From politicians to VC firms, everyone is falling out of love with the massive, money-oriented, global technology titans. In their place, we have the chance to build something open and trustworthy.
  • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    37·
    3 days ago

    I hope I’m wrong, but this seems very naive. Just as an example, we just had a report released here in Denmark this week, that stated that AI could replace 100000 civil servants. Denmark is a small country of only 6 million citizens.

    Who will run the servers for those AI services? Probably Microsoft or Amazon or some other tech giant.

    The truth is the tech Giants are getting bigger and more powerful, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, TSMC.
    These companies are all bigger and more powerful than they were a decade ago.

    And just because we can run Linux, and have found a sliver of freedom there, doesn’t really help in the big picture of modern technology.
    When your government chooses to use proprietary solutions, there is little that is done to prevent it. It shouldn’t of course be necessary, the politicians should be smart enough to know dependency on proprietary systems is costly even dangerous in the long run. But lobbyist always manage to shoot down open source initiatives.
    So here we are, chugging along to ever more dependency on and power to big tech, as individuals and companies and in public services.

    I use Qwant search, I used to use AOSP (Android Open Source Project) for my phone, and I use Linux. But that doesn’t prevent big tech to take more power. The current and next big play is AI, and all the above companies are fighting to dominate that within their fields, and no small player has a chance anymore. Because the cost of entry is in the billions.

    EU is taking up the fight, and is regulating all these companies, with the exception of TSMC which AFAIK hasn’t been shown to play dirty (yet).
    Hopefully governments across the world, will cooperate to put a lid on the amount of power a single company can attain.

    • Shadywack@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      AI hype being overblown is also uncovering at a rapid pace. Even at the lay person level, AI is just bullshit now.

    • baggachipz@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      11·
      3 days ago

      There is no way this AI bullshit will replace 100000 people, no need to worry there.

      Incidentally, we were in Denmark a month ago and your country is awesome. You all have a lot of things figured out.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        2 days ago

        Compared to most I think we have it pretty good here. But that doesn’t stop us complaining, and sometimes we have to remind ourselves that it could be worse. We could be living in Sweden. 😋
        Jokes aside, we are lucky that we also have good neighbors, and of course we love our Scandinavian brothers.

  • aesthelete@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    3 days ago

    I would love for this headline to be correct, but it seems far more likely that it is wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. /Drcox

  • yesman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    3 days ago

    There are two genres of capitalist optimism.

    one is the “it’s going to be different this time baby I swear” and the other is “prayer to an angry god”. This piece obviously is of the former category.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    big tech

    Soooo, IBM? NVidia?

    Or just the massively-enshittified ad-shoveling social media hoses?

  • horse_battery_staple@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    3 days ago

    So the autocrats will disband the technocracy? This is watching rich people have a slap fight with billions of dollars and think to yourself, “Ah yes this is good policy.”

  • tias@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    Looking more like Wired has fallen from grace. Why would investors care about negative societal consequences of Big Tech as long as they make money? And it wasn’t Microsoft who cut corners, it was CrowdStrike. That’s a big enough error to be the target of a Microsoft lawsuit. I stopped reading there cause this just seems like hot garbage.

  • DrunkenPirate@feddit.orgEnglish
    41·
    3 days ago

    Fortunately, there’ve been successful Monopoly destroying actions in the past. When money power/ capitalists get too much influence political power strikes back.

  • pr06lefs@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    3 days ago

    wow that’s optimistic. how about big tech gets with government to make laws that prevent the use of such egalitarian protocol based tech. instead, big tech is mandatory and further continually monitors you from your phone which you are mandated to carry. AI minders alert the morality police or etc to come issue beatdowns to dissenters.

  • renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.netEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    This is a bit optimistic. It’s amazing that the tools exits to create a better, more open internet. However, the biggest barrier is convincing people to use them.

    Personally, I’ve found that convincing the average user of just how much they are being taken advantage of by big tech is much harder than it should be. People are addicted to the convenience that lured them into these proprietary platforms in the first place. Humans tend to choose easier options over healthier options.

    We should continue to carry the flag of open source, decentralization, and privacy-respecting platforms. However, we should be prepared that people will look at it an go… “Nah, that sounds hard. I’ll let them sell my data to save a few clicks.”