining do their own typing.

How much toxic waste have we built and burned through. Is 5% of it recycled?

We doom scroll. Human interactions are worse. Everything is worse. Everyone scrambling to keep up.

Just as with the Industrial Revolution, big technological and cultural advances benefit some and leave others behind. It rewires history and there's no real "opt out" unless you go full Luddite or join a cult.

I see the digital age as a net positive for scientific progress, but it's had a hugely corrosive effect on human interaction.

The positives are not being harnessed while the negatives (massive misinformation for one) are running amok. I don't expect anyone to agree with me.

consider yourself as having exceeded expectations.

There was a brief period when early adopters were creating community and value at a heady rate. Then the Internet was widely adopted and monitized in ways that allowed oligarchs to rise, thrive, and control, bringing us the current dystopia and its brightest symbol, DJT.

I find all the services available on the internet, wonderful! Makes life so much easier as it gets harder physically. AI. Is something I know little about. Not for my generation to worry about.

“The saddest aspect of life now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom”

do more harm than good.

I first got online in the mid-1980s, before there was a world wide web, and the main thing I did for two years then was run an international forum on technology and politics, one that put a lot of emphasis on ethics. Back then, none of the many techies I met seemed as ethics-free as many AI peddlers today. Which was nice. And I loved being able to chat with new friends around the world. Especially since I had been healing from a back injury when I first got online and couldn't easily get out to my favorite bars (one for live music, mostly blues, and the other to meet a group of friends including academics, writers, musicians, and a poet who later became a poet laureate; chatting with mostly techies online was something that would never have occurred to me if a techie I'd met offline hadn't suggested it as a way to prevent cabin fever).

I quit that a couple of years later, then about two years after that got back online again at the request of a business associate in NY who wanted to use email. There was still no world wide web, and once I was back online, I ended up subscribing to multiple ISPs for online contact with different people. One was mostly for business connections, others depending on which ISPs were most popular with family and friends.

I was glad to see the world wide web, and I enjoyed online shopping and search engines.

Never liked Facebook because I saw it immediately start decimating most message boards, taking up people's time with trivial chitchat, endless notifications, and games designed to be addictive (never understood the addiction to FarmVille, but I knew people, one a close relative, who played it endlessly).

I'd say the public side of the internet started to become really harmful with deliberately addictive social media. That was on top of the hidden threats from hacking, surveillance and data mining.

Generative AI has been harmful since it was unleashed a few years ago.

Practically, the biggest life-changers to me are the cell phone (and infrastructure) and GPS. I missed my Mom at the airport decades ago and it took all evening to find her (she took a cab to my home) in the days of landline phones.

Books are available on the internet. Vast amounts of information (I totally avoid garbage)

Others? I built computers from kits (I mean soldering hundreds of sockets and chips into S-100 computer cards) when there were no personal computers, and had a blast and created a good career.

Philosophically: Open Source software is wildly liberative, but takes evangelists to make it truly so (and there's only one ME)

Downside? Since the day "dot com" was unleashed, the internet (and much of life) became a cesspool and killing field.

That said, I made a living partly in aerospace, in the company "We're the dot in dot-com" (Sun) and in University computer support and lots of other areas.

The difference between helping/liberating people and exploiting people IS A CHOICE.

Many/most techies "Choose Poorly"

I grew up with
Thoreau "Men have become the machines of their machines".
Lewis Mumford "The Myth of the Machine"
Ted Nelson "Computer Lib; Dream Machines"
and others

I built kits!! Technology was fun. Sometimes, it still is.

---------------------------
What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelley:
https://kk.org/thetechnium/what-technology/

So, looking at the evolution of life and the long-term histories of past technologies, what are the long-term trajectories of the technium? What does technology want?

