The human-car gestalt, for example, experiences life and has opinions that are quite different from the human-bicycle gestalt, the human-train gestalt or even the bare human with no mode of transportation. What’s possible and what’s desirable for a driver is pretty radically different even to what’s possible or desirable for the same human outside of a car: in individual instances of this happening, we call it road rage, and on a policy scale it leads to things like people getting extremely angry about bike lanes even when said bike lanes would benefit them at all times when they’re not in their car. The human-car gestalt has interests and opinions that are separate from the human in the gestalt, often opposed to them and able to assert them over the human part of the gestalt.

It is an unfortunate fact that, when faced with such an analysis of technology, tech people will often think that for whatever reason the considerations that apply to literally the entire rest of the world of technology somehow don’t apply to them. This kind of overweening arrogance is, of course, why we find ourselves in so much of the shit that we’re in, but nonetheless, to really get my point across it’s probably a good idea to spell out how these dynamics operate in the tech world specifically.

  • Sleepless One@lemmy.ml
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    9 days ago

    [W]e shall have to rely on the work of notable Nazi (and unfortunately also very important 20th century philosopher) Martin Heidegger.

    several paragraphs later…

    …all kinds of fascinating weapons systems are being used in defence of freedom and democracy in Ukraine, and this is both good and necessary…

    Lol


    Goofing aside, it’s a good article. I am becoming increasingly alienated from my coworkers because of how LLMs affect the human/LLM cyborg (trying to avoid the nazi philosopher’s jargon). A perfect example of this happened to me the other week.

    I was in daily standup and, after we went over the status of all the tickets on the board, one of the devs asked what to do in the meantime since github copilot was down. I suggested he just write code the normal way, but all the other devs pushed back on it. Tbf I was pretty unhinged and irritable since I was early into nicotine withdrawal. Still, this other dev who’s been in the industry roughly as long as I have (both senior in title), who I know was able to do dev work perfectly fine before the slop machines, is now automatically assuming he can’t write code without an LLM. It’s only going to get worse since my employer is signing a contract with Anslopic so we can all be forced to use Clod.