No spoilers
Butch:
Oh no...it's been a couple of days and none of us have played.
Now, before Looty joined, this would quickly and thoroughly derail into nonsense. Humorous, sometimes raunchy nonsense, but nonsense.
I've noticed that, since Looty has been here, we derail into incredibly esoteric, erudite non-nonsense. So who knows where this will go? Philosophy? Sorceresses? BOTH?
It's a whole new world.
Loothound:
Well, I'm up for any good talking (although I'm going to reserve judgement on raunchy nonsense). I got really busy yesterday afternoon, and didn't really get a chance to comment on the technology discussion that I started with my rant. If people don't mind going back to that well, I'd like to bring up a few points related to it.
Butch:
Judge not the raunchy nonsense.
But also, what are we gonna play next?
Loothound:
I obviously don't actually have a problem with raunchy humor. Do you not remember the sorceress with her toy of magic wood song…
I thought that we had settled on Phantom Liberty, but I open to other suggestions. While transferring the data to the new PS I realized that getting Platinum on AC Mirage is pretty low hanging fruit at this point. Also, I've been checking out Spider's Thread in Ghostwire. So, basically, I'm not in a rush for anything.
Butch:
I can do Phantom Liberty.
Femmy?
Feminina:
Phantom Liberty is fine. In the meantime, I've been in meetings, so...uh...I got nothing. If Loothound still has deep thoughts on technology that we never got to, this could be the chance.
Loothound:
I pretty much always have thoughts on technology, and I was hoping to be part of the discussion the other day. Unfortunately work didn't give me the time. I'll throw out the highly abridged version, since things are pretty crazy at work today, too (also, I doubt that anyone has the patience for the full rant). Fortunately, I can also keep it relevant to the gaming stuff, because of what we're going to be playing.
It's actually kind of funny that we're getting back into Cyberpunk right now, because the issues of technology and what it does to our humanity are Highly Relevant in that game, and they really exemplify (in an exaggerated way) a lot of my feelings about where technology is/is going. There's lots of really amazing machinery that greatly expands our capabilities, but the more fully we integrate it into our lives (and bodies, in the case of the game) the more dependent on it we become and the more that it shapes us and how we understand and engage with the world. This is fine up to a point, but I think we may be moving beyond that point.
I'll limit myself to one example. Cyberpunk has cyberpsychosis, where the technology that people are installing in their bodies causes people to break from reality in very damaging ways. This is ostensibly because our biology can't handle certain levels of machinery being built into it, but the game also shows how that technology can be manipulated by the creators of it. I think both aspects of this are relevant to the real world.
Now, in the real world, we're largely not installing things in our bodies. Smartphones, however, mark a distinct (and similar) change from the past in terms of how often and how thoroughly we can access information. They are always with us, and more and more people are always using them. For a lot of people their phones are the dominant way that they know about what is happening in the world. I think that we can say that it is causing a form of cyberpsychosis among people, especially younger people who have less of a formative baseline of what life in the real, natural, immediate world around them is like.
Since the introduction of the iPhone there have been significant spikes in all sorts of psychological problems, especially among young people. Anxiety (especially social anxiety), depression, body image issues, admissions to the ER for self harm, demand for plastic surgery, attention issues, and more. In a closer correlate to Cyberpunk cyberpsychosis, shooting rampages caused by people who we find out were feeding on a steady diet of paranoid conspiracies.
Okay, work is calling.
Butch:
Wow, you do have thoughts.
This is why I like my new hobby of going to book sales and yard sales and whatnot. I'm not the only one there, and then people buy my stuff. Sure, I joke about the tequila money, and that is nice, don't get me wrong, but it's also nice to know that other people like old books and old records and tabletop games and other weird, tangible items. It's a nice reminder that there's still a non-digital contingent out there who appreciate the old ways and the old things. It's also heartening that I'm never the youngest one there. It isn't just me and a bunch of old fogies.
So, there's a ray of hope.
Feminina:
A few people do still request print books, even though a lot of them are now available online. Mostly textbooks that are heavy on illustrations, which people like to spread out tables and compare. I think for serious study, the physical item may be easier to use, even if the same content is theoretically available on a smartphone.
