Ondřej Surý
yuvipandaYou can’t solve social problems with technology but my god can you make them far far far far worse
This is a good response to people simply saying ‘it is a social problem, you can not solve it with technology’. Often the existing technology is what is making some fundamental social problem worse and we can change the technology so it stops doing that.
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Doc Edward Morbius ⭕@yuvipanda I see this as a corollary of the Elizabeth Eisenstein principle[1]: One of the most effective ways to change the behaviour of a system is to change how information flow through it.
How fast/slow, what's promoted/demoted, what's encouraged/discouraged, what's amplified/repressed, what's collected/discarded.
Harshad Sharma@yuvipanda All here *gestures around* for this take :D
Verwechslungsgefährte@yuvipanda Tech like Social Media makes social problems appear first of all.
Shut it down, and mightier will decide upon the relevance of your kind.
Second, a host of a platform of any kind will always be one of the mightier. Hence decentralized Mastodon (tech!), obviously.
Elizafox 
& (winter edition 🎄☃️❄️)@yuvipanda Yes but on the other hand, if someone is hitting me with a hammer, I don't think the hammer is really to blame there.
@yuvipanda Now, if the hammer has a gun attached and it goes off and shoots me in the leg, then yeah, that's horrible user-hostile design (and there is plenty of that in tech).
Tech can't solve all social problems, but it's easy to make the problem a Hell of a lot worse.
Nathanael Nerode@yuvipanda That's a better way to put it. Because technology can create problems, but it can also solve problems.
I immediately thought of how Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood addressed a huge number of social problems related to the status of women in society by developing the *technologies* of artificial birth control, liberating women from constant pregnancy.
Most attempts to "solve social problems with technology" are not nearly as radical or clear-headed as Margaret Sanger's promotion of birth control technology, however.
I can think of a few other examples. "Engineering controls" in public health. Making renewables cheaper than fossil fuels.
Liberonscien 
@yuvipanda I think certain social problems can be solved with technology. Say for instance that you have people constantly pushing a pull door or vice versa. Engineering a better door solves that problem.
@Liberonscien no disagreement, and in fact this is my point - it is solving the problem caused by the technology of doors!
Nick Ali@yuvipanda in a microcosm, I see this in the corporate world everyday. Let’s get another internal communications tool so we can say employees and culture are important. Of course it rarely works.
Annbass@nickali @yuvipanda I saw this in spades over 3 decades in a large corporation. Lots of slick slogans about how employees were the most important. Executive blather; bla bla bla. (As they raked in over-the-top wages and benefits.)
@Annbass @yuvipanda yeah, till their pay is tied to some kind of employer experience metric, it won’t happen. But boards and shareholders definitely won’t impose such a requirement.
canusfeminacanisSome social problems can be ameliorated via tech...(note the words 'can' and 'ameliorated')
But it's so much easier for the human mind to blow something up than to reconstruct it...
Cyber Yuki@yuvipanda Cyberpunk in a nutshell.
@yuki2501 yep! Too many people unfortunately seem to take it as a guidebook instead
@yuvipanda My only comfort is that capitalist technology is self-destructing; corporation's efforts to maximize gains inevitably resultin defunding security efforts, QA, even backups and at the end companies implode / get hacked and people quit en masse.
(And I wasn't talking about 🐦.)
Grassroot technologies get the upper hand in the end.
@yuki2501 yeah, Twitter might be the quickest run to it in the next few weeks. Fun to watch it play out in weeks rather than years
cyberjunkie@molly0xfff Yea, people were uninformed before the internet came along, but they were humble. Now, they're misinformed and arrogant.
daskeit@cyberjunkie @molly0xfff in the US context weren’t AM talk radio and partisan cable TV already laying foundations for today’s right-wing propaganda ecosystem before the Internet?
Murdoch news properties tend to be toxic, and they’ve been toxic even before social media etc. was a thing.
The Internet definitely made things worse, it’s just that it wasn’t great before either.
Colin Curtin@yuvipanda @evan this is the premise of the book I’m writing. Nothing has ever failed because of a strictly technology problem—it’s always those pesky humans
Dan Shick@yuvipanda which, in a way, is solving your opponent’s problem.
joe@yuvipanda I agree with the idea that this is a general response to the argument though. Typically NEW technology can make a social problem much worse, THEN you need to fix it.
She-Ra Co-Exists 🌩️@yuvipanda This is all the feels...
AutisticMumTo3@yuvipanda
Some social problems can be helped using tech such as loneliness for housebound folk can be eased by enabling them to have online social contact. Its not solved but it is eased to some extent.