Possibilities
To increase diversity 

To maximize freedom/choices

To expand the space of the possible

Efficiencies 

To increase specialization/uniqueness 

To increase power density 

To increase density of meaning

To engage all matter and energy

To reach ubiquity and free-ness 

To become beautiful

Complexity
To increase complexity 

To increase social co-dependency

To increase self-referential nature

To align with nature

Evolvability

To accelerate evolvability

To play the infinite game

to all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips, we would evolve into a more educated and better society. Unfortunately, it rapidly devolved into a cesspool with a few rays of sunshine here and there. For some, it's been a boon. For others, it's taken over their lives. The arrival of cellphones compounded the problem. How many people - especially young people - view the world through the lens of their phone's camera. They've paid hundreds of dollars for concert tickets, for example, then watch it through the camera. It's as if real life has disappeared. Throw in the widespread bullying and threats than come with social media and it seems like what is not real is more important than what is real.

I was leaving my subdivision. At the entrance were about a dozen teenagers waiting for the bus. About half male and half female.

Every one of them were looking at their cell phones.

They were not talking to each other, just staring and scrolling.

No interaction whatsoever.

That cannot be a good thing.

Also, I've seen many people jaywalking across busy streets looking down at their phones texting. Ridiculous.

The internet is my lifeline for everything from paying bills to ordering grocery deliveries.

Although I don't like what's happening with AI, I believe that the positives far outweigh the negatives.

for most people.

And with AI now helping more with data mining, you might be charged more for groceries depending on what AI knows about you.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/instacart-price-discrepancies-investigation/

Up until a certain point in time I would say the technology definitely improved our lives.

But I think there was an inflection point where the good things it brought us leveled out while the bad things took off.

It feels like phones, streaming, internet, social media, etc. have all peaked and have just become a way to exploit us for eyeballs, data and subscriptions. In some cases the delivered value leveled off but in some cases it has outright declined. It has even been given a name (Enshittification) as technology gets worse to maximize monetized ROI to the tech giants.

All in all, I think the curve peaked about 10 years ago. You could move that needle about 5years plus or minus in either direction and I think it probably does vary among the various types of tech. But somewhere along that time frame, I think we tipped over from being users to being cannon fodder.

Having said that, not sure I would want to roll it backwards. But I could definitely see~2015 as a peak.

No matter where you go people are wearing headphones and/or talking on their phones. They are unaware or uninterested in the person in front of them. You turn your head because you hear someone talking, and they are talking to their phone. Its like nobody can stand to be present in the real world. People can't live without their cell phones.

The best thing about cell phones is that they make us all a little safer. The worst thing is that they cut us off from the world around us.

The NEW nuclear weapon that destroys our democracy! (maybe our planet)

not confident AI won't wreak economic havoc.

Having information at my fingertips has been helpful, educational, has saved me money, and has made life easier overall.

When I watch TURN, an AMC (now on netfix) series on the Revolutionary War and Washington's Culper spy ring, I can't help but be amazed at how much we get done with our immediate communications: phone, email, text, cellphones, twitter, etc.

I think we need better rules about social media, which can be dangerous. And I'm looking forward to the long term results from Australia's banning SM for children under 16.

So I’d say so far, on the whole, we’re way worse off.

Stupid people are dangerous.

My roll in the computer lab was the fool they kept around when they had to fool-proof some software. I was also the guy a harried teaching assistant could point to when someone needed basic help. Go ask him...

Now I'm pretty much a Luddite. DU is my only "social media." I block all the well known social media sites, including bluesky. They seem to be mostly noise to me and besides I don't want them tracking me. I block advertising aggressively too. I'll pay to make advertising go away on sites I visit frequently. If that's not an option, and they insist I turn off my advertising blockers, well, fuck them. I don't have to look at their site. I apply the same rule to television.

I was very late to get a cell phone, and that was mostly at my family's insistence. It's still flip phones ( like Star Trek! ) that I use for phone calls, texts, and sometimes as a camera. The camera is hardly any better than the cheap disposable film cameras I used to keep on hand, believing that the best camera to have in an unexpected situation is the one you've got. I rarely carry expensive cameras for casual use because I'm very good at loosing or breaking things or having them stolen.

My favorite computer is still the Atari 800 series. Computers and networks were simple enough then that one person could understand them in their entirety, both hardware and software.

The internet is very similar to the early days of radio, it can be used for good or evil. On one side of the Atlantic you had FDR and his fireside chats, on the other side you had Hitler.

we reached the phones-glued-to-our-hands stage. I am positive we're going to look like the movie "WALL-E" before long.