Am I helping or harming?
Filed under: tech
A few minutes ago, I found this article about World’s Worst Guy #3 and how he gave Meta’s Llama team the OK to train on copyrighted works. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Most Popular section on the right was a charcuterie board of the most heinous things in tech:
- More about Matt Mullenweg being petty in the most cringe ways imaginable
- More about Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan’s shitty podcast
- More about OpenAI ruining stuff
- How to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads
- More about Meta giving DEI the middle finger
I looked at all of this and I almost felt numb to it. Not in an apathetic way but frozen still because this is what we have right now. We’re days away from Donald Trump’s second term as president. Elon Musk is walking next to him like a very rich, insidious shadow with no legitimate ideas of his own but they’re being heard and they’re being taken seriously enough that the UK government are tiptoeing around both of them. As you’ve seen above, Zuckerberg has put his fashmobile into 5th gear, cruising around looking like a white boy rapper as opposed to an Amish version of Sonny from i, Robot like before.
This is all incredibly white, incredibly male, and incredibly depressing. And, as someone who works in and around tech for a living, I wonder if anything that I do is helping or am I contributing to the harm. I’ve built apps that are effectively wrappers for large language models—more specifically, those made by OpenAI. I co-ran a webinar on generative AI last year and I’ve offered opinions on it at work and in industry publications. But over time, I feel a growing pang of regret. All of this shit is destroying the planet and making the worst people richer and more powerful. And for what? Some cheap automation of metadata and mediocre short form copy that needs to be rewritten anyway (this is the advice I give but whether anyone takes the advice is another story). I don’t take pride in it, which likely sounds cheap and meaningless now. So what? The damage has been done.
And it’s not just generative AI. It’s tech in general. I just don’t know if I’m helping in my line of work in a morally meaningful way. Am I just making other people richer? Am I making the world a better place or helping regular folk (ie. non-business owners)? And if I try to offer recommendations to do that, will they be heard? Why does everything need a business case anyway? Why can’t we just help people without needing evidence? In the words of Edward Nygma at the end of Batman Forever, there’s too many questions.
So I guess this stream of consciousness boils down to needing answers in 2025. Because none of this is sustainable. Tech can’t keep getting away with this and I need to figure out how to do better in this awful and very real landscape. It’s not “like” a horror movie. It’s not “like” a dystopia. It’s all happening. And we can be part of the solution or part of the problem.