@LizW
Some social problems can be helped using tech such as loneliness for housebound folk can be eased by enabling them to have online social contact. Its not solved but it is eased to some extent.
@LizW
@yuvipanda I had significant role deploying very early web into a large corp. Many middle-level managers panicked about what their employees might do or did. I concluded the web just made old problems more visible. Wasting time? Porn? Etc. The advent of social tools just picked up the pace.
Bindestrich@yuvipanda I agree with the sentiment, while it's ultimately a wrong assessment. You can solve a health crisis with better medicine. You can feed people with better farming technology etc.
@Bindestriche no disagreement! See https://hachyderm.io/@yuvipanda/109340100773522290 for context. I think what I’ve learnt is that here, unlike on twitter, I can put the whole context into one post instead of threading!
yuvipanda (@[email protected])
This is a good response to people simply saying ‘it is a social problem, you can not solve it with technology’. Often the existing technology is what is making some fundamental social problem worse and we can change the technology so it stops doing that.
@yuvipanda I wish mastodon was better at showing replies. didn't see those at all, thanks
Tom Walker@yuvipanda wow, this is the response to that daft saying that I've been waiting for
@yuvipanda Why is this opinion so popular? (yet funny)
Have you already forgotten about #metoo #maidan #arabspring #fff #flattenthecurve and #twexit??
@dichotomiker see follow up in thread for more context https://hachyderm.io/@yuvipanda/109340100773522290
yuvipanda (@[email protected])
This is a good response to people simply saying ‘it is a social problem, you can not solve it with technology’. Often the existing technology is what is making some fundamental social problem worse and we can change the technology so it stops doing that.
The 3rd Corey@yuvipanda True story. We cannot engineer our way out of social problems.
rikw@yuvipanda It’s the ageless cult of tech-ing our way towards a brighter future; each technological iteration producing increasingly fraught and unexpected consequences based on a rather dim understanding of our own existence. To your point, technology in general (and certainly socmed) often amplifies our ignorance and ineptitude in dealing with the baseline issues of “what does it mean to be human?” and “who actually gets to be human when we figure it out ?”.
Christopher Guess@yuvipanda universities should seriously offer a science/humanities double major. Think computer science/English lit or software engineering/sociology or biology/journalism
Thatch@yuvipanda I’m sorry I misspelled your at in@y repost, I changed social to education. Apologies
femaven@yuvipanda or don’t use the same types of thinking to solve a problem that created it in the first place.
Ellie@yuvipanda @beccadax Nothing quite like fucking up at scale!
Reed Lindwurm@yuvipanda I thought about why this is the case and I realized that "worse problems" has higher entropy than "no problems" and now I am listening to "Entropy" by M.C. Hawking.
Eva Libuše Debora Pavlíková@yuvipanda yep! We always need to have in our mind that #technology must me #helper not #solver.
The technology must be owned by people with all the prons and cons.
Ben McIlwain@yuvipanda As a general principle I'm not sure this is true. You can definitely use technology to help address many societal issues, e.g. the printing press helped improve the overall level of education and literacy level of society. Before the printing press, hand-copied books were incredibly expensive and only available to the elite, and thus most people owned zero books and couldn't read.
I would say technology can (but not necessarily always) be *part* of a solution.
@CydeWeys Yes I agree! See followup posts on the thread :) https://hachyderm.io/@yuvipanda/109340100773522290
yuvipanda (@[email protected])
This is a good response to people simply saying ‘it is a social problem, you can not solve it with technology’. Often the existing technology is what is making some fundamental social problem worse and we can change the technology so it stops doing that.
Malaclypse@yuvipanda Counterpoint: sewers
Dan Hon@yuvipanda @alaric “Huh, seems bad… … but *can it scale?*”
El Diablo Roboc 😈🤖@yuvipanda I never got to actually try Tay; it was down before I even managed to test her. But that was 2016, I don't think Microsoft had a tool like OpenAI back then. I imagine Google went through a lot of beta testing before releasing their APIs. I played a lot with the bots in chai.ml and they are a lot wilder.
Mike Morpheus@yuvipanda Not sure if that’s true. Certainly, technological solutions create unintended consequences that may also be problematic. Greater complexity is harder to navigate.
@Mike_Morpheus indeed, see the next post in that thread :)
Tim Gatewood@yuvipanda I believe the #metoo movement, #BLM, #ArabSpring and others might disagree. Okay, none of those have been solved, but the bird site alone helped all 3, along with many others. Rt now, that site has turned more to the dark side, but it and all social media have always been a mixed bag of impacts.
@timgatewood no disagreement! See follow up posts in the thread when I had posted this originally :)