The author is still grieving by watching a civilisation changing technology just passing by. Every single one of the problems they note applies to any technology that existed.
The internet produced 4chan. Produced scammers. Produced fraud. Instrumental in spreading child porn. Caused suicides. Many people lost their lives due to bullying on the internet. Many develop have addictions to gaming.
To anyone who has given it some thought, any sufficiently advanced technology usually affects both in good and bad ways. Its obvious that something that increases degrees of freedom in one direction will do so in others. Humans come in and align it.
There's some social credit to gain by being cynical and by signalling this cynicism. In the current social dynamics - being cynical gives you an edge and makes you look savvy. The optimistic appear naive but the pessimists appear as if they truly understand the situation. But the optimists are usually correct in hindsight.
We know how the internet turned out despite pessimists flagging potential problems with it. I know how AI will turn out. These kind of articles will be a dime a dozen and we will look at it the same way as we look at now at bygone internet-pessimists.
This is response not just to this article, but a few others.
I think you underestimate people's grievance with technology. If you make a poll my guess is more than 50% of people will say the world was a better place pre-social media.
If the AI tech keeps going at the direction it's going now, more and more people will start believing the world would be better if the internet and computer had never been invented.
You talk like the internet being a net positive is a given. It really isn't, especially after it's proven that it doesn't democratize power (see Arab Spring, and China, and the US, and everywhere.)
Its usually the educated and elite PMC types who have grievance with technology. They secured their status and have lucrative jobs mostly with the help of technology and they are too scared to have anything threaten their position in society. It is highly hypocritical to behave this way but they don't seem to have the self awareness to observe it objectively.
Ask any poor person in India what their sentiment is with tech - it is usually optimism.
> You talk like the internet being a net positive is a given. It really isn't, especially after it's proven that it doesn't democratize power (see Arab Spring, and China, and the US, and everywhere.)
The world is far more democratic now than before and I attribute it to technology because it reduces information asymmetry.
I’m in India, and I sure as shit haven’t seen what you are talking about.
In 2025, we lost 22931 crores to cyber fraud - about 2.7 billion USD. People are now saying that they are relieved if the losses were only single digit crores lost.
India invented digital house arrests. There’s entire districts/cities where the primary revenue stream is from scams. Cops don’t want to involve themselves with cyber crimes because they can’t resolve them.
India’s information economy is so broken, that the idea that we are less or more democratic is not even relevant.
The amount of revenge porn, non-consensual intimate imagery released per day is heart wrenching.
I REALLY want to agree with you. I too want to talk about the good that tech can do. India cannot afford to talk about the good without dealing with the bad.
The motto of move fast and break things assumes someone else will pick up the pieces. This doesn’t hold true for India - we need to pick up the pieces.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of overindexing on local issues. On a holistic level internet brings people to the same level by democratising knowledge.
I’ll ask you this: would India be better off without internet? If your ultimate goal were democracy, would you end internet to promote democracy in India?
> The world is far more democratic now than before and I attribute it to technology because it reduces information asymmetry
That is fantasy. Information technology has created an unprecedented level of information asymmetry and the gap is widening everyday as the total computing capacity grows.
Before information era, the ruling class was roughly as blind as peasants. Population census took years, and sometimes outright impossible. The opaqueness was two-way. Now it's one way - people in power know everything about the citizens.
Take two countries. One with open access to information in the way you described and another country where internet is not allowed. Which one do you think will be more democratic?
(hint: there already exist examples like such)
Without information, there is no way a voter may know which person to vote for and whether to believe in them at all and you are easily susceptible towards manipulation.
It will become more clear when you try to answer this hypothetical: if your objective were to bring in more democracy in North Korea, would you allow the global internet to proliferate if you could? According to your theory, it would just make it worse in general.
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> We know how the internet turned out despite pessimists flagging potential problems with it.
A sludge of spyware and addiction machines which employ negative emotion and outrage to drive shareholder value?
"The internet" is a pretty big tent. Everything from text messages to streaming video to online gaming to social media to encyclopedias. I think 15 years ago you could make a strong case that the internet was mostly a net positive, I think now that is much more difficult. If governments are able to fully realise their plans for surveillance and control, it will almost certainly become a net negative. Of course with many positive aspects.
So likewise with AI, we should be careful to not make the same mistakes as we did with the internet so we can realise something that is mostly positive. We could absolutely have a world where AI is as beneficial as you believe it will be, but we don't get there through inaction, we get there by being deeply critical of the negative aspects of AI and ensuring that we don't let a small number of hyper scalers control our access to it.
No internet is not a net negative now. I can't believe I have to say this.
You don't have to say it, but if you want to make that case, it would probably help.
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Prove it.