I don't disagree with the contention that smartphones can be harmful, but I think a lot of the examples Loothound raises can be traced to people seeing more things, which is very complicated to oppose in theory.
All the body-related stuff, for sure, comes down to "I see people looking like this/doing this thing so now I think of it as something I could also do." Normalizing what was once weird or fringe or just unheard of.
And seeing more things can for sure be unhelpful, but it's a super hard line to draw, because seeing more things also helps people feel better about things that we as nice liberals want them to feel OK about, like their sexuality or their doubts that god hates them or their noticing people who aren't like them doing human stuff that reminds them there's more than one way to be an OK human.
The super happy fun side of freely available information on all kinds of crap, which is a real story, even if it's definitely not the whole story.
Yeah, a lot of stuff you see with a smartphone is stupid or dangerous or plain evil, and I'm all for…I don't know, major sites following reasonable public health-based guidelines that limit the extent to which presenters should glamorize cosmetic surgery or discuss the details of suicides or whatever, I guess? That seems like a reasonable thing?
But as always with speech issues, who gets to establish those guidelines, based on what evidence, and with what authority to ensure compliance, is the can of worms.
There's probably a way to manage it, but I don't know what it is, and even if I heard something that seemed like a good answer to ME, 50 million other people would hate it because it prevented them from seeing something they want to see, and 50 million still other people would hate it because it didn't prevent them (or more likely "the children" who always get referenced here, for understandable reasons) from seeing something they think no one should be able to see.
So working this stuff out is going to be a long slog, I guess is my feeling. I think people are talking about this, ideas are being tossed around, Loothound is certainly not alone in feeling this way, so it's not that nothing will ever change, but it's a can of worms, and will probably be a long, wormy slog.
Loothound:
I get all of that, and I agree with most of it. Yes, there are absolutely upsides to all of this, and I don't want to minimize those. When we adopt new technologies, though, it's because of the upsides that we can see them having. Negatives, however, are usually harder to see coming. In the past, it took technologies a long time to go from introduction to full adoption. That lag allowed some time to see how things were going and make adjustments before the worst consequences set in. The speed at which these new technologies enter large aspects of everyday life make that much harder to do. We're now making dramatic, large scale changes to entire systems without any clear idea of the costs.
AI is the perfect example here. It's been an actual, viable thing for five years or less and just about every major company is rushing to see how fast and wide they can build it into things. Meanwhile, the technological geniuses who design and make these things will often freely admit that they don't fully understand how they come up with what the outputs they do. Yet, they will be a fundamental feature of life in another 5 years.
Consider another technology that produced massive, unquestioned benefits and reshaped the world. One that is so embedded in the world that we can't truly fathom giving it up. One whose long term consequences we've only recently come to appreciate, despite it's having been around for 100 years or so.
Our friend the internal combustion engine.
Butch:
All true, but then, what's the alternative? Go back to living in caves? Not that that doesn't sound pretty great most of the time. Genies don't get put back in bottles. You mention internal combustion engines. How do we give those up so fast and still have society as we know it? Even if we switch to electric, what about lithium mining? We don't know what's going to happen with that in terms of negatives.
We're stuck.
Loothound:
That's almost exactly my point. You can't put the genie back in the bottle once it's out. Which is why I would really hope that we would learn the lesson, and be A LOT more circumspect and cautious about letting technological genies out of the bottle in the first place. I know it sounds an awful lot like I don't like technology sometimes, but that's not the case. I just dislike the fetishization of technology that leads us to rush into it headlong without considering what actually having it be a basic part of our lives will be like. "Move fast and break things" might be a great way to make money, but it is a reckless and childish mindset that considers neither where it is that you are moving to in such a hurry, nor exactly what you are breaking.
Feminina:
Yes, it would be super great if we as a species/as societies could pause to consider the consequences of a lot of things, especially when the time between invention and unexpected consequence can be so short and the consequences themselves so significant. Long term thinking is really not a strong point for us (though in our defense I suppose we're probably better at it than any other species around).
"Unintended consequences" will likely be our epitaph.
Loothound:
We have the FDA and other agencies like it that have to evaluate and approve of new products that go to market if they are a food product, or a drug. You can't just sell a new type of car or truck, that has to be safety and road compliance reviewed. I don't see why a similar approach can't be taken with other technologies.
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