Computers are fun but as a society we have taken them too far.

Submitted by flabberghaster in just_post

Half of our economy is based on stuff that only exists on the computer. We have built a world of illusions to inhabit.

It used to be that you would just take something you were doing and then add a computer in there to speed it up. That makes sense. Use computers to help you keep track of your inventory or figure out math problems to help figure out what you need. Great. I can support this.

But now it seems all the capital is being allocated in increasingly self referential ways in the tech industry. How is Facebook expecting to keep making money? They make money by getting you to look at their website and then getting other people to pay them to show you ads while you do it. But looking at their website doesn't get you anything.

Same with google, but they put ads on other people's websites, and a lot of their money goes in to making it easier and more appealing for you to look at websites more. That's why they have chrome and Android: make it easier to browse and make an OS that let's you look at websites on the go (while also tracking you more).

Amazon makes their money by running other peoples websites for you to look at.

Netflix makes money by.... Well they don't make money lmao.

All of this human effort is going in to trying to think of ways to get people to look at websites. There's so many problems in the world and more sophisticated websitrs can't solve any of them! It drives me insane to see the colossal misallocation of resources towards building a world of illusions that just distract us while the world is dying. We know it's dying. We are watching it die around us and everyone wants to do something but instead of that, we get NFTs and the metaverse. Everything is just going in to increasingly convoluted scams.

There are so many smart people working in jobs that produce nothing of value because you can't support yourself doing the things that really need to be done.

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voxpoplar wrote

computers are meant to be for playing silly little games and talking to you tiny friends who live in the computer

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hollyhoppet wrote (edited )

I see it as a resource allocation problem that is caused by a motive for profit rather than a motive to make things that address needs of the people as a whole. A lot of software intended for really good and helpful purpose just gets completely ignored or is total garbage.

There are probably applications in computing for making our industries and infrastructure more efficient and safer that we can't even dream of. For example, I used to work for a company that built software used to simulate municipal water networks to do things such as track leaks, minimize water waste, and ensure efficient temperature management. The company was about 10 people large but the software serviced hundreds of cities, many in arid or desert regions of the world, where water conservation is paramount.

Unfortunately, the software was extremely buggy, as cities just don't have the money to compete with the amazons and googles of the world. Sometimes I wonder how amazing we could have made those tools if we had 25, or hell, 100 people.

No, I don't think we've taken computers too far. I think we've been coerced to attend to diversions that largely benefit those with access to the levers of power. I think in a liberated society we could take the wealth of talent and science we have and use it to solve actual problems.

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flabberghaster OP wrote (edited )

Replying to hollyhoppet (#13,005)

Yeah I agree with that. I think there's definitely good use cases for computers to help us solve important needs.

I also think there's just things we already know the solution to, but don't get enough investment interest. And under capitalism, nothing is invested in unless someone thinks it can make them money.

I was kind of just typing whatever was coming in to my head; it wasn't really as coherent as I'd like it to be.

I don't think computers are bad per se. It was more that I think too much human effort is being put in to unimportant things to make quick easy money, and currently the frontier of quick easy money is 'the computing space.'